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Entrepreneuring: Executing To Completion
I recently read this post: How to Make a Successful Business over at One Year Goal .com. In it, he refers to the problem of "never-finish-itis", the act of continually switching to new projects and never finishing previous ones--a problem which resonates very strongly with me. The post concludes with the advice: "Pick a venture, any venture, and finish launching it. Then repeat. Success will find you sooner than you think." It is valuable advice indeed, and co-incidently, I have been thinking on this subject a lot lately, and would like to share my own meditations. I will refer to projects in general, which includes, but is certainly not limited to, starting a new entrepreneurial venture.
Over the past couple of years I made good progress toward productivity and Getting Things Done (GTD) goals; however this particular issue remained unresolved. Therefore, if I accomplish any resolution this year, it will hopefully be mastering the ability to focus and drive (my own) projects to satisfactory completion. I am going to focus specifically on the endgame--finishing a project--as opposed to starting them or finding time to work on entrepreneurial projects. I will relate to my own situation so that you will believe that I feel your pain, and that I am not just preaching something that happens to come easy to me. It doesn't.
The Obstacles
1. Not having a clear goal for completion. Clearly, if you don't establish a concrete definition for when a project is completed, you will never know when you get there or what's left to do to get there.
2. Attention of focus. I have spent much of my career multitasking work items and being successful doing so. There are many productivity gurus now proclaiming the evils of multitasking and I agree with their points, but I would also argue that it works in some domains. I would also have to agree that it can make you fail miserably at other times, such as when, say, entrepreneuring your own startup.
Garret LoPorto has a book entitled The Da Vinci Method - Break Out & Express Your Fire. In this book LoPorto discusses the connections between creativity and ADHD, and offers plausible behaviorial motivations for attentive "disorders" and why they may not be such. Let me say up front that I am very skeptical of diagnoses and justifications for ADD/ADHD behavior. I have read more than one book justifying or even celebrating a lack of focus and/or commitment. Based on my experience, both academic and as a parent, I believe it is usually just an excuse for lack of discipline. To be clear, I am not saying that attention focus is not a problem, and I believe there are real causations for attention problems, genetic, evolutionary or otherwise. And after reflecting on my own personal history, I am also somewhat obligated to agree, from my excruciating boredom in the classroom as a child to my multitasking, completion-challenged track record as an entrepreneur. What I do not buy is that ADD/ADHD is a clear-cut disorder that one can simply medicate, or worse that it is an excuse for antisocial or unproductive behavior. I view it as another dimension of behavior that is more or less of a problem depending on the individual. In my case, I have worked to overcome the problem in some ways, but I have room for improvement.
3. The Bigger, Better Thing. This is what happens when you are midway through a project, and then come up with another wonderful idea which you just know will be insanely greater than the current one, make you more money, and change the world. So you soon lose interest in the current project and spend all your time thinking about the new one. Of course, the excitement wears off a bit after you think about it enough and even if it doesn't, it is destined to become the next project you abort partway through. Sometimes, you don't have a new project but simply become disillusioned with the current project because you peceive it as risky, lacking a value proposition or lacking revenue potential.
4. The Illusion: The next problem with completion is the illusion of anything ever being complete. There is more to this than being a perfectionist. Although I generally strive to do quality work, I am not what you would generally consider a compulsive perfectionist. Anyone who has ever seen my messy desktop can attest to that. Still, I find it hard to let go of something--with my name on it--that is not a well-rounded, complete package of goodness. The irony is that few things are ever really complete, so the effort is misguided at best. This concept seems to be at odds with #1, or even the whole idea of getting something done. I will explain shortly.
The Solutions
1. First of all, define a clear, achievable goal for completion. And it is extremely important to set a date for completion. A whole book can be written (maybe it has) on how setting a concrete date will drive you to completion. In my corporate career, project timelines are usually clearly set and driven by business or customer deadlines, which partially explains why I don't have the same problems in that environment vs. my personal entrepreneurial projects. With my own projects, if I even bother to set a date, I am only disappointing myself if I don't make the date.
2. Defer, or ignore completely, the Bigger, Better Thing. If it really seems like a good idea, then write it down and resolve to not work on it until you successfully complete the current one (there's another motivator for you). Or, you can chose to ignore it because a) it will not turn out to be bigger and better and b) you don't need a bigger and better idea--you need to be successfully at something now. I can't tell you the number of other people's business ideas I've seen that seemed incredibly lame and stupid and yet somehow they managed to make more money with their idea than I did with my brilliant idea that I never finished.
3. Do some research before you start. There are cases where a project is really not worth pursuing because it doesn't have a viable market or niche. This is a topic outside the scope of this article, but it can be easily solved by doing a little research upfront. Check out possible competitors. Use tools like the Google keyword tool to find out if anyone is interested in your subject. But don't spend too much time on it and suffer analysis paralysis--just do some ballpark research, and then dive in and start doing something.
4. Use the 75% completion principle. I recently had an epiphany--or perhaps more accurately, co-opted one--when reading Brian Armstrong's book: Breaking Free. Brian explains the technique more eloquently, and I highly recommend reading the book in general. But basically, the technique is to set a goal and milestone for 75% completion of the project. This amounts to psyching yourself out such that you actually achieve a good-enough version of your project before your innate tendency to drop off has time to fully kick in. For example, if you are building a new website, you should set a milestone that has you going live with 75% of what you wanted to do, because that 75% is more than good enough to put online. And it is probably infinitely better than one you never put online. You can see a different form of this principle in the popular Web 2.0 approach of calling every website a "beta". You can always create a new project targeted at making improvements.
rk
