Execution Over Time

The three largest variables in success in any arena or endeavor are time, execution, and the idea (or table selection).

I think a lot of people (myself included) often overweight the idea section and underweight the execution and time variables.

I was talking with a mentor of mine last year one night and he told me one of the things his mentor had told him when he was younger. You’re be going to be successful. It’s just going to take you 5 years to get there.

And initially that’s a frustrating thought because time is the variable you don’t have any control over.

You can come up with better ideas and you can improve your productivity (or at least convince we delude ourselves into thinking we can), but you can’t accelerate the passage of time.

Ironically, I think the priority with which most people (again, myself included) value these three is probably inverse to their actual role in generating results.

Everyone has a good idea. I’m in a cafe in San Diego right now and I bet everyone in here has all the knowledge and ideas they need that, if properly executed and committed to over a long enough time period, would let them accomplish all their goals. Probably few if any of them will ever reach that result though. Ideas don’t seem to be the bottleneck for success.

David Heinemeier Hansson gave a talk at startup school in 2008 and one of the things he said struck me.

There are hundreds of thousands of million dollar businesses out there.

I’d never thought about that before, but that’s absolutely true. And most of them aren’t the result great ideas, they’re good ideas that were well executed on consistently over time.

I remember learning that the mother of a friend I had in college ran a company manufacturing those little disposals people put their cigarettes in outside big buildings. That was a multi-million dollar business. However, it took years and a lot of work to build.

Lately, I’ve come to realize that the real predictor of success in any execution over time. This is the essence of the Helsinki Bus Station Theory, which I’ll paraphrase/plagiarize below:

Some two-dozen platforms are laid out in a square at the heart of the city. Each bus takes the same route out of the city for a least a kilometer stopping at bus stop intervals along the way.

Now let’s say, again metaphorically speaking, that each bus stop represents one year in life.

So you work on a project or a goals for three years on something and at the end of it you think to yourself that what you have been doing for three years others have already done.

So you hop off the bus, grab a cab (because life is short) and head straight back to the bus station looking for another platform.

You spend three years at it and come to the same realization that what you’ve been doing has already been done before.

So once again, you get off the bus, grab the cab, race back and find a new platform.

What to do?

It’s simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus, because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.

The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination.

It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

I see this both with projects I’m working on now and project I’ve finished in the past.

I remember coming back to Spanish classes after I studied abroad and everyone commenting on how good my Spanish had gotten. In their minds, it happened overnight. I disappeared for 6 months and came back speaking exponentially better than when I left. What really happened was I spent 5 hours a day speaking Spanish for 6 months

With the project I’m working on now I know I’ve still got a long way to go, but they’re going to be successful. It’s just a question of time and execution.

Compounding Interest is a powerful force. And I think it operates in almost every area of our lives.

The more I think about, the more empowering this is. Unlike great ideas, execution is entirely under your control today. I think a lot of people have realized this across different fields

Ira Glass, who hosts the most popular podcast in the world, said that the most important thing he did when getting started was a lot of work.

I was talking to a friend of mine that’s particularly good at sales and asking him about different sales techniques. He stopped me and said — “Process over persuasion.” The best way to get at sales isn’t to read a bunch of sales books. It’s to make a bunch of sales calls.

This is why I think I’ve gotten back into the Pomodoro method recently. The Pomodoro Method is basically a simple way to track your output in blocks of 25 minutes of focused work. You set one task you’re going to work on for 25 minutes and then execute on it. If you’ve never done it before, you’ll be amazed at how difficult it seems at first to do 25 minutes of focused work.

If the two most important variables are time and execution then Pomodoros track the amount of time you spend executing, which I suspect over the long term is the “secret” to success.

I also think is helpful for goal setting. I recently implemented the agile results system of setting weekly goals for myself and then defining the “how” for each of those goals. I get a lot of satisfaction from writing down goals but don’t always follow through on them so actually forcing myself to outline a “how” has made a huge difference.

Interestingly, the only goals I haven’t achieved since starting the system are the ones I haven’t executed on.