4

CONVERT YOUR IDEA INTO A PROJECT

The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret to outward success.

HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit

Now that you’ve chosen an idea that matters, you’re much closer to doing your best work. It may have been hard work to pick that idea, but by doing so, you’ve given yourself something compelling enough that you’ll stick to it until the end.

It’s time for you to take your idea and convert it to a project that you can make space for and start talking about with people who are going to help you see it through. Since we do projects, not ideas, let’s start by looking at where the project is taking you.

CONVERT YOUR IDEA INTO A SMART GOAL

Being stuck with an idea that’s not yet a goal keeps you swimming in the ocean of possibility, which is fun for a little while but exhausting over the long term. Converting that idea into a goal gives you a safe shore to swim to.

But it turns out that some formulations of goals get us to done better than others.

Consider the following two formulations of the same goal:

​ Book

​ Complete a book on the history of cappuccino by the end of 2019

Which of the two are more likely to get done? Our survey says the second.

That may seem to be a straw-man comparison, but my work with thousands of creative folks shows that many goals look closer to the first than the second. The more distant the goal seems to be, the more it looks like the first. Consider, for example, the “saving for retirement” goal you likely have. Does it provide the details you need to prioritize, implement, and track your progress toward it? How much is enough? And so on.

A SMART goal 1 formulation that works particularly well for creative people is a variation of a framework you may have seen at time-management seminars. While the standard framework works well in some contexts — especially those in which you’re on the receiving end of a goal — it doesn’t work quite as well for creative projects and creative folks.

The variation of the SMART framework I recommend is:

​ Simple

​ Meaningful

​ Actionable

​ Realistic

​ Trackable

Let’s handle each in turn:

IS YOUR GOAL SIMPLE?

A goal is simple when you can look at it without wondering. You shouldn’t have to look up something else to understand its meaning.

Simple doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s easy, but simply stated goals help you know exactly what you need to do to move forward with the idea. If you look at a goal and have to think about what you need to do to count that goal as done, your goal isn’t simple.

When we set a complicated goal for the future, it may be difficult to hold on to its meaning over time. A complicated goal made when we’re in the zone may be harder to understand when we’re not — the last thing we want to do first thing in the morning is struggle to figure out what we’re supposed to be doing, and knowing that we’re retreading ground we’ve already trod makes it more frustrating. Simple goals help set us up for success.

As we’ll see in a moment, simple and actionable are often related: actionable goals tend to be simple. That said, it’s entirely possible and normal to have a goal that’s simple but not actionable, or a goal that’s actionable but not simple.

IS YOUR GOAL MEANINGFUL?

A goal is meaningful when you can look at it and quickly understand the importance of completing that goal.

If in the previous chapter you chose an idea that matters, you’ve done this already. We learned there that we’re more likely to be successful with ideas that matter than with ideas that don’t connect with our heads and hearts.

What often trips people up, though, is that they equate meaning and desire, but that’s an unnecessary relationship: you might not want to do something that’s meaningful, yet it still might be meaningful to do. For instance, you may not want to do your taxes, do the back-to-school shopping for the kids, or help transition your aging parent to assisted living, but these projects have meaning in the broader context of your life.

While doing enjoyable work creates pleasure, doing meaningful work creates fulfillment — and there’s no reason why meaningful work can’t also be enjoyable work.

IS YOUR GOAL ACTIONABLE?

A goal is actionable when it’s immediately clear what action needs to be taken to accomplish the goal.

If there’s nothing you can do to bring about your goal, it’s not a goal — it’s a wish. A wish is granted by someone or something other than you and is thus out of your control. You can’t plan for it or work toward it by clearing space on your calendar. I’m all for wish lists; combining wish lists and action lists, not so much.

Making a goal actionable is perhaps the simplest criterion to meet because it’s just a matter of thinking of the actions that will bring about that goal. The simplest way to make a goal actionable is to begin the phrase with a verb. Instead of “Chapter 1 ,” phrase the goal as “Write chapter 1 .”

IS YOUR GOAL REALISTIC?

A goal is realistic when the endpoint is achievable with the resources you have available.

