Whenever I do something. I assume that it's going to be a business failure. That helps me to avoid procrastination which could otherwise arise out of a fear of failure.
Business success is not within my own control so everything I do needs to have a "fallback purpose".
Everything I do is at once a business opportunity, a learning experience and a technical stepping stone which I can re-use for future projects.
All of my work builds on top of my previous work and I constantly combine it with other people's work. This strategy is failure-proof and it stops procrastination. I've been doing it for almost 10 years. It does get a bit closer to business success every time.
You have to set yourself up for success and sometimes that requires redefining success.
Thank you for sharing this perspective, it really resonated with me. I've always struggled with procrastination at a moderate level, but the last 6 months or so have been especially bad.
I had worked my heart out on a project that the business decided not to pursue. It killed me, all my time was wasted, business was fucking up, would have to re-do all this work in subpar tools etc. As I got moved onto a new project, it has been insanely hard to get motivated to work on it.
Just assuming that it will be a business failure again... it relieves a lot of pressure off me. And you are right - at this scale I have almost no say on whether the business decides to run with it or not, so why worry about it?
I know the feeling. I think this is one of the major challenges of working for a big company, there is no sense of ownership over the project and you usually can't reuse that code for your own purposes later.
I highly recommend working for an open source company if possible. I find it motivating to think that some people I've never met from a future generation could pick up ideas from my work and continue the mission.
Is this just to shard yourself from perfectionistic impulses? As in you allow yourselves to do a "subpar" job, and in thinking that way, it relieves you from the stress that you need to hit a certain bar?
As I understand it, you approach your work as if it were a prototype to be discarded soon. That actually makes sense if you have a natural tendency to fret about quality.
One of my open source projects became quite popular so I wouldn't say that my approach reduces my degree of perfectionism or hurts my projects' chances of adoption; if anything, it has the opposite effect. It provides me unlimited time which allows me to think really hard about every decision I make - It gives me the freedom to always choose the most long term solution. I'm not trying to get lucky catching the next big wave and timing it just right. Not looking for a lucky break. I'm trying to work towards a reliable result in the long term and I'm getting closer every year.
Not caring too much about the economic results behind the work is absolutely critical for this approach to work at all. If I broke down or considered giving up every time I experienced an economic disappointment or my project didn't get any attention, I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as far as I did today.
It took me 10 years before I could monetize my project such that I could work on it full time. It was literally a decade of almost no income at all and almost nobody taking my work seriously. Then suddenly one day in the 10th year I started earning good passive income from that project.
If I was even slightly focused on financial results or even popularity score, I would have given up on year 2.
Everything I do is at once a business opportunity, a learning experience and a technical stepping stone which I can re-use for future projects. All of my work builds on top of my previous work and I constantly combine it with other people's work. This strategy is failure-proof and it stops procrastination. I've been doing it for almost 10 years. It does get a bit closer to business success every time. You have to set yourself up for success and sometimes that requires redefining success.