Should You Build in Public Or in Isolation?

Best Technique for Success

Photo by Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash

A New year is a time when most people make resolutions and announce them to their friends and family.

I’m interested in knowing how many people actually achieve the goals that they so enthusiastically announced.

Comment down below the resolution you set for yourself and if you have achieved it or not.

I asked my family and friends the same question and most of them told me they don’t even remember the goals they set.

But on New year’s day, were they all set to achieve their goals?

Yes.

Did they believe then, that they could actually do it?

Yes.

So, why did they not?

In his TED talk, Derek Sivers says that Telling someone about your goals makes it less likely to happen.

But the new trend of Building in Public is the opposite of this premise.

Building in Public means talking about your goals and sharing your progress with an online audience as you work on your project or product.

In this article, we will explore building in isolation and in public and find out which is better.

Working alone: Why should you keep your goals a secret?

Peter Gollwitzer, a brilliant scientist conducted a series of experiments to find out if talking about goals was good for an individual or a hindrance.

His research showed that people who wrote down their goals and didn’t tell anybody were, on average, working harder to achieve their goals.

Whereas, people who wrote down their goals and talked about them, were less likely to work hard on the tasks that would help them achieve the goal.

Let’s look into the reasons why people who talk the talk don’t walk the walk:

1. When people who talked about their goals, received acknowledgement from others, their minds were tricked into believing they actually achieved the goal. So, they were no longer motivated to work.
2. They felt a sense of pride in letting people know about their goals. This closed the gap (in their head) between the place they are and where they should be. So, they didn’t put in the effort because it didn’t feel necessary.

In fact, several studies concluded that writing your goals and keeping them to yourself was much more beneficial. Also, most people don’t really care about your life. They have their own problems and telling is not that impressive. It’s just bragging.

Why brag about things you do or will do?

Why not just work on stuff you really care about?

Building in Public: The Emerging Trend

Kevon Cheung, an entrepreneur says that building in public is about sharing your ideas and goals on social media platforms, it’s useful because you can test your ideas and receive valuable feedback from other people.

Most people love to see projects in their early stages (I do too) and when they can contribute to them by giving feedback or suggestions, they become invested in them.

This is good, especially for businesses, because they won’t have to sell their work to strangers which is extremely hard, instead, they already have customers (in the form of contributors).

And as they say: word of mouth spreads like wildfire in marketing, so having a customer base, early on, boosts the sales.

When individuals take up building in public projects like building a website, they expand their network by connecting with people who have similar interests.

When they get an audience, they become accountable and responsible which pushes them to keep improving.

They also receive feedback on a regular basis which improves the quality of their work.

Not all that Glitters is Gold

Some of the problems with Building in Public are :

• When you are in the public eye, your perception of success and failure is inaccurate. When you fail, it can become too embarrassing.
  Although failures are embarrassing in general, when you fail publicly, it feels terrible and obviously, it’ll take more time to get back to feeling normal than if you failed in secret.
• Building in public opens doors to distraction. Most people share their work on Twitter or other social media. But social media is a slippery slope, it’s easy to lose yourself in endless scrolling and mindless consumption.
• When sharing with an audience becomes a metric, it’s easier to share low-quality work or fake an achievement or steal someone else’s work to look good in front of your audience.
• Lastly, when you build in public your work can be stolen.

This doesn’t mean that building in isolation is the answer, it has its own cons, like:

• Working on projects can easily become boring. The project idea is often the most interesting part of any project. Working and completing tasks is often the hardest.
• People who work in isolation don’t receive feedback on a regular basis which can put them on the wrong track.
• There’s no accountability partner so it’s easy to procrastinate and not work.
• When you work alone, nobody knows about your project so it becomes harder to sell it. You have to spend another month or so on growing your network.

So, what’s the solution?

A Framework for Building in Isolation and Public

I’ve come up with a framework that incorporates the best parts of building in isolation and building in public:

1. Don’t talk or tweet about your goals.
2. Set milestones for yourself.
3. Work in isolation until you have completed a milestone.

No Social media or bragging about what you do.

4. Share the milestone in a public forum to receive feedback. Connect with like-minded people and ask them for suggestions.

This is tricky because it can make you believe that you are closer to the goal than you really are. So, remind yourself that there are milestones you haven’t achieved yet.

5. When you have received valuable feedback, go back and work on the suggestions you’ve received.

6. Share it again with your online audience and if you are satisfied with this milestone, start working on the next milestone.

7. Do this until you are done with the project.

8. If you are concerned about your work being stolen, then instead of sharing your work. Document your work and share that. Document your decisions and write why they worked for you and why they didn’t.

Originally published in Shreya Sinha’s newsletter.

Written by Shreya Sinha, thanks for reading!