Cartoon from www.thedoghousediaries.com used with permission
‘You’ll come down from the Lurch/with an unpleasant bump./And the chances are, then, that you’ll be in a Slump./And when you’re in a Slump,/you’re not in for much fun./Un-slumping yourself is not easily done.’
—Dr Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go
SO, HERE WE are at the halfway point in your project. It’s at this point you might find things start to unravel a little. So if you’re finding yourself flagging, losing motivation, procrastinating or hitting the doldrums, rest assured this is not unusual; you’re just in the mid-project slump.
If you’re finding yourself flagging, losing motivation, or procrastinating, rest assured this is not unusual; you’re just in the mid-project slump
The going gets tough about halfway through. At the beginning it’s all excitement and possibility and at the end you have the finish line in sight and the pressure of a deadline. But the middle … the middle is trickier. As Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter says, ‘Everything feels like a failure in the middle.’
In the classic three-act structure of a play or movie, we’re now into Act Two where the hero (that’s you!) is forced to battle all manner of setbacks. People struggle with this halfway point in different forms. It challenges our commitment, our stamina, our fear of the unknown and our ability to keep ourselves motivated. And it brings out our Top Dog. ‘Top Dog’ is Gestalt psychology’s name for that critical inner voice that says ‘This will never work’ or ‘You messed that up!’ or ‘Who are you to think you can pull this off?’ and it loves to strike when you’re feeling most vulnerable.
When you’ve hit this point in the past, you may have given up and walked away because you didn’t know what else to do. Let’s make this time different. You’re a player now. Players learn how to deal with this mid-project slump. Learning what to do to get yourself out of it will be one of the best discoveries you can make.
Every creator, inventor and entrepreneur has at some point faced these moments of doubt, setback and far worse. Thomas Edison said about inventing, ‘The first step is an intuition – and comes with a burst – then difficulties arise.’ In the early days of Elon Musk’s space-rocket company, SpaceX, so many of their rockets blew up during testing that, instead of calling them explosions, Elon and the team coined the tongue-in-cheek acronym RUD, meaning ‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly’. The company eventually solved their problems and went on to conduct 25 successful launches and win contracts with NASA and other organisations around the world worth over $10 billion.
Richard Branson may look like an entrepreneur without a care in the world but he too has had his trials by fire. During the 1980s, in the midst of launching his airline and running his record label and stores, Richard Branson came home to a nasty surprise.
From triumph to crisis
RICHARD BRANSON DESCRIBES in Losing My Virginity the moment in 1984 when he returned from the triumphant inaugural flight of Virgin Atlantic to find his bank manager sitting on his doorstep …
As we pulled up at my house I saw a rather uncomfortable-looking man was sitting on the steps. At first I thought he was a journalist, but then I realised that it was Christopher Rashbrook, my account manager at Coutts. I invited him in, and he sat down in the sitting room. I was exhausted and he was fidgety. I was rather slow to understand what he was saying. But then I suddenly heard him say that Coutts were unable to extend Virgin’s overdraft as requested and would therefore regrettably bounce any cheques that took our overdraft over £3 million. I rarely lose my temper – in fact I can count the times I have lost my temper on the fingers of one hand – but as I looked across at this man in his blue pinstripe suit with his neat little black leather briefcase I felt my blood boil. He was standing there in his highly polished black Oxford brogues and calmly telling me that he was going to put the whole of Virgin out of business. I thought of the numerous times since March when I and the Virgin Atlantic staff had worked through the night to solve a problem; I thought about how proud the new cabin crew were to be flying with a startup airline; and I thought about the protracted negotiation we had fought with Boeing. If this bank manager bounced our cheques, then Virgin would be out of business within days: nobody would supply an airline with anything such as fuel or food or maintenance if word went about that the cheques were bouncing. And no passengers would fly with us. ‘Excuse me,’ I said as he was still making excuses. ‘You are not welcome in my house. Please get out.’ I took him by the arm, led him to the front door and pushed him outside. I shut the door in his bewildered face, walked back into the sitting room and collapsed on a sofa in tears of exhaustion, frustration and worry. Then I had a shower upstairs and called Ken [Berry, Virgin executive]: ‘We’ve got to get as much money in from overseas as possible today. And then we’ve got to find new bankers.’
Richard and his team rushed into action to pull in enough money from his record business that week to keep them just below the £3 million overdraft limit. That meant Coutts had no reason to bounce their cheques, and so the entire Virgin group was saved from ruin.
Creating anything – whether it’s a business, a book, a service, an app or a TV show – is challenging. At some point you’re going to hit a setback or simply come up against your own doubts and demons. This is exactly why most people don’t even try. They’re happy to spend their days working unfulfilling jobs, watching TV and scrolling through Facebook.
What you’re facing is a test; not a test of whether your idea works or whether you’ve chosen the right thing. This is a test of your mettle. You’re in the midst of one of the most worthwhile challenges life has to offer. Not whether you can make money or get your marketing right or choose the right target audience – or even whether you’ll have to give up, slink away and go back to your day job.
This is much much bigger than that.
This is about you deciding to find out what you’re made of, what lies dormant inside you. It’s about finding out who you are, what you can create that only you can create and what impact you can have on the world.
