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The other day on Twitter, a guy mentioned that he had trouble with overthink, that his mind was often on overdrive.
I replied. I said that often you think you should think less, but instead I think we should focus on thinking better.
Today’s attention spans are short.
Shortest they’ve ever been.
So you better make your point.
Better keep it short.
A little like these paragraphs.
These short paragraphs don’t feel too good, don’t they? Something feels off. Is it that they’re too short? Curious, because when we read poetry, we’re used to shorter lines. But those lines don’t rhyme, that must be it. Maybe. How about this: those lines feel manufactured, trying to make a point, and your mind is distracted by that effort. Whatever the reason, your mind noticed the flaw. You should keep things short, but not like this.
You can be uncertain about a project. You can be uncertain on the details of the future of a product’s success. You can be uncertain about the side-effects of your business decisions.
If you want to build a software product like everyone else, make a landing page, show features, show the benefits, maybe highlight the outcome.
But if you want to go beyond, you can go in these two directions:
Being a beginner at anything feels about the same: you feel like you don’t master any of the important aspects, you feel like you’re out of your depth, you feel like somebody has the truth, surely not you.
A home owner bought something completely unexpected, something they weren’t thinking about buying even a week ago. While they had been spending weeks looking at the market for bigger houses, they bought two pairs of high-quality headphones to watch TV late at night.
This article contains spoilers.
BBC’s modern re-telling of Sherlock Holmes had me hooked. Here we had Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Watson (Martin Freeman) meeting in the smartphone era. Instead of sending telegrams from Baker Street, Sherlock flung texts from London Black Cabs. He used social media to sway cases to his advantage, the Internet to do his research.
The car salesman. The type of salesman I told myself I’d never turn into. The type that uses pressure and misdirection to make every sale. Aggressive. Determined. Sleazy. The hustler.
A friend of mine, a software engineer, took a bit of a detour from his career path. After making a good buck from a stint at a large tech company, he decided he’d take up acting for a bit. Completely different mind exercise, and that was the point. He needed to explore new parts of himself.
We’re spoiled that we can learn from some top-notch productivity principles.
Here’s a list.
Getting Things Done by David Allen taught me about always identifying, in a project, the immediate next step.
“$99 a month! Whoa that’s expensive.”
“You find? But you’re going to make a few hundred more per month just by using this tool.”
“Yeah, maybe, but still, I’m going to have to pay this amount every month.”
To beat doubt, there’s little point in trying to create confidence.
That’s because you could say that doubt and confidence are two sides of the same coin. The coin of “results”. They both grow from prior conditions—you can manufacture neither.
If you’re creating something for others, there’s going to be a strong pull to publish only the best you can make.
That’s a bit of a mistake.
That’s because the best products are awful at many things. They’re awful at all the things they’re not meant to do. And they might only be good enough for the thing they’re built to do. And yet, they’re bought, and they’re used, and they’re raved about by the buyers who tell others.