Please Feed The Animals

Second in a series of posts inspired by Seth Godin’s Linchpin.

I quoted Seth Godin’s Linchpin in my last post. But I didn’t give him enough credit. “Lean forward” was directly inspired from his chapter about “Becoming The Linchpin” and the steps people and businesses need to take to be indispensable.

Books like Seth’s always trigger ideas. So rather than thinly veil my inspiration, I thought I’d try something different. As I finish reading Linchpin, I’m going to do a series of entries that are directly inspired from it. Think of it like this Hugh MacLeod’s collection but in blog form.

Today’s Seth ripoff: Thrashing.

Some months back, my goal was to evolve PFTA into a job finding/survival resource for the ad industry. I got tons of help from tons of people to launch a beta version of what the new site was to become. A small army of volunteers spent untold man hours getting it ready. And because it was done after hours and without pay, it took a lot longer to launch than anyone would have liked.

As designs started coming in, flaws in planning became more and more obvious. We overlooked that people would need to retrieve forgotten passwords, for instance. Some seemingly basic stuff  slipped through the cracks, and it was because there was too much emphasis on the finishing and not enough on the starting.

In other words, I was thrashing at the end of the process instead of where it belonged, at the beginning.

“Every software project that has missed its target date (every single one) is a victim of late thrashing,” Godin writes. “The creators didn’t have the discipline to force all the thrashing at the beginning.”

Guilty as charged. Launching the PFTA beta was a testament to haste and late thrashing. Now, compare that with all the forethought that went into Lemonade, and you get a sense of how results can differ.

90% of our thrashing happened before Marc Colluci ever yelled his first “action.” We did tons of planning. Sifting through stories. Mapping out shots. It even took days of concepting with Todd Gallentine just to name the thing.

Got a grand or even pet project in mind? Mapping out the ideal trajectory to your career? Learn from what PFTA did wrong and Lemonade did right. Turn the thrash pyramid upside down and spend your man hours getting it right early.  Believe me when I say it makes all the difference.