Writing Lean

I know a lot of people who talk about starting a blog or writing a book, but week after week, it remains just talk. And even if they do make progress, it isn’t what they expected. It’s not unlike all the software projects or businesses I’ve worked on that failed.

When I started my software career out of college, we were taught the “waterfall” method of developing software - a lengthy process of phases gradually proceeding into the next and there isn’t any going back.

We’d gather requirements for months. Then we’d develop for many more months before showing something anyone could use. It might make sense in some capital intensive projects like building a Martian Rover, but in many situations it fails.

Even with these smart people working and planning, 75% of the software projects I worked on were late, cancelled, or they disappointed their business owners. The list of features took a lot longer to develop than we planned. Or a business owner had failed to predict how people would use it. Or simply, their needs changed from 12 months ago.

Things are much better today with Agile methodologies and Lean Startup techniques from folks like Steve Blank and Eric Ries, who’ve shown a better way.

At the Obama campaign, we would work in one week sprints, forcing new feature ideas to be small. Those small things were immediately in users’ hands being tested before we wasted time on dead ends.

Draft, my current business, was built in two weeks before I sent it to friends to use. It wasn’t some giant vision that took months of talking. It was a little kernel I didn’t know could grow. But it did.

But most people don’t write like this.

We have these big ideas for blogs and books. We’re going to have hundreds of blog posts each year and many thousands of readers, so we spend weeks worrying about the name of our new blog or which ads we’ll display before we even have an idea what the first post is. Or we imagine for months how to write the memoir of a big tragedy in our lives, but it’s too poignant to even begin articulating.

Just like those waterfall projects, they don’t get done or fail our expectations.

Then there’s folks like Andrew Chen.

Andrew is a widely-read blogger, who’ll Tweet possible headlines of things he’s thinking about, and use a tool like Crowdbooster to see which gets the most traction. Then he’ll work out an entire post.

For many blog posts, I started answering someone’s question on Reddit. The answer takes minutes to write, but if it generates any interest, or more importantly, if I enjoyed writing it, I’ll spend the hours crafting it into a blog post.

Want to start a new travel blog? Use Reddit every day answering travel questions. If you find yourself enjoying the process, graduate to blogging. If blogging works, polish those posts into a book.

Have a giant event in your life that you want to write about but it’s too painful to start? Practice with lots of smaller stories.

I’ve written about big life events too, but first I had a lot of practice blogging about what I’ve learned from mundane life tasks: how trying to save money at a sandwhich shop taught me something about growing a business, or how constraints like only buying your groceries at 7-11 makes us more creative.

Smaller in scope than you had in mind, but your memoir can be too big and painful to write about if you lack the practice.

If you’re anything like me, you have big ambition. You want to write a book or start a blog that many, many others are going to enjoy and benefit from. But don’t start there. Start publishing something small. Small stories. Small lessons. Small ideas. Take a long-term view of writing in your life, and watch those small things grow into something much bigger.

P.S. I’d love to meet you on Twitter: here.

Or please let me send you my latest newsletter.


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