We creative folks have a lot of friction with this one, as we have that peculiar ability to change the world in important ways. To be creative is often to see parts of reality as tentative.

However, just because we can change the way things are doesn’t mean we can do it all at once or without regard to the basic constraints of reality. Try as you might, you can’t change the fact that it takes time to do things well or that you need sleep. You also can’t change social reality overnight — or, if you do, it will probably be accidental.

Rather than put your head in the sand and try to deny the way things are, asking whether your goal is realistic helps you figure out ways to make it more likely that you’ll succeed. Identifying drag points — those places and elements where your goal is likely to go sideways — allows you to plan ways to overcome them. Better to beat the dragon you already know is there than pretend as if it’s not there and then be surprised by it.

Realistic goals and trackable goals are often heavily interrelated, especially if you track your goals based on time. An unrealistic goal can often be made realistic and doable by changing your expectation of how long you think it would and should take.

IS YOUR GOAL TRACKABLE?

A goal is trackable, quantitatively or qualitatively, when it’s clear what progress means.

Most SMART-goal advocates use the T for “time-specific,” but I prefer to leave it more open. Some goals don’t fit into a temporal framework as easily as others, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t actively do things to bring about those goals.

Consider the broad goal of being a better friend. Setting a goal to become a better friend by June 1 is neither meaningful nor simple. However, it can be a recurring broad goal with which you check in every once in a while by asking yourself what you’re doing to be a better friend to specific people. Understanding a goal in this way makes plenty of room for other kinds of uniquely human activities such as contemplation, intuition, mindfulness, and unstructured learning in ways that setting rigid time frames can unhelpfully constrain.

That said,

most goals are best formulated with time specificity; assigning a timeline to a goal can help us identify the simple actions we can take to bring about that goal at the same time that it makes the goal feel more real.

Additionally, if there’s a specific quantitative measure that relates to your goal, having the courage and intention to use that measure can go a long way to creating a plan that actually succeeds. For instance, many people want to change the world for the better, but they haven’t specified the number of things they want to change. “Keeping kids from going hungry” is a noble goal; “feeding one hundred thousand kids who would otherwise go hungry” is noble, simple, trackable, and compelling. (For those who just said “But what about all the other kids?” if you can’t feed one hundred thousand, you can’t feed all the others, so best get to work on that first one hundred thousand and upgrade as you go along.)

HOW TO MAKE YOUR GOAL SMART, STEP BY STEP

While making SMART goals comes naturally to some people, many creative people unhappily struggle with it. It’s really a matter of practice; and once you practice it, you won’t be able to abide a non-SMART goal. I’ve been doing this so long that seeing non-SMART goals creates the same effect as thinking about round squares; it actually stops my train of thought unless I correct them or stop looking at them.

From a practical point of view, the simplest way to convert your idea into a SMART goal is to add a piece at a time, with the following steps being the easiest order:

​ Verb it! State the goal with a verb that best captures what finishing the goal looks like. Some examples: “Move Alex to Atlanta.” “Publish a book.” “Rework staffing strategy.” If you’re stuck, use the word finish at this point; when you break the project down, you’ll use more specific completion words.

​ Time it! Think about what seems to be a reasonable amount of time to complete the goal, then double that time. Why double it? To account for the fact that we chronically underestimate how long it will take to get something done. Doubling the time will help you set a realistic goal.

​ Check it against reality. I know you think you’ll be able to do it faster than how long you just said if you doubled it, but remember, you’ll be doing this project along with other projects , and almost all of us creative folk underestimate how long something will take and overestimate how much we’ll prioritize any given goal.

​ Reread the goal to see if it’s still simple. It will probably have some formulaic phrasing such as “Completion (Verb) (Idea) by (Date)” — for example, “Move Alex to Atlanta by June 1” — and that’s a very, very good thing. Use your creativity and mental horsepower to figure out how to do the work, not to figure out what the work is.

Because we already started with an idea that matters, we already know it’s meaningful.

