I'm in a great mood this morning so let me drop a bomb for all my nerds on their way to the top who are feeling stuck or don't know where to start...
You may know that I'm obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I often joke around saying Donnie is my spirit animal.
But there's a good reason for that.
Whenever I'm about to embark on a new project or trying to decide where to focus my efforts, I put the idea through the following steps...
It's called the ShellShock.
Leo - The Leader: How can I leverage sound principles and proven strategies to build a solid foundation for the project? What wisdom can I learn from those who've done it before, and how can I duplicate their success?
Mikey - The Idiot: What are the opportunities to innovate? If someone had no understanding of how things "should" be, how would they do it? How do I make it simple? How do I make it fun?
Raph - The Bruiser: What's the shortest, most powerful way to hit the ground running right now? What can I achieve from brute force and effort alone that will get me closer to my end goal?
Donnie - The Tech Genius: How can I automate and systematize the processes, optimize and eliminate redundancies? How do I remove myself from operations in the shortest time or scale my results?
---- BONUS ROUND!!! ------
Casey - The Vigilante: Who can I outsource to or bring in on the project to get me the best results in the shortest time. What outside help do I have access to?
Well, that's all folks. Hope you enjoyed it!
The idiot sounds pretty smart.
They say there's a pretty fine line between madness and genius. A lot of innovations have been made by accident out of an epic failure.
So learn to embrace your failure, remember the value of play, don't take things too seriously and bend the rules once in a while :)