You can’t steer a parked car.
In order for steering your car to have an effect, you must be moving. Sitting in your driveway turning the wheel back and forth takes a lot of effort, and gets you no where. The analogy is this: Stop sitting around thinking and talking about what you want to do, and planning it to death. Get started, and actually do something.
Getting started
What I have learned is that it is better to start moving. Once you are moving you can steer this way or that, and navigate to your destination. You might have to circle the block a few times. You might have to stop for gas more often. One thing is for sure, you will NEVER get there if you are not moving.
The MVP
An MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, is a concept from a book called “The Lean Startup“. In the book the author talks about how it is better to build a barely workable product, get feedback from customers, and start making changes. Getting more feedback, and continuing this cycle until you have a fully functioning product is far better than the decades old method of planning for months and building for years before launch.
In today’s day and age there are so many alternative choices (to everything) and competitors are moving so fast, you would be obsolete before you launched if you waited until you had a perfect product. Sometimes what you think matters doesn’t matter and what you don’t think matters really does. You will only find this out by listening to your customers along the way and making rapid small changes.
MVP your life
In the same way the MVP principle can be applied to business, it can be applied to your own life. Instead of making gigantor plans and taking 2 lifetimes to achieve them, figure out what some steps in the right direction are and begin to take those steps. I recently wrote about losing weight. Instead of designing some massive plan and executing with brute force commitment I decided instead to get moving with an MVP, and steer my moving car as it is in motion. It’s easier to turn when something isn’t working and stomp the gas when it is if you are moving.
Don’t let perfect get in the way of progress
Sometimes it is easy to say “Well, I really want to do this thing, but it’s going to be better if I could do it THIS way. I can’t do it that way right now, so I won’t do anything until I can”. This is a trap because waiting for perfect will result in never doing anything. Even if you can achieve perfection you will never achieve it all at once. Getting started gives you the opportunity to create many learn and improve cycles leading to incremental success.
So what do you want to achieve? What are you waiting for? Take a STEP today. Get that car in gear!
Craig