Make it happen!
You hear it a lot. And it's generally good advice, of course. At least the 'happen' part.
You definitely want things to happen. But often times, it's the 'make' part that gets confused for progress.
You can push a ball uphill, but should you? Not only does it take a ton of effort, you can't really see what's over the edge until you get to the top of the hill. So you use all this effort to just find out if it was even worth the push to find out.
Contrast this with starting at the top and letting the ball roll downhill. Rather than make things happen, you let things happen. The hill, in this case, is the process, the team, the environment you've built to allow things to happen gracefully. To glide, not grind. To roll into a view you can see, with the gravity you get for free.
That's the way. Less force, more momentum.
What you must make happen is the way you work, the people you have, the trust you've built, and the way you work together. Once you've made that happen, you can let a of other things happen mostly on their own. Less huffing and puffing, less exhaustion from always pushing up hill, less of a feeling of starting from ground zero each time.
This doesn't mean you get to lean back, hands clasped behind your head, feet kicked up on the desk, with a cigar in your mouth. But it does mean you have more faith in the machine you've built to make all the other things you make. It surely makes things quite a bit easier, and there's no shame in that at all.
You hear it a lot. And it's generally good advice, of course. At least the 'happen' part.
You definitely want things to happen. But often times, it's the 'make' part that gets confused for progress.
You can push a ball uphill, but should you? Not only does it take a ton of effort, you can't really see what's over the edge until you get to the top of the hill. So you use all this effort to just find out if it was even worth the push to find out.
Contrast this with starting at the top and letting the ball roll downhill. Rather than make things happen, you let things happen. The hill, in this case, is the process, the team, the environment you've built to allow things to happen gracefully. To glide, not grind. To roll into a view you can see, with the gravity you get for free.
That's the way. Less force, more momentum.
What you must make happen is the way you work, the people you have, the trust you've built, and the way you work together. Once you've made that happen, you can let a of other things happen mostly on their own. Less huffing and puffing, less exhaustion from always pushing up hill, less of a feeling of starting from ground zero each time.
This doesn't mean you get to lean back, hands clasped behind your head, feet kicked up on the desk, with a cigar in your mouth. But it does mean you have more faith in the machine you've built to make all the other things you make. It surely makes things quite a bit easier, and there's no shame in that at all.
-Jason