2 Effective and Simple Steps I Use to Start and Finish ANYTHING well.
At some point or another, each one of us gets excited, emotionally aroused, infused and insanely motivated by a new project, girlfriend, buying a car, house, etc. And as an enneagram type 7 (enthusiastic visionary) it happens to me a lot, and obviously, it does feel kind of therapeutic to be writing this article considering that I know myself as one who seeks variety, fun, and stimulation in things. I feel like this because to start and to finish something as this enneagram type is not only difficult but VERY difficult because of the desire to be constantly stimulated, excited and exempt from pain and discomfort. Starting and finishing something is not always stimulating and exciting, but may take endurance, delaying of gratifications, high levels of self-control as well as pain in the process.
Perhaps the title of this article is assuming that it is hard to start and finish something, be it writing an essay, getting a degree, group or individual project, marriage, business, etc. The Small Business Trends website reported that one of the top 10 reasons why businesses never see the end of the tunnel is because of incompetence (46%) — inability to provide effective action. The top reason why businesses fail was reported to be the lack of market fit (42%)– people are either not buying or not selling your product to other people. So my title is not an assumption, people do find it hard to finish things they started, they also find it hard to start and we can bet our lives it is not because of the gruesome phenomena of laziness.
So below I give two crucial and beneficial thoughts on how we can have a great start to something and still get to finish strong. Finishing my Civil Engineering degree at the best university in Africa and one of the best universities in the world (University of Cape Town), got me to learn a lot about what it takes to start and finish a project well, but so did starting a business, a non-profit organization and other things in life. So please do have a wonderful and fruitful read and give thoughts on what you think of these two ideas:
1. WHY it and Start it — Walk Out of The Door
If you do not know where you are going, you might not get there — Yogi Berra
As people who start things, we sometimes find it painful to think and become aware of what usually keeps us from finishing well what we started. But now we can face that pain more wisely with the internet resources provided to us, meaning we can research deeply what we want to start and avoid being drunk by the excitement and arousal of starting a new thing. Think about it, we live in an age of the internet where one question typed on Google gives more than a million search outputs. The internet has made it much easier to envision the end of something we may desire to start. So the matter doesn’t become about blindly starting something, but finding, through rigorous, intentional and sufficient research, WHY we want to start something in the first place. This then becomes more than just finishing something but completing it. Once we realize this, we then start to understand that it is no longer interesting to ‘just start’ something, but we consider the meaningfulness of what we want to start and realize that this is what will sustain us after we START. So below I have collected some questions I ask myself about things I and others have started in the past and I hope once you go through these questions, you will develop a very strong WHY to get you to walk your idea out of the door of your mind into the streets with your feet with confidence:
Are you working on a worthless project or goal? — Remember 90% of ideas we start are worthless in our age. You will never negotiate, plead or recover lost time so decide well.
Does it have clearly defined steps? Is the finish worth your effort? — There must be a clearly defined return on investment of your strength.
Who will support you once you start? Who has done this before? What can I delegate to others? — Consider whether it is necessary that you even start alone and consider what you can have others do after starting.
When this project is done, what will happen with it and how will it still be useful and relevant? — here you are thinking about the sustainability of what you want to start.
NB: Take your time with these questions because it will be the foundation for the house you will build. And as you do this process, it is helpful to be as imaginative as possible and speaking to yourself as you go through the questions is considered helpful and beneficial.
2. OKR the process — Systemization and intentionalization of Decisions
There are so many people working so hard but achieving little — Andy Grove
Amelia Mays Woods & Susan K. Lynn wrote an article on starting strong, having a great run and approaching a finish line in sight. Their research was more focussed on an educator’s career cycle and they found plenty of ideas on how one can start and finish well on a career project. One of those can be easily explored through the famous Objective and Key Results (OKR) framework. The OKR framework is a tool that enables one to easily and usefully outline and track objectives and what these objectives produce as an output. Larry Page (Google Co-Founder), on writing the foreword of John Doerr’s book (Measure What Matters) reflects on how the OKR’s helped and still helps the company to be on time and on track on things that matter most.
So why speak about OKR’s here? Between starting and finishing something, there is a process. The process is usually where most of us decide to quit even though the light at the end of the tunnel is evident and near. I remember during my Cape Argus cycle tour (109km of road cycling), I got a cramp whilst starting one of the steep hills (Suikerbossie) and I had wanted to quit and get off my bicycle as others were. Thank God I didn’t and here are the reasons: I had a bigger WHY and my system for pushing through the process was strong enough to keep me going. I had clear key results to meet my objective and that’s what the OKR system does. The key result you develop, after deciding on your objective, helps you know whether you are moving closer or further from the objective itself. Hence a key result can be referred to as the consistent daily key decisions and actions that get you closer to a clearly defined objective. That hill was a key result towards me getting to the finish, and once I finish, I would raise money and awareness for my organization (AfrikaCan! Foundation). So, finishing the race under 5 hours was a key result, climbing that hill that was at 90km of the race without getting off my bicycle was a key result, the objective was to raise money and awareness for the organization. As you can see, key results are measurable and cannot be confused with the daily planned effort and activities done during the day to get to the key result itself.
NB: It is good to always remember that after seeing and imagining the bigger picture, we need to take care of the daily demands to get us to take care of the end. It’s better to work with daily results and this may help not forfeit what we imagine as the end-result(s).
Conclusion
The essence of this article is to ask you a very important question about starting and finishing well: Are you ready to Dig Deeper? Finishing well in the context of this article is not just about ticking all the boxes from start to finish, instead, it is doing what most people who finish and start do not always get to do: Finishing with ambition and enthusiasm. The journey between the start and finish line needs to be enjoyed as it is a rollercoaster process with so many try-fails and try-succeeds that John speaks about in his book, and one of the ways the questions and the OKR framework can allow us to do that is by understanding, defining and tracking the key reasons why we do what we do with our lives (time). I hope this has added value to you and please do add comments on what your thoughts are after reading this digest.
For more on these topics you can follow this blog, book, and page:
Blog — Do It For The Gram by Milton C. Stewart
Article: Product/Market Fit: What it really means, How to Measure it, and Where to find it by Eric Jorgenson.
Book: Measure What Matters — John Doerr