There are three powerful upshots for choosing to consistently use the SMART framework for your goals:

​ You’ll have a default that will accelerate your ability to convert ideas into goals and push them to the finish line.

​ You’ll be able to review a list of goals with a similar format and see how they relate. If too many goals need to be completed in the same time frame, you’ll be able to see that you’ll need to do some deconflicting and sequencing in advance. You want to avoid the pressure-cooker pattern where everything is due all at once followed by a period of recovering from being exhausted, only to have everything due all at once all over again. Crockpot creativity leads to better work and a better life than pressure-cooker creativity.

​ You’ll be better able to communicate with other people about your goals since they’ll be easy to decode and discuss.

A not-so-powerful upshot is that you, too, will experience mental misfiring when you see a non-SMART goal. You’re welcome.

Take a look at the idea you chose in the last chapter. How can you rewrite that goal to make it SMART?

Fair warning: When you convert that idea into a SMART goal, you may experience some tension and anxiety. You may be questioning if your goal is realistic or you’re eager to take action on it but you’re stumbling with some of the elements of the air sandwich. Excitement, tension, frustration, and other hard-to-pin-down emotions are all normal and sure signs that you’re grappling with something that matters to you.

THE THREE LEVELS OF SUCCESS

A chief challenge in converting an idea into a SMART goal is figuring out what success looks like. We tend to bifurcate our outcomes into success or failure, but this is an oversimplistic view. There are levels of success, and which level of success you choose should weigh heavily into the plan you make to achieve that goal.

Before we go into the levels of success, one of the best things you can do when you start planning is to assume you’ll succeed rather than assume you’ll fail. While we all want to be successful, many of us start planning as if we’re going to fail. We spend a lot of energy and time imagining what failure looks like, so much so that we build a plan that focuses on preventing failure rather than setting up success. The end result is that we choose smaller goals and less ambitious projects that ultimately don’t fulfill us because they never require us to channel the courage and discipline to do what we’re most capable of. Consider the best-work project in front of you and how planning to prevent failure feels different than planning to succeed.

Since we’re focusing on success, I won’t focus much on the levels of failure. Let’s consider three different levels of success:

​ Small Success. Since tests are the easiest analogy, consider a small success as getting the minimum score needed to pass. The thing about small successes is that we’re never really proud of accruing them, but a string of small successes done with coherence and intention can lead to much greater success down the line. So even though we may not be proud of them, they’re still successes and worth celebrating.

​ Moderate Success. A moderate success exceeds the minimum requirements for success. While you may not be shouting from the rooftops about a moderate success, you’re likely to be proud of the outcome. Moderate success is the highest level of success you can achieve with just your own effort, resources, and advantages.

​ Epic Success. If you’re not a Millennial or younger, you can substitute extreme for epic. An epic success greatly exceeds the minimum requirements for success and is a “tell your momma” moment. It’s your version of getting on The Oprah Winfrey Show or winning the Super Bowl. Epic success requires you to build a team to help you get there.

Considering the levels of success while goal setting helps you align your expectations and resources. Small successes don’t require nearly as much effort and focus as epic successes, but many of us want epic success with small-success-level effort and focus. Additionally, having epic success across all dimensions of our lives requires intention, awareness, boundaries, courage, and discipline at mastery levels not yet reached by most of us.

Applying the levels of success also wards off the low-level insanity, anxiety, and overwhelm that so many of us grapple with every day because we’re expecting higher levels of success across all dimensions of our lives without doing the work to get to those levels of success. If you aim for a small success from the beginning, you can actually be satisfied when you achieve it. If you aim for epic success from the beginning, when things get hard — and at this level, they will get hard — you can remind yourself that it’s not hard because something’s wrong with you but more simply because you chose to play at a level that really makes you show up.

Let’s make this less abstract so it has more grip. Consider the fuzzy goal of running a marathon. A small success might be finishing the marathon, which could include walking parts of it and finishing before the event ends. A moderate success might be running the whole way. An epic success might be winning your category. It’s pretty obvious in this example that there’s a big difference in what it’s going to take to succeed at these different levels; depending on your level of fitness and ability, you might be able to just show up on a random Saturday and accomplish the small-success level, as that happens often enough to be possible. To get the epic level of success, you’re going to have to do a lot of running, training, recovery, and life-changing to make it happen.

