Some mornings I have deep insights about myself. I’m now on a start-up quest – that tingling time when your start-up is an oozing mass of excitement, lives no where but in your head, and the whole universe lights up when you talk about it. To your friends, you sound like a bumbling baboon on PCP. They are trying to decide if they should cage you right away or feed you something stronger because it is hilarious. But of course, I digress. Morning. Insight. Blog post. Bad mind baboon, stop distracting me.
So this morning, I put some meat around a key strength I have come to realize over the course of 3 start-ups, 5 research projects, and the countless nameless things I do. I am a Born Thinker. A Struggling Doer. And an Awe-tastic Finisher. I love the early phase of ideation. Problems make me salivate. Slap on me some status quo so I can hear my brain slosh right through it. Give me rocket surgery, and I’ll tell you what you need to do next. I stretch the thinking time, the zoning out in creation mode, the basking in a shaping pool only because I enjoy it so much. I approach learning a new field and brainstorming like a teenage hero on a dystopian quest. I devour it.
And then comes the doing part. It doesn’t take long at all for the excitement to wear off. Like 3 minutes post start of task. Let me try to communicate the frustration when the early excitement wears off. Everything has already been perfectly executed in my head. The steps are broken down. The translation to the world of reality should be automated by now. This blog post should have written itself when I had ran through this analysis in my head. I get a high out of analysis, uncertainty and creation. The actual doing part is a total buzz kill. But here is the kicker. I still do things. I am an accidental doer. I do things kicking, screaming, struggling, sulking, and even fuming. But, as I realized this morning, there is a method behind my madness. Turns out, 9 stages even:
1. The Frustration: The first task at hand, post story boarding, most often is so simple a cave computer could do it. A cave computer. You start to empathize with Marvin, the Android from Hitchhikers Guide. “Brain the size of a planet and they ask me to…”.
2. The Nothing Works Stage: Its just blah. I don’t know. No one cares enough to help. Parts fail. Computers crash. You don’t work. Why? It rains – yay, it’s chai and samosa day. It’s sunny – yay, it’s frolicking in a frock day.
3. The Pain: How do you expect me to come up with this ? I’m a ‘pick from the career label that has the least overlap with whatever I am doing’ not a ‘career label assigned to the job at hand‘.
4. The Deadly Valley of… Death: It’s deadly. Endless. More a desert than valley, really, but who can really tell? You see it stretching and stretching. You are out of water. It’s hot. Death. I can go on – probably in circles. You get this part.
5. Warp hole of Cliches: Somewhere through the deadly valley of death, provided I am still there, something miraculous happens. There must be a warp hole that spontaneously emits all relevant cliches, fuses, and amplifies them and then throws them at me. Light-tunnel ends merge with midnight oils scented with dad’s favorite no-pain gains. Sweat, toil, boil, and bubble.
6. The End in Sight: My doing starts to take shape. The form in hand looks better than it did for days before. And hope, excitement, energy, and little Miss. Perfectionism kick in to lead to the…
7. The Blur: The next few days wheeze by. Reckless. Clockwork. Mind. Matter. Machine. Curses and coffee mix to make me unstoppable. I love this part. I hate this part. Mostly, I don’t remember this part. That’s why I call it the blur.
8. The Finish: Bloody victorious dystopian hero! Deadline met on the freaking dot. Forget deadline, look at the work in hand. I haven’t just finished a task, nay, I have created m***f*ing art. Art that is breathtaking, sparkling, and awe-tastic. I can’t believe I actually did that. It’s top of the line. Art, so freaking good, I want to wear it to a dinner party. Gloat. Gloat. Gloat.
9. The Aftermath: I bask in my awesomeness as waves of appreciative feedback – even if it’s just from me – and amazement at what I just shipped flood over. No, we did not hire a professional ‘insert relevant label here’ to do this. Why, thank you! Blush. Blush.
Oh, what a finish! Let’s start over.
So what are you? How do you manage to get things done? This is all part of my attempt to fine tune my core strengths so I can leverage the hell out of them. And oh, try to delegate parts that are not my core strength to whosoever it is. My conclusion, given that my core strengths are in ideation, story boarding, and shipping, take control there. Leave the rest to the smarter people on the team and have them pull me in as needed. If that’s not an option, start whining start working.
Interestingly, I went through all these 9 stages just to write this blog, so apparently it holds even on a micro level. Bask time.