This is an adventure in finding life’s meaning – an adventure every bit as great as finding your life partner or raising children. What can you give to the world? What are you willing to go up against in order to give it? Can you stare down embarrassment, failure and the risk of loss to get there?
Because if you can, you’ve made yourself into an entrepreneur – the kind of entrepreneur who goes on to have a life that other people look at and say, ‘Wow, I wish I was lucky enough to have a life like yours.’ And when that happens you are fully allowed to laugh out loud at them – because you know it has very little to do with luck and a very large amount to do with bravery and plain old stubbornness to damn well not give in.
When you find a way to pick yourself up and carry on you’ll discover something really interesting; the mid-project slump is your friend. You’ll look back at the hurdle you just vaulted, burrowed under or ran around and see all the other people who balked and quit. Then you’ll understand that coming up with ideas is easy but few people have the drive to actually make them happen. And that makes those of us who do all the more valuable.
Psychologists are just starting to realise the importance of this ability to persist in the face of challenges. American psychologist Angela Duckworth has termed it ‘grit’ and has been studying its impact for 13 years. She has concluded that, ‘If it’s important for you to become one of the best people in your field, you are going to have to stick with it when it’s hard … Grit may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment.’
If your grit seems to have gone missing right now, let’s get you back on track. Here are four tasks for today to help:
‘The real enemy of success isn’t failure. It’s inertia.’
—Barbara Winter, author of Making a Living Without a Job
The mid-project slump sometimes sneaks up on you. You find yourself getting distracted and doing something seemingly very important – updating all your apps, watering all your pot plants or perhaps tidying your sock drawer – instead of actually doing what is most important on your project. Perhaps you’ve found you’ve missed your microblock for a day or two and now you just can’t face getting back into it. You’re in procrastination town.
What’s the solution? It’s not to wait for inspiration or even try to get yourself in the mood. It’s to use the Swiss cheese approach:
Time-management specialist, Alan Lakein, named this the Swiss cheese approach; keep picking holes in any task no matter how large or unpleasant and eventually it will start to look more manageable.
When you don’t know where to start, start anywhere
Sometimes those ten minutes will feel very unpleasant indeed – particularly if Top Dog chimes in with messages like, ‘I should have done this ages ago’ or ‘This isn’t going to work anyway’ – but you’ll usually find that once you’ve got over the pain of re-entry and worked for ten minutes (or several batches of ten minutes), the worst is over. I still use the Swiss cheese method for the tasks I feel the highest resistance to (either getting started on very large projects like redrafting an entire book or very dull projects like bookkeeping). Because sometimes, in the words of Ernest Hemingway, ‘The shortest answer is doing the thing.’
Often when you find yourself demotivated it’s because you’re disconnected. It’s very hard to stay motivated on your own. If you’re working on your project alone, find a community to plug into, learn from and get support from. Look on meetup.com for meet-ups related to your topic near you. Join a course that will teach you something while also placing you in a room with people on a similar path. Join the conversation with others following this book on social media – search for the hashtag #screwworkbreakfree. For more ways to get connected and to learn about my group programmes, such as The Screw Work 30-day Challenge, go to www.screwworkbreakfree.com.
If you’re not enjoying yourself on your project right now, is there a way to make it more fun? Perhaps there’s a way to change it to suit your personality better? If you’re a people person who’s found yourself stuck behind a computer, see if you can change your approach to give you more contact with others. What would make your project a little more fresh and enjoyable for you? As IBM founder Thomas Watson says, ‘If you aren’t playing well, the game isn’t as much fun. When that happens I tell myself just to go out and play as I did when I was a kid.’
Whether it’s doing the figures, sorting the tech out, designing your brand or selling your service, there will be someone who actually loves doing that stuff. Perhaps it’s a friend who can get involved with your project or you could hire someone at peopleperhour.com, fiverr.com or 99designs.com.
Whatever happens, always fall back to microblocking. Yes, it’s good to do longer sessions of work on your project when you have time but when you’re busy or your enthusiasm seems to have abandoned you, turn up and do 20 minutes regardless. That will prevent your project from stalling. To quote Confucius, ‘It doesn’t matter how slow you go as long as you do not stop.’
‘This project isn’t going well, I should switch to another one.’ When you hit the slump, you may be tempted to switch project. After all, you have this other great idea, another Play Project that you could have or should have started, and it looks problem free! But don’t fall for this. Every project turns into hard work at some point, even that shiny new one, and you’ve just got to get through it and produce something. WD40 is the famous water-displacement spray found in 80 per cent of homes in the US. If you’ve ever wondered what the name means, it was chosen by its inventor Norm Larsen back in 1953 for it being the fortieth attempt to create a water-displacement spray. It’s fortunate they persisted; over 60 years later, the WD40 product range makes $378 million a year.
Paul Graham gave a talk to his cohort of fledgling startups at Y Combinator where he addressed the mid-project slump directly:
So I’ll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand. So don’t get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don’t give up.
Keep going and continually reflect and adapt your project to maximise the ENERGY, GENIUS and VALUE elements to make it both fun and successful. We’ll learn more about this on Day 20.