The marathon example also illuminates the contextual nature of the levels of success. A competitive runner likely would consider the aforementioned moderate success to be just barely a small success for them. Someone who’s never run before or who has a disability or injury that makes running challenging might consider the aforementioned small success an epic success.

A corollary to this is that what was once one level of success to you may be a different level of success later on in your life. For example, at one point in my life, doing twenty-five pull-ups was a small success for me; twenty additional years and about as many pounds later, twenty-five pull-ups is pushing the upper band of moderate success for me. In a similar vein, a decade ago, publishing a book would be a moderate success for me, but now it’s a small success. Hitting the New York Times bestseller list is an epic goal — thanks for helping me get there, by the way.

Another personal example may help here. Before I understood the different levels of success, I was completely daunted by the prospect of finishing my dissertation. Success meant writing a groundbreaking dissertation that argued an interesting, original, and compelling point that would set up my later research program and earn me a position at a great university. Pressure much? But when I later considered that I could research and produce a scholarly work and I no longer needed it to get me a job or set up a later research program, it became much easier to see how I could get through it. I had unconsciously chosen an epic success as my target, but I wasn’t in a place in my life where I would put epic-level effort into the project.

Our head trash — in this case, comparisitis — often clouds our judgment of the levels of success, especially when it comes to intentionally choosing small successes as our target. It’s incredibly easy to fall into the trap of using other people’s successes as benchmarks for our own, regardless of our desire to do what other people do to earn their level of success. We usually don’t see the work other people do or have done to get to their level of success, and even when we do, we somehow think we can and should be able to catch up or take a shortcut to get there. And when we’re not comparing ourselves to other people, we’re comparing ourselves to some idealized version of ourselves that has it all figured out. That person can and would achieve greater levels of success than our current self, and we use that person’s fictional success as a yardstick to hit ourselves with.

Here’s the deal: What other people achieve is irrelevant to where you are and what level of success makes the most sense for you. That idealized version of yourself doesn’t exist and what it might achieve is also irrelevant. Where you are and where you want to go is all that matters, and no one but you can choose what level of success is resonant.

The grace of the levels of success is that you can choose goal levels that align with what matters most for you. Some dimensions of your life may matter more to you than others; in those dimensions that matter less, choosing small successes makes sense. Even within a dimension, some projects and responsibilities may be less important, so you can deemphasize those with small successes, or what my friend and author Michael Bungay Stanier calls “acceptable mediocrity.” 2

Even when it comes to the idea you chose in the last chapter, you may still want to consider choosing small successes as your target. Why? Where you are in your life and career right now may be such that you know you can’t commit to epic or moderate success, and it’s more important to you to get some momentum and wins than to put your best work off for some day when things settle down.

What I most want to ingrain here is to match the level of success with your level of effort and commitment.

The higher the level of success, the more you’ll need to do to achieve it.

Yes, it sounds obvious when stated that way, but it’s far too easy for us to visualize and expect a high level of success without also committing to a high level of effort and commitment. Tying success to commitment also helps us retroactively; if we get a lower outcome than expected but also put in much lower effort than we planned, it’s easier to thwart head trash about our competency because it’s really about our effort.

Consider the idea you chose in the last chapter. What would each level of success look like for that idea? Considering those different levels of success and what else you have going on right now, what level of success is most resonant with you?

NO DATE = NO FINISH

A running theme throughout this chapter has been the importance of having dates assigned to goals, projects, and action steps. Simply put, if a goal, project, or action step doesn’t have a date assigned to it, it’s not likely to happen. Undated items get a free ticket to Someday/Maybe Land, even when they matter to you.

There are two reasons for this: (1) an undated item doesn’t have any real commitment juice to it, and (2) we naturally triage items based on time requirements. These two facts are especially important when it comes to working with the people who will help us succeed — the whole reason we have the concept of dates and times is because we need a way to communicate specific times when things can and should happen.

