When you’re starting something new, you might want to dig and find out what will make it exciting for you. That might be a personal goal, a task you want to accomplish, or a risky innovative product. Because you’re starting fresh these are all tasks where there’s a chance of failure, or seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and making tasks exciting is a great strategy for overcoming both.
The obstacle might come in the form of something internal, where you just give in and give up, because you feel you’ll never get it done. It might be something external, where an unforeseen problem comes your way, and it seems like there’s no way to resolve it.
Plus, doing something new is always hard because there’s the risk of failure. And risk that the failure will say something about you that you don’t like.
But doing something new is also a creative act and making creative work exciting is what will see you through.
Beating back the blank page
Rachel Aaron writes science-fiction and fantasy and authored the writing productivity book 2k to 10k that shares how she boosted her daily writing from 2,000 words a day to over 10,000. Most writers are somewhere between 1,000 – 2,000. She does that by making her work exciting.
For about two months, every day she sat down to write, she would note the time she started, the time she stopped, how many words she wrote, and where she was located, all in a spreadsheet.
One of the things she noticed was that during the high productivity times, she was writing scenes she was most excited about. With that knowledge she planned out her daily work sessions to make sure they were full of things that she was excited about. She improved her output and produced more exciting work at the same time.
Every day, while I was writing out my description of what I was going to write … I would play the scene through in my mind and try to get excited about it. I’d look for all the cool little hooks, the parts that interested me most, and focus on those since they were obviously what made the scene cool. If I couldn’t find anything to get excited over, then I would change the scene, or get rid of it entirely. I decided then and there that, no matter how useful a scene might be for my plot, boring scenes had no place in my novels.
— Rachel Aaron, 2k to 10k: : How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love
Reinventing a product that frustrates you
Jared Spool is an expert on usability, software, design, and research. He’s the founder of User Interface Engineering. In his research he’s found five design decision styles. I first heard about this idea when I attended a presentation of his at a conference but you can read about it in his article, Figuring Out Your Design Decision Style.
For small projects that need to be done quickly, making design decisions ad hoc will work well. This can work, for a time, but when you’re building a design team and trying to have a larger business impact, having an ad hoc, unprincipled approach to design decisions will lead to a chaotic product.
In the research he saw that the most effective design teams were deliberate about how they made design decisions. They took an approach appropriate to the project and then stuck with it — while it worked. Every design style has a place and time and teams need to regularly re-evaluate the design decision style they’re employing.
One of those styles is what he calls Self Design or what emerges when a design team creates a product that they’d personally use. Something you’re excited about putting out in the world. It’s the style you want to use in the creative act of making a first version of a product — like the first iPhone.
The first iPhone is a famous example of a team using the self design decision style. The team at Apple didn’t need to go off and do a ton of research about the problems and frustrations people had with their phones.
Each member of the iPhone team hated the old phone they were using. They experienced the problems and frustrations first hand. They created something that would make them happy, in turn creating something that made millions of people happy.
— Jared Spool, Figuring Out Your Design Decision Style.
I’m using the team following their own happiness in product design as a proxy for choosing to make something they were excited about but it’s impossible that the team wasn’t excited with what they were producing. It was evident in Steve Jobs’ presentation for the 2007 MacWorld Keynote. You don’t make “a revolutionary product … that changes everything” without being excited. I recommend watching the presentation. Everyone was excited.
Meeting your personal goals
Michael Hyatt is the author of the productivity book, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less. The book outlines the ideas behind his Full Focus Planner system and a key idea behind that system is crafting SMARTER Goals.
SMARTER is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Risky, Time bound, Exciting, and Relevant. You want your goals to hit all of these notes.
But why exciting? If your goals aren’t personally exciting to you, you’ll face even greater challenges when completing them when obstacles appear. And they will. When you set out to put words on a blank page your self-critic will want to chime in and your motivation will start to wane. Or when you’re making a new product like a touchscreen iPhone and you find out that you need a whole new type of glass to prevent scratching from your car keys.
To conquer those obstacles you should be …
… be personally excited about achieving the goal. If this isn’t the case, then you likely won’t have the motivation necessary to continue pursuing the goal when you encounter unexpected challenges—which you inevitably will.
— Michael Hyatt, The Beginner’s Guide to Goal Setting.
Find the Excitement
Making a new annual goal with some element of risk, starting the morning facing the anxiety of a blank page in the morning; taking a risk with a new category of product, like the iPhone. There’s a chance of failure. A risk that the failure will say something about you that you don’t like. And every minute of every day of effort, you’ll face resistance.
What can get you through is treating every goal like a creative act and figuring out how to make that creative work personally exciting for you.
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