Untitled Post #2
21 May 2013

Before we start, go read this most excellent post: Too scared to write a line of code. It served as the inspiration for my post so it makes sense to see where I am coming from.

Go read, I’ll wait.

Now I really don’t have a lot to add to what Ben wrote in his post, I’m a developer and I have felt that pain. I know what it’s like to spend more time mentally evaluating if your ‘doing it right’ then you are spending ‘doing it’. I guess it’s also a form of mitigating future risks.

I want take this observation and go further with it. We will keep it in the realm of the digital and tech working landscape but I’m sure this applies to other industries as well, but I am not in a position to speak to them.

  • Entire projects, hell, entire companies are failing because the desire to mitigate risk has become far more important to companies than taking risks. It’s kinda hilarious for all this talk about failing fast and taking risks, there’s very few people / companies out there actually doing this anymore.

  • You’ve received a round of funding and need to make that money last 12-18 months, but maybe, you should burn through that money in 6 months to pivot to the idea you know will work. Instead, you’ll make the money last 18 months, have to let your entire team go and start from scratch a year too late.

  • You’ve been working away at your crappy marketing company while builidng some awesome product on the weekends with the hopes that you can get funding and start your own company. This doesn’t work out and you throw away your project for the safety of the marketing gig.

Each of these examples is pretty commonplace, and each of these reasons to stop are just as commonplace.

Ben’s post is great, he doesn’t really offer any specific advice at how to get around this issue, because, see that is really the secret. There is no right way to do it, it’s about recognizing problems and responding to problems (which is a massively personal thing). This is not something you can reliably reproduce, it’s not something that if you follow a preset path will work every time. Guys writing posts will want you to believe it is, because, they get paid for you to read that post. That is the motivating factor (I may be generalizing, but I bet i’m pretty on the mark).

My take away from Ben’s post?

Worry about problems that are real right now.

Now that is some sage advice.


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