As a simple example, consider how many “we should hang out soon!” statements actually turn into hanging out if they’re not very quickly followed up with specific dates for hanging out? Consider how much more likely hanging out is if followed by “Would you like to get drinks Friday evening?” Even if Friday evening doesn’t work, the specific date converts the idea into a commitment to be accepted or rejected or an alternative offered.

The same principle is at play with your goals, projects, and action items. It’s also at play when you make a request of other people. Undated items are unsigned checks you can’t cash.

Putting a date on an item makes it a commitment, which is one reason why some of us struggle with putting dates on items. If we can’t follow through on the date, then we’ll let ourselves and others down. And subconsciously we know that putting a date on something likely means we’ll have to make some downstream choices to either finish or let go of an existing project since we’re probably maxed out with existing projects to start with. In the moment, it’s easier to put it in the someday/maybe pile; it’s only when we really look at the pile that we realize that we’re smothered by it.

The gift of dating items is that it helps us get real with displacement, and displacement channels our energy and attention. Displacement and commitment are our enemies only when we choose to ignore or downplay them. Once we honor and accept them, we can get busy doing what matters most.

When most of us think about dating items, we typically only think about due dates or completion dates. By doing this, we miss out on the grace and power of start dates. Yes, it’s logical and obvious that every project has a discrete start date, but it’s also true that many of us don’t intentionally choose a start date for projects — if completion dates are slippery, start dates are doubly so.

When it comes to commitment, start dates can often be as powerful as completion dates. Start dates are analogous to the difference between being in a long-term relationship and being engaged; regardless of how long you’ve been together, engagement changes the relationship and requires a new way of channeling time, energy, and attention. Start and completion dates put a ring on your idea, and, yes, I’m going to invoke Queen Bey:

if you like the project (and actually want to get it done), you’ve got to put a ring on it.

Take a second to think about how different it feels to intentionally commit to today being the start date for your project rather than just letting it remain in Someday/Maybe Land. If you’re honestly playing along, you probably felt two things simultaneously: potential movement and anxiety, as if your carefully stacked and weighted Jenga tower is about to fall over. The sense of potential movement is the future pulling you forward toward meaning making; anxiety is the present and past wanting things to stay as they are.

But remember how I said there’s some grace to start dates? Think about how it feels to intentionally choose a start date of, say, three weeks from today, after you finish the current major project that’s on your desk. Most people feel less anxiety but still feel that sense of movement. To avoid having your start date be a proxy for procrastination, it’s important for the start date to be based on some real reason for delay. Not being emotionally ready is a poor reason; waiting until after your surgery, work trip, or move are all really good reasons, because those events count as projects.

By picking a start date, you’re choosing to start directing, redirecting, and creating available time, energy, and attention toward your project. You’re not committing to getting specific chunks of your project on your schedule yet, but you are committing that you will get those chunks scheduled.

It comes down to this: Are you starting this project today? If not today, when?

If you truly want to get it done, put a ring (date) on getting it started.

CREATE YOUR SUCCESS PACK

If you’ve converted your idea into a SMART goal, chosen your level of success, and put a start date on the project, you’re probably beginning to feel some of the weight of the journey ahead and wondering how you’re going to do it. One way you’re not going to do it is all by yourself. That’s the hard way, and if you chose an epic goal, you won’t be able to do it by yourself anyway.

With your goal, level of success, and for-real start date, you have enough to start building your success pack. Your success pack is the group of people who are going to be instrumentally involved in helping you push your best-work project to done. Think of this group of people as the rest of the Avengers, the Fellowship of the Ring, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, or the crew of the Enterprise (without the redshirts).

There are four kinds of people to put in your success pack:

​ Guides

​ Peers

​ Supporters

​ Beneficiaries

You’ll want to include three to five people from each group for projects that you think are going to take a quarter or longer, but you may need to build a success pack for smaller projects if such projects require big changes to your habits, career, or lifestyle. If you have more people than that, you’re more likely to end up a rudderless ship due to too much input and overwhelmed by having too many people to keep in the loop. Less than that in each group and you won’t have enough people fuel and diverse perspectives to augment your own. Assembling three to five people per group means you’ll have twelve to twenty people who have got your back, but note that a person can be in multiple groups — this is especially true for supporters and beneficiaries.

