81–90 of 99 posts
I wish G+ had more descriptive links, like http://plus.google.com/Daniel_Meade/Always_a_starter_never_a...
Google doesn't need to care about SEO ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're welcome to your opinion, but I respectfully disagree. Frankly, I wouldn't be employed if anything you said was absolutely true. My firm is hired to implement concepts as working products. I first help the clients decide whether their idea has legs and help them refine the vision. My team builds out v1 over a period of months, and then we generally hand off to an internal team or another firm that will provide…
I'm not talking about you or your company, but a lot of Starters are excellent bullshitters. They have an idea that is the equivalent of "Lets go to the moon" and leave it to others to build a Saturn V rocket. The latter of course is just an implementation detail.
This year had to be different. I needed something to show for my time. I became a finisher.
To make this change I did 3 things:
1) Reduce the scope on any new product ideas. Simple is best. I will only allow myself a month to work on something. If I am working longer than that and have nothing I can publicly show then the scope has probably buried me and nothing will ever be released.
2) Say Fk it and quietly release the project. Quietly because it isn't 100% finished. There are little problems here and there. I would like to spend weeks tweaking a feature but if I do it without releasing anything I will get bored and start a new idea. Once released I can iterate, improve and add functionality.
3) Tell everyone what I working on as I am doing it. This means I need something to show at the end of it or I will look silly. I then tell people in order of technical expertise about its release. Tech savvy people understand the concept of a beta and even an alpha. Others... not so much.
So far its working. I have already released something this year. Its still a bit iffy but it is improving each week. I am becoming a finisher.
Once it's out in the world and providing some modicum of value to me and others, I can start deriving joy from fixing that one thing or adding that other small feature that's keeping me from being able to do X.
Case in point: http://www.viainstapaper.com. I wanted to be able to see what people were sharing from Instapaper. I came up with the idea around 11PM on Valentine's Day, and spent an hour prototyping the Twitter search stuff in Ruby. The next afternoon, I slapped a Rails frontend on it, and called it 'launched'[1]. Over the next couple days, I found myself getting annoyed by missing features or nasty bugs, so I'd fix those. Once this subsided, I announced it to the world, and it's been pretty much running on autopilot since.
I wouldn't say it's set the world on fire, but it's gotten me the attention of Marco Arment, Max Linsky (proprietor of Longform.org), and a handful of other people whose opinions I greatly respect.
[1] Hooray again for Heroku, Ruby, Rails, Bootstrap, and all of the other infrastructure that makes it possible to build something like this in just a few hours.
It's somehow interesting to me how often this comes up on HN. It's also a problem I tend to have. But if you had asked me 10 years ago based on what I'd casually heard outside of tech, it was much more common for me to encounter and worry about the exact opposite failure case in creative projects: not the person who has 30 half-finished novels, but the person who's spent 30 years writing their Masterpiece Novel that…
Film and novels derive their quality from their plots. Plots transcend time. Although the tools involved in creating a movie or book may change (improved camera systems), the tools don't impact the plot much. Therefore, a book written thirty years ago can have the same quality as a book written today.
The quality of an application is unable to transcend time. Sure, the idea of creating a website to connect people might, but the quality of an application isn't usually based on the idea, it's based on the implementation. Implementations cannot transcend time; that's why technological masterpieces don't exist. A programmer who locks himself in his room and starts working on "the next Facebook" now won't be very successful in thirty years: when he launches, the whole technological landscape will have changed.
Programmers rarely work on something for too long, because they understand that their products are dependent on technology, which changes over time. What is amazing today is not amazing ten years from now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cannot disagree more. Opening up my ideas to ridicule and critique has been the best thing I've ever done. I don't waste time on the bad ideas, people get behind the good ones, and people see that I'm always doing something . I don't have to deal with the "what happened to that project you were working on" question much because my standard answer is "Boy was that a good learning experience! I showed it to X, Y, and…
I'm not advocating working on projects in secret. Once you have something even slightly ready, by all means share it. Incessantly talking about what you're going to do before you've done anything isn't admirable in my books.
Maybe restraining yourself from this might make you work towards having something more substantial that you can then in turn "show off".
For me the joy is in figuring out how I would construct stuff, once everything is figured out... the joy is gone. The last step, actually making it, is almost never reached.
My father is an engineer, and he always taught me that there's no such thing as a good job half completed. The problem with his perspective is that it is uni-dimensional, and with good reason: if you half-build a bridge, people are going to be sad. He's an engineer and he's got to finish the bridge. However, my father didn't decide that a bridge was required, nor did he choose the ideal location for the bridge based…
> What I learned when I came of age was that I am a Starter. The more accurate way to put this is "I am not a Finisher". The argument here is that starting and finishing are two equally valuable skills that are somehow equivalent. A "Starter" is a fairweather friend. It's easy to start things. Most people like starting things. Note this is different from networking and so forth, which is really a separate skill altog…
In both scenarios you see the same pattern: once things get off the ground, the co-dependency relaxes because the starter can always hire finishers, but not vice versa. Look at who you hear more about: Jobs or Woz? Gates or Allen? There's definitely a difference in their levels of success, and definitely in their personalities. (Not saying it's the only factors, but certainly important.)
As is probably common for most HNers, technically feasible ideas pop into my head daily. My mind leisurely constructs state and class diagrams while I'm taking a shower, by the time I dry off, my gameified crowdsourcing quant-bot seems like the most amazing idea ever. But what about my MMO and a dozen other half formed projects each with their own litter of bastard experimental branches? I was able to end this cycle…
I decided to stick with it with the idea for two reasons:
(1) I'm tired of thinking on behalf of the market and would actually like to see what the market has to say for a change (this same principle worked pretty well in my love life, too, FWIW); and
(2) I could reuse some of the code for my other projects (true).
This weekend I started working on the first front-end use case after dealing with back-end stuff for the past 2 months off and on while simultaneously working an 8/hour day short-term contract with a 1.5 hour commute, on top of finding a new long-term contract after my previous project was cancelled, and even breaking up a relationship so I could stay focused. After feeling particularly exhausted from working non-stop like this and thinking I probably need to stop for a bit, I suddenly hit a point where I cracked up laughing at how awesome this thing that I was building was going to be, and I realised: I have GOT to follow this through, if only to see the look on people's faces it'll be worth it.
Creating things that make people laugh or look twice has always been something I've enjoyed, and if anything is going to motivate me, it'll be acknowledging this. The nice thing is that that is my raw personality, and I don't need anybody to tell me to stick with it, because I know I'm just expressing something inside of me that will connect with someone.