‘Accept that everything is a draft.’
—‘The Cult of Done Manifesto’ by Bre Pettis and Kio Stark
YOU’VE STARTED YOUR project but in all probability you’re still not that sure whether it’s the right one, whether it will work and make money or whether you’re even going to enjoy it in the long run. That’s OK. Uncertainty is a normal part of the process. But that doesn’t mean you should charge on right to the end without any clue whether it’s going to work.
When you understand what I call the Play Cycle, you’ll be able to check your progress every step of the way and correct your course so that you don’t waste time heading in the wrong direction.
The Play Cycle is how children naturally behave and learn, it’s how people find their grand purpose in life and, contrary to the standard view, it’s also how modern businesses are built. Once you understand it, you’ll know that you no longer need to bite your project off in one chunk, you don’t need a complete plan to make your whole project happen and you don’t even need to be sure what you want to do. The Play Cycle allows you to launch a project straight away and fix things on the fly. It’s ready, fire, aim.
The Play Cycle allows you to launch a project straight away and fix things on the fly
The Play Cycle is a simple three-step cycle: ACT, REFLECT, ADAPT and then repeat. Keep cycling round these three steps until your project is where you want it to be. In the startup world this is called iteration and is a fundamental part of twenty-first-century business strategy.
The Play Cycle may look simple but don’t underestimate its power. This iterative process is at the heart of the scientific method that has given us our modern understanding of the world, it’s how all medical innovations are created and it’s similar to how all life on earth evolved.
Here’s how to use the Play Cycle to make your project a success:
Jump into action, create something and share it. You’ve already begun this process simply by microblocking every day. The key is to cut the crap and focus on the very heart of your project. Write a white paper that lays out your new process for managing projects. Make a video that illustrates the problem you want to address. Write an essay or blog post that captures the idea for your non-fiction book. Finish it and get it out there, because it’s in action that the connection and learning happen.
After you take action (and even while you’re doing it), notice what happens – both the internal and external feedback.
Internal feedback is about how it felt. Which parts did you enjoy? Which parts didn’t you enjoy? Is this an approach that suits you or is there a more in-flow way for you to work? Are you doing the work you were drawn to do or have you strayed off course into what you think you ‘should’ be doing? Are you saying what you wanted to say?
External feedback is about how others reacted to your project so far. Which bits did they value and which bits didn’t they? Which of the ten posts on your blog got the biggest reactions and most comments? What gets misunderstood? What gets retweeted? Which product sells the quickest and easiest? Which song did your audience hum as they left the gig? Prepare to be surprised! I’ve written things I thought were profound and life changing which garnered nothing more than a collective ‘meh’, and I’ve put things out which I thought were nothing special and seen them go viral.
‘Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.’
—Sir Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister 1940–45 and 1951–55
Taking into account all the feedback you received, adapt your project to make it even better. If everyone loves your novel’s lead character but got confused by the plot, change it. If you launch your business and find everyone’s most interested in something you thought of as a sideline, consider making it a central part. If the part you loved most about your blog was designing it or using your own photos in it or doing the techie stuff for it, consider whether this should be the focus of your next Play Project.
Once you’ve completed Step 3 and adapted what you’re doing, then it’s time to iterate – to go round once again but with an improved version. Put your adapted approach into action, then reflect on what happens and adapt once more. Continue going through the cycle: ACT, REFLECT, ADAPT … ACT, REFLECT, ADAPT … until you’ve achieved success.
If you’re willing to take action, try to create something useful or interesting to people, even if you’re not sure it will work, and then adapt what you’re doing according to feedback, your success really is guaranteed.
How following the Play Cycle turned a hobby into one of the most famous websites in the world
IN 1995, 43-YEAR-OLD Craig Newmark was working in IT at American brokerage firm Charles Schwab. In his spare time he started an email listing that he sent out to friends and their friends of arts and tech events going on in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It was a hobby; no grand plans, not even a website initially, just CCing the people who had expressed an interest on regular emails with a list of interesting events. The email list grew and then turned into a listings website. Craig’s only aim was to be helpful, to be of value to people. He kept listening to what people were saying, reflecting on it, adapting his approach accordingly and acting again.
The result of following the Play Cycle in this way was Craigslist, one of the most visited websites in the world. Here’s Craig’s own simple description of how he got there, as written on Quora.com:
– from beginning, did something simple and useful
– from beginning, began cycle:
– asked for community feedback
– did something about it
– repeat, forever
– got lucky with simple site design, realizing I have no design skills (didn’t waste time doing fancy stuff no one wanted)
By the end of 1997 craigslist.com was getting a million page views per month. It was no longer a hobby as Craig explains in another post on Quora:
in 1999, made craigslist into a real company for it to survive effectively. decided I didn’t personally need to make lots of money. NOT altruistic, just knowing when enough is enough.
updated software in latish 1999, ceased coding, committed to customer service work, but only as long as I live.
made Jim Buckmaster CEO in 2000, since as a manager, I suck.
Now doing customer service work, but personal major focus on public service and philanthropy at craigconnects.org
Despite Craig’s humility, the remarkable global value he created with Craigslist resulted in a personal fortune estimated by Forbes in 2010 to be $400 million. Craig’s formula is one we can all emulate: do something simple and useful, then keep increasing the value to people again and again by moving round the Play Cycle, acting, reflecting and adapting.
The Play Cycle is about experiential learning. This was your natural way of approaching everything before you got into school. When you were a baby and the urge took hold of you to stand up on your own legs and try to walk you didn’t ruminate on it much. You didn’t think, ‘Will I be able to do this? What evidence do I have on my CV that I could be a walker? I’ve only ever been a crawler … I’d better go and read up on walking before I start … But there’s really no point even learning because someone else will always be better at walking than me anyway.’ Nope. You just stood up on your wobbly little legs, tried to take a step and then fell over. And what did you do next? You iterated. In fact, a baby typically takes a thousand hours of practice to learn to walk. That’s the persistence you were born with and that you can draw on now.
The Play Cycle works at every level. At the end of your project you’ll reflect on how it went and then adapt what you’re doing before starting another project. Day by day, you can check how people are responding to what you’re doing – what’s valuable to them and what isn’t – and continually adapt to make something they’ll love even more. And moment by moment you can tune in to how you are feeling about what you’re doing and adapt to have a better experience. If you notice yourself getting distracted working at home, you could go out to a café to work instead. If you notice that you particularly enjoy working with one kind of client, adapt your focus to find more of that kind.
The faster you move through the Play Cycle the faster you progress. Anything that shortens the cycle from taking action to getting feedback and adapting will make your journey faster. Famous architects are usually over 60 years old because it takes years to go through the cycle of getting commissioned, designing a building, having it constructed and then seeing how people respond before you can learn from it and design a better building next time. Contrast that to stand-up comics who find out how successful a new joke is within seconds. For that reason it’s not unusual for the best stand-ups to become worldwide sensations in their 30s or even their 20s.
Remember this is just version 1.0. Get the first version done of your idea, website, book or whatever it might be and know that you can make it better and add more to it in the next cycle. In book writing, you might not even show anyone your first draft but you need to get the whole thing done before you can go back and start improving it. This is why some authors advocate ‘fast drafting’ to get the first draft done as quickly as possible – sometimes in as little as 30 days – so that you have something to build on.
Think about how you can get a first version out there as soon as possible. Author John Purkiss had already had one bestseller with Brand You. His new book Change From Within though was on a very different topic: meditation and spirituality. To test out his approach in the book he printed a hundred copies of a ‘beta release’ of his book and gave them away. This allowed him to get feedback on the ideas in his book and see which parts needed adding to, removing from or improving. And he also gave a handful of live talks to see which exercises from the book worked best. John even tested the title of the book; he created a Facebook page called Change From Within, which received a few ‘Likes’. He then posted the same material on a new page called The Art of Letting Go. This received almost twice as many ‘Likes’, so he renamed the book accordingly.
Hold your idea lightly. Accept that when you follow the Play Cycle your idea often takes on a life of its own: your documentary idea turns into a comedy as you try to make it. Your humour blog turns into a political campaign or a philosophical exploration. Your business morphs under your very eyes. This is normal. The business you start is rarely the business you end up succeeding with. As long as you’re staying true to your values that’s OK. Accept that, as author Steven Pressfield says, ‘Your idea is smarter than you.’
‘I don’t want to do something that fails.’ If you approach your project in the step-by-step way I am recommending, you can avoid any expensive failures. But that doesn’t mean things will always turn out the way you expect or want them to. It’s your willingness to go round the Play Cycle and learn from it that separates you from the millions of people who refuse to start until they have a guarantee of success.