Building a team of active supporters not only gives you additional capabilities to get your project done, but it also gives some positive voices to counteract the undue attention we all give naysayers. Because of faulty wiring, we’re far more likely to imagine a crowd of naysayers or see the (at most) handful of naysayers in our lives and make them the primary anchors for our fears and insecurities. It’s the person who has their arms crossed while we’re speaking that we latch on to, or the one out of a hundred negative comments on our work that sends us in a tailspin for days.

Rather than focus on the naysayers, we’re stacking our success pack with yaysayers. Our yaysayers are the people who have seen who we are all along, been in our corner, and want and need us to succeed. Rather than trying to prove our naysayers wrong, let’s prove our yaysayers right. (For many people, this refocus is both freeing and terrifying.)

Let’s handle each kind of people in turn.

GUIDES

Your guides are people you look up to who have walked the road a little longer than you have. They’ve done more than just accomplish a certain level of success that you’re after; they’ve done so in a way that resonates with you in terms of character and approach. Your guides serve as compasses, remote advisors, and paradigm shifters when you get stuck in seeing things in ways that aren’t working for you.

Ideally your guides are alive and reachable, but you may also have some historical and larger-than-life guides that are important to you. Be careful that you humanize this latter type of guide, though, so that you don’t create a model that’s impossible for you to live up to. “What Would Jesus Do?” is great from an ethical perspective, but “walk on water” isn’t so great when you’re drowning in a project ocean.

As far as interactions go, your guides are like Yoda, Dumbledore, or Gandalf. They won’t be in the work with you, they’ll often give cryptic counsel that you’ll struggle to understand, and they’ll pop in and out randomly — and many times, when you’re stuck, the way they’ll pop in is with your version of “Use the force, Luke.” Picking your guides is less about the external interactions you’ll have with them than priming yourself with their worldview. Sometimes it’s literally asking yourself how they would discuss your challenge or question that does all the work.

For instance, Seth Godin is one of my guides more for his character than his marketing genius. While we’ve had actual conversations, at this stage in my career, I disagree and argue with him in imaginary conversations multiple times per week. Our imaginary conversations are much more volatile than my imaginary conversations with Peter Drucker, Lao Tzu, Aristotle, Teddy Roosevelt, and Maya Angelou.

While historical guides aren’t to be discounted, it’s extremely helpful to have a few living guides in your success pack. Enrolling a living guide can be tricky, though, because it’s likely that a lot of other people want their attention at the same time so that they may have no idea who you are. I’ll let Pam tackle this in a sidebar since its one of her genius zones.

PEERS

Peers are people at your approximate level of accomplishment or skill who can and will regularly contribute to your project. You’re likely in a reciprocal relationship where you’re helping them with their projects and in regular back-and-forth communication. If your guides are in front of you, your peers are with you side by side.

When considering your peers, it’s important that you don’t conflate cheerleaders with yaysayers. Some of your peers should challenge your thinking and approach, as well as point out your blind spots. They’re like the friends who will tell you about the salad in your teeth when you’re at a party. The big difference between the unhelpful critic and the helpful critical peer is that the latter draws out the best in you rather than just making themselves look better.

PAMELA SLIM​ THE PRINCIPLES OF ENROLLING A GUIDE

The most nerve-racking part of building a success pack is enrolling a guide. What is the best way to approach a very busy person who is constantly being asked for favors? Of all the people in the world who this guide could be helping, why you? Your biggest concerns are the right questions to ask and answer. Here are some guiding principles for enrolling a guide:

​ Equality. A true guide is simply a more experienced equal. Your guide’s body of work is deeply intertwined with your own. What kind of change in the world are they advocating? How is their mission deeply dependent on yours? Approach enrolling your guide with a focus on passion for your shared mission.

​ Nature. No set of ideal guide criteria is a substitute for natural chemistry. You and your guide need to truly dig each other. Choose guides who not only have extraordinary gifts but who also share interests and values that make it fun and interesting to be together.

​ Commitment. When you enroll the help of busy people, you must follow through on your commitments. Be proactive to see what kind of help they need from you. Get your work done on time.

​ Liberation. My best friend Desireé Adaway describes the quality of great relationships as “liberatory.” It’s your job to keep your relationship with your guide free of expectation. Where freedom exists, connection grows.

Pamela Slim is an author, community builder, and business coach. She focused her first decade in business consulting with large companies such as HP, Charles Schwab, and Chevron. The second decade has been focused on helping entrepreneurs thrive in the new world of work through her coaching and books Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur , and Body of Work: Finding the Thread That Ties Your Story Together.

It’s also important to make sure you have some peers who are outside of your discipline, field, or echo chamber. Few things will propel your work more than having a successful peer who isn’t deeply familiar with your discipline, field, or work, because they’ll ask the questions you’ve forgotten are questions, and you won’t dismiss them as beneath your consideration or as something coming from a critic. The other major upshot to having a peer outside of your field, discipline, or industry is that they’ll have a lot of insights and analogies from their discipline and field that will cross-pollinate your work.

SUPPORTERS

Your supporters are the people who are doing work with and for you to help you get the project done. More so than status or level of accomplishment, you can ask the people in this category for support and expect them to meet reasonable deadlines — guides and peers are much more removed from this aspect.

Your most important supporters often are outside of the office. For instance, your spouse or partner may be a key supporter, or would be if you actively enrolled them to support your project. In a similar vein, it may be the neighborhood kids who tend your lawn on Saturdays and babysit in the evenings so you get in some extra project time. Or maybe it’s your roommate who does most of the grocery shopping, cooking, and dishes while you’re on a deadline.

Actively building and curating your support team is the single most important practice that you can do to ensure that you’re finishing your best work. Your support team is your force multiplier — no matter how competent you are, you’ll always be constrained by the amount of functional hours you have available in a day.

In addition, few joys are as sublime as winning as a team; at root, we’re cooperative animals who are biochemically rewarded for cooperative success. We were made to slay dragons together.

In theory, building a good support team isn’t that difficult. In practice, it’s much harder because most people have to work through a lot of head trash around asking for help and claiming that their work is important enough to prioritize. Women especially struggle with these challenges because we socialize women to be supporters and to be asked, but it’s rare that people will ask you to do your best work and to pick themselves to support your best work. Men struggle more due to the self-made-man myth and the mindset that asking for help and support makes them weak.

I’m well aware that I’ve juxtaposed the reality that we’re naturally cooperative creatures and we have a lot of head trash that keeps us from collaborating. There’s no logical tension there, but it’s an experiential tension that plays out every day. Furthermore, the tension between cooperation and independence plays out in every dimension of our lives from our relationships to politics, so why would we think it wouldn’t play out in our best work as well?

BENEFICIARIES

Your beneficiaries are the specific people who will benefit from the completion of your work. Whether it’s full bellies, full minds, or full hearts, your beneficiaries’ lives will be better because of the work you’ve done.

There’s an important corollary here: If you don’t finish your best work, your beneficiaries will be worse off. Whatever pain your work heals or delight it delivers won’t be healed or delivered without you doing your work, and there’s no substitute for your best work because no one else will create what you create in the way that you create it.

I state the corollary because it’s been my experience that it can be helpful when your project gets hard or you’re stuck in the void. It’s one thing when your best work is just about you and what you want to do; it’s quite another when you think about the people who will be worse off if you don’t stand tall, lean into thrashing, and work your way to done. This is where the “specific” piece of the definition of beneficiaries comes into play, for there’s a big difference between an imaginary person being worse off and some specific person you know. You might quit on yourself; few of us will quit on other people.

An additional reason beneficiaries need to be specific people that you know is so you can ask them for feedback about what you’re building. Your head trash, ignorance, and arrogance can keep you stuck and take you way off course; having the courage to show your work and ask your beneficiaries how it’s landing can keep you on course and inspire you to finish it up.

DON’T JUST BUILD YOUR SUCCESS PACK — USE IT

While it can be fun to think about who might be in your success pack, the real magic happens when you make a plan for how you’ll actively use it. Sure, you may have one of your trusted peers in your success pack, but how are you going to do your best work with them? How frequently will you be in contact with them? About what? And what will you need to show them so that they can provide their best feedback?

Here are the steps to go from idea to action on this strategy:

​ List the three to five people who are a part of each group. Remember that you’re looking for specific people — “single moms in Idaho” don’t count as a beneficiary, for example. In this step, you’re building your phone-a-friend list.

​ For each person, brainstorm at least three specific ways they can help you or you can help them. If you can’t think of at least three items, you likely have the wrong person on the list or don’t know the person well enough. For your guides, perhaps list what types of questions you would like to ask them or who they may be able to introduce you to. For peers, list skills, connections, or perspectives they bring to bear. For supporters, list what work they can do to help you do yours. For beneficiaries, list what questions would reveal whether what you’re doing is actually making their world better. Now you know what to phone your friends about.

​ Determine the frequency of communication that would be most supportive for you and the project. For a default, consider a monthly pulse for your peers and beneficiaries and an at-least-weekly pulse for your supporters; guides are more as-needed and will often find you.

​ Let each person know they’re a part of your success pack. Given that it’s unlikely they know what a success pack is, just let them know you’re working on something and you would love their help. Based on your answers to questions 2 and 3, communicate to them how they can help and about how much you’ll be in touch with them, so they know what they’re agreeing to and what to expect from you. Guides are trickier because you may not be able to enroll them due to their being out of reach or no longer alive; even when they’re alive, the most you might want to do is email them and let them know they’re an inspiration for the project you’re working on. If you have a mentor relationship with your guide, then you can enroll them as if they were a peer.

​ Proactively communicate with and show your work to them per the pulse established above. It’s not the job of your guides, peers, and beneficiaries to follow up with you and ask how you’re doing; it’s your job to keep them informed and engaged. The exception here is if your guides and peers agree to help keep you accountable, in which case it may be their jobs to follow up with you if they don’t hear from you on the pulse you jointly agreed to.

It’s the fourth step that terrifies people, because assembling your success pack makes things real really fast. Suddenly there are twelve to twenty people who care about you, who can help you, and who expect something from you. Suddenly you’ve got skin in the game, deadlines, and accountability partners. Suddenly your excuses, procrastination, and what-abouts morph into a simple “Will you or won’t you?”

Of course, in that same step, you’ve set yourself up such that completion is nearly inevitable as long as you show up. So if you’re ready to make the completion of your project nearly inevitable, work through the steps.

If you’re ready to start finishing your best work, take your idea from the previous chapter and work it through the steps in this chapter. You’ll probably need a two-hour block to work through converting your idea into a SMART goal, choosing your level of success, picking a date for the project, and brainstorming who’s in your success pack. You’ll probably need another two-hour block to contact most of the people in your success pack, depending on how long you thrash.

At this point, it comes down to whether you’re willing to put a ring on this project and build your team. Your natural inclination will be to get ready and then commit, but I’m asking you to do the opposite: commit so that you get ready. Without the commitment, it’s unlikely that you’re going to make space in the world to do your project — that’s what we’re turning to next.

CHAPTER 4 TAKEAWAYS

​ A SMART goal is simple, meaningful, actionable, realistic, and trackable.

​ The three levels of success — small, moderate, and epic — require a corresponding amount of effort and focus, and you can’t do everything at the epic level.

​ If a project doesn’t have start and completion dates, it’s not likely that it’s going to get done.

​ Your success pack consists of four kinds of people: guides, peers, supporters, and beneficiaries.

​ Activating your success pack makes your project real because others get invested in your goal and you’ve made your first real commitment.

1 .​ George T. Doran first formulated the SMART goal framework in “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management’s Goals and Objectives,” Management Review 70, no. 11 (November 1981): 35–36.

2 .​ Michael Bungay Stanier, Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork, and Start the Work That Matters (New York: Workman, 2010).