a project is anything that requires collaboration, even if only with yourself
My secondary school motto was “Nil Sine Labore”, nothing without labor.
I’m not sure why I began thinking about project management. I suppose I began by thinking about the vague idea of getting things done. Some people seem to get things done, others seem to struggle with it. I wrote a tweet about cathedrals…
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wtf just learn project management
I’ve found myself thinking the title of this post (“wtf just learn project management”) multiple times in multiple conversations, or as a response to people’s tweets.
I used to feel bad about myself when I failed at things. I thought it was because I lacked discipline, or willpower, and that it was because of incompetence on my part – and underneath that it felt like moral failure, like I was a worthless piece of shit, and that if I could trade lives with some hungry, desperate kid in poverty, that would be for the best, I’m wasting the opportunity I’ve been given, what a selfish coward, waste of breath. I remember specifically feeling that, I have the journal entries to prove it. It took me a while longer to realize that I had internalized that from other people, from the culture around me, and also to see that it’s not even helpful. If it worked, it would’ve worked, but it clearly wasn’t working. It took me years and years to see that, and these days I sometimes think, if I can help someone else see that for themselves even a few months sooner, I think that’s a good life.
Just because you haven’t done it yet, doesn’t mean you never will. it can seem “logical” and “evidence-based” to think that if you’ve never been able to do something, you’ll never be able to do it. why would you be able to succeed at something you’ve only ever failed at? and yet, people make personal breakthroughs all the time. But to make that breakthrough you typically have to believe that breakthroughs are possible. If you’re determined to believe that it’s not possible, then you’re going to end up avoiding the things that could help make it happen. I’m not saying belief is sufficient. But it is quite necessary. The absence of the belief in possibility can be ruinous.
Youtube chapters:
I am not a natural at project management / cathedrals and rocketships / I never want to make people feel bad, but sometimes it happens / writing 1,000,000 words / you have to define your projects clearly / I know that I want to become a good writer, even if it takes my whole life / I like music, but I know I’m unlikely to be world-class / my goal this year is to make 100 YouTube vids… to become a better writer / I was rambly and incoherent for the first 100,000 words / navigating by arbitrary internal standards / the point of doing creative work is to gratify your taste / what I learned writing ~800,000 words / consider the speedrunners / 1000wordvomits has given me confidence and makes me excited about the future / I fail at “do X every day”-type projects / doing 1,000 pull-ups / doing experiments publicly / it feels good to complete mid-sized projects / doing anything repeatedly at volume is going to be interesting / DMs I get from aspiring writers / abandoned projects are still useful if you keep track of them / 1,000 omelettes / this is my 20th video this year, I’m learning about lighting and audio / it’s impossible to learn everything in advance, you’d never get started / took me 10+ videos to realise that ad-libs are the best format I could be doing right now / studying my earlier videos / I design with failure in mind / I felt bad about myself when I fail, but the problem wasn’t discipline or willpower – it was project design / my ADHD makes it difficult for me to motivate myself to do something indefinitely without a sense of completion / it’s pretty great to have an existing audience / I can motivate myself by reminding myself of how I can help other people / friend meetup thread – it’s a project! / people have already started their own threads because they saw mine / Karen x Cheng’s dance for a year / each “do 100 thing” project is an accomplishment that’s yours, that you can be proud of, even if you don’t subsequently follow up on it – it’s a story you can tell / video games are fun partially because the game does the dirty work of project management for you / music, sports, dance – they’re great for kids because it teaches them from experience that they can suck at something, struggle at it, and then GET GOOD by persisting / used to have limiting beliefs about how much I could squat / breaking that limiting belief felt profound, magical, almost religious. I wanted to cry, to realize I could do something I couldn’t do before / you have no idea how much you can improve / I’m making this video because I’m not naturally good at this stuff / it feels logical and evidence-based to reason that you won’t be able to do something you’ve never been able to do before / things don’t change if we decide that they won’t change (self-fulfilling prophecies) / how do you break out? Baby steps! / the pessimistic mind writes off small changes, but big changes are made up of small changes / you don’t know your own potential / most of us are bad project managers who may think we need motivation or discipline / I love supporting others and being supported by others – I don’t feel important enough to do something just for myself / I gotta lift so I can uplift the mens / I remember the despair I felt 5 years ago because I was failing – but those failures weren’t all bad, they were lessons
tactical inefficiencies / golden goose secret sauce is connecting things across different contexts… as a culture? we don’t seem to have an appreciation for how someone might have to work on a thing for decades
Further reading:
Introspect – 300 page pdf
LessUnstrategic – 21 page google doc
Doing anything substantial requires project management [45mins]
Comments:
I was conflicted about writing and publishing this post because I want to be quite careful not to fall into a pattern of becoming some sort of productivity hustlebro. That’s not a huge issue but maybe my audience might come to expect it from me? That’s not a huge issue either because I can always just switch to writing about other things, and if people don’t like it they can leave. I suppose at some subconscious level I’m always worried about disappointing people.
Part of me is slightly annoyed at the realization that I’ve already made a video about this – it’s funny, because I’m mostly grateful to my past self for already having covered this, but I guess there’s a part of me that feels underappreciated. “Only 1,912 views?” Well, yeah, Visa, most people don’t have the time to watch a 45 minute video that’s unedited and rambly. And also, more people will watch it in the future as you continue to build and grow. And maybe think back to the time when you had no audience whatsoever, and you would have been excited to have even 100 views on a video? Yeah that’s true. I’m always hungry for more, but as I said in the second video, it’s important to celebrate your wins.
I told a bunch of guys that I would write an essay today and so it would be good if I wrote the essay today. But I’m starting to get tired.
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Let’s talk about project management. I’ll start with what I think is the most important feature of a project. To me, a project is something substantial enough that it requires collaboration to complete. Even if you’re doing it entirely on your own, it’s big enough that you can’t do it in a single session, which means you have to collaborate with your past and future selves. You have to pick off tomorrow where you left off today.
All great artists and athletes have to learn project management to accomplish the great things that they do, even if they don’t necessarily call it that. They might not be particularly precise or deliberate about it, but they do have a process, and if they’re really serious, they likely have a process for investigating and updating their core process.
When people sign their kids up for art classes or sports teams, to some degree I think what they’re hoping is that their kids will learn project management. To manage their own psychology, to collaborate with themselves and others, and to do things tomorrow that they aren’t yet able to do today. This gives people a sense of power and autonomy, it gives people a way of relating to others, a way of expressing themselves, all sorts of good stuff.
Okay? Alright, now a bit of personal backstory.
When I was a kid, I never thought about “projects”. I just did whatever I felt like doing. I read a lot of books, played a lot of video games. I would meander around happily. That’s part of the joy of childhood. You don’t have any responsibilities yet.
(The following images are from Julie Zhou’s “Junior Designers vs Senior Designers”, 2014)
Then came school, and with school came homework. And I hated homework, so bad. I would put it off, avoid doing it, sometimes try and do a rushed job minutes before class, sometimes copy frantically from friends. It was a lot of stress and anxiety. I would lose things, I would fail to keep track of things. It was a mess.
And… I’m sure people tried to help me, but it didn’t really work. My teachers couldn’t really help. My parents couldn’t really help. I would have to figure it out on my own, and it was a messy, painful, frustrating process. The “obvious” solution would have been to, well, do my homework before it was due. But I almost never seemed to be able to get into that headspace until it was too late. Sometimes I would do my homework immediately the moment I received it, and that would usually give me the best odds of not screwing up.
But this section is not about “how to do your homework”. I hated homework and I still do. After years of second-guessing myself and having lots of conversations with people, I now personally reject the whole structure and spirit of traditional schooling. I don’t think that’s how learning actually works, at least for me. I think real learning happens on a slightly unpredictable schedule. You can try and plan for it, and set things up to facilitate it, but you can’t rush it, sort of like how you can’t have a baby in 3 months.
I could write a whole separate section about this old meme. Part of it is that gaming provides clear rewards, immediate feedback, desired outcomes. The concept of “gamification” started out quite promising, but unfortunately I think it came to be associated with the superficial veneer of gaming – frills, trinkets, points, etc – when what is really required is that we investigate the fundamental structure of the systems we are trying to invigorate. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, design is not what it looks like, design is how it works.
I’m thinking now, what did I do, as a kid? What projects did I indulge in? I know I kept a sticker book at some point, and a Digimon cards collection, almost by accident. Those didn’t *feel* like projects, even though technically I would say they kind of qualify. Because a collection is something that you build over time, it requires collaboration with past and future selves.
I had a personal website, which was something that I built over time, and I was very proud of it. It started with a few individual HTML pages, mostly text, some images and links. And then from there I learned to create a network of pages which referenced each other, related to each other. Nobody particularly taught me to do this, I learned it myself through trial and error, partially by copying what I liked about other sites. (Today, my personal homepage is on visakanv.com, which functions as a sort of “master node” that links out to my blogposts, youtube channel, etc. I consider this to be part of the same ongoing project, and it still makes me very proud and happy that I have a “home” on the web.)
I also remember writing a couple of video game guides, or FAQs, which you can still find on GameFAQs.com almost 20 years later. They were really just a list of moves with a bit of commentary on them, but looking at them now, it’s remarkable to me how much effort I put into it. And these are legitimate projects! I wrote then in notepad.exe, and I remember it took me days of effort to do it. In retrospect, this was my earliest and most substantial creative work, and it laid the groundwork for me to get more comfortable writing longer blogposts and essays, and eventually, this book, and hopefully in the future, entire novels, even series of novels.
The above image is by @joulee, published in 2014 to articulate the difference in the process of a junior designer vs a senior designer.
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Ironic that you’re stressed about your chapter on project management
The following image is via @destraynor, the co-founder of Intercom.
