The other thing I liked was the somewhat non obvious advice to stay focused on your goal and not be open to other opportunities. This sank a lot of my projects over the years. Hot, exciting new idea beats familiar, hairy, in progress idea. But if you keep chopping and changing you'll never finish anything. There is a risk you ignore a really much better opportunity, so you can't do this 100%, but you do really strongly need to bias towards finishing what you started.
Lastly when I started on the project of teaching myself to write software more than half my life ago now, I hated it. It was alien and difficult and boring. If I'd quit after a month I would have not found my passion, and I would have missed out on a pretty great career.
Also, I would say learning to enjoy the gym took a lot more than a month.
So don't give up so soon, but also three years is a long time if you really are not enjoying what you're doing. Maybe something in between, based on how you feel about it.
It makes the assumption that the motivation is already there and he enjoys doing it, only is not seeing immediate feedback.
I think 3 years is kind of arbitrary and not to be taken literally. He's just saying that sometimes these projects take longer than expected to gain any traction
The thing about not being open to other opportunities reminds me of the idea of flow: You don't focus on getting into flow but you focus on avoiding distractions that would prevent you from getting there.
Design each two week goal so that you get a dopamine rush from doing it, get some value out of it, and it also helps your long term goal.
I share my attempt at doing just that here: https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/do-more-by-doing-less/
I go into a project thinking "I bet I can get 50% to 100% of this thing done today" and that's almost never the case, but the thought of it gets me excited. That's all the motivation I need. I work like crazy until I'm ready to stop working. I say "Wow I sure made a lot of progress. Tomorrow I'll probably finish it off." feeling satisfied. This repeats forever. Maybe it's a kind of madness, but it gets the job done!
/sarcasm :)
Whether to give it a month or three years depends on the ambition of the goal and the things learned in the process.
Spend 100+ hours learning to juggle over a month and you’re not doing tricks, but you’re going to be noticeably better at it. 3 years on the other hand is a long way from say mastering French, but it’s plenty to be useful on a trip. And that IMO is what separates two benchmarks, noticeable improvement is rarely worth much on it’s own.
That's what gave rise to the whole Lean Start-up movement - spend 3 months, get a working version out there, get some paying customers, start improving the software with new features. If you can't get any paying customers with an MVP, it's a sign your idea might not be worth a 3 year investment.
Here's how outdated in tech usually works across three years:
We gotta switch to NoSQL, it's the new new hot hot thing! It's going to save us money, it's going to make our service much faster, it's going to be easier to manage. It's revolutionary, everybody says so. Our competition is switching too.
Three years later: we're going to switch away from NoSQL, turns out we didn't actually need to use that. It caused more problems than it solved in our case.
Outdated in three years is mostly only true in a small echo chamber of the tech industry obsessed with chasing fads 24/7. It's an almost entirely self-imposed form of torture by that part of the industry. There are exceptions of course, cases where things legitimately get outdated in just three years, and they're rare.
Was the NoSQL fad that so many people chased necessary? Nope. Are there great use cases for NoSQL systems? Of course. The legitimate use cases aren't fraudulent, it's the fad that is, the mania, the hype (which always implodes, then the headlines come rolling in about switching back).
That's a microcosm of the three year fad hopping that you're talking about (and there are obviously a lot of examples of it, from big data to AI/ML, to the latest framework craze). A small segment of the tech industry is like a dog that never stops chasing fad cars.
* A blog or novel isn't inherently outdated in 3 years, and good ones can certainly take that long to complete.
* Any fitness regimen lasting less than 3 years is a waste of time (IMO). You don't get meaningful "credit" applied to your lifespan for doing yoga for three months.
* Taking the time to develop your relationship with your children needs years of persistence, otherwise they'll just raise themselves and not respect you.
Much of this is the same advice given to ADHD candidates. I don't know if he is one or just happened to be inspired by self-help books about the subject, but the advice does work. Breaking large tasks down into smaller ones that yield more immediate satisfaction/feedback and riding that dopamine train until it's second nature is the best way to stick to a project and avoid burnout.
Usually these are software-enabled service businesses (I.e. the software is not the essential part of the business).
Standing up a pure SaaS business in 3 months just doesn't happen unless it's really straightforward and you already have it planned out.
However, I believe that statement applies more to the vision/philosophy of our projects. A professor once recommended us to set ourselves an unreachable goal to keep driving your project/company/employees forward towards a common goal. They gave us an example of Bimbo –a Mexican food industry company– that states as its philosophy: "Feed, delight and serve our world, this is our philosophy." They'll never really be able to feed the entire world but they're sure as hell going for it. Though whether a such big corporation's real interest is doing so is another discussion altogether. Even if that was their original intention.
I read this article and think about my goals to become a Game Developer. I take the advice of setting expectations for a couple of years down the road as a way to keep learning and investing the time that's required to become what I wish to become. I shouldn't be naive to apply this to a particular game project at the earlier stages of my career. In my case I should take on multiple projects that will broaden my knowledge regarding game design, architecture, project management, etc.
Article gave me much more to think about than I though it would.
Some things are just harder but that doesn’t mean they are not worth it.
The advