Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, that is why they are called ideas. You can try them out and sometimes they will work successfully, other times they will blow up in your face and leave a mark on your face. But if you never try to put them into practice, to make something real of them, they will always be just that – an idea. And I think we need something more.
Delivering software is all about cycles, the biggest one being you finish one delivery, the next one starts up, we rinse/repeat and do the same dance again. We try to optimize the cycle as much as we can, do requirements early, get code into QA sooner, work on smaller pieces as we go – but at the end of the day it is a cycle that starts over and over again. The challenge for a…
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t feel this way. And then they are forced to stop and they wonder to themselves – “What was I falling behind again?” And then we reset, and we are good for a while until we once again say to ourselves – “I’m falling behind.” Cue the stoppage.
If you are constantly measuring your results by the final result, you’re going to be disappointed 90% of the time. You won’t always come first. You won’t always win gold. You won’t always get the job. But you can learn from it, you can grow from the work you did to get there and you can turn your focus to a greater goal. But if you’re all focused on is the end result, you’ll never…
But sometimes you need a tweak to make it better. And sometimes you need to ask for a second opinion when what you’re doing is getting the same results. Tweaks aren’t about throwing out everything you have done. They are about figuring out what’s missing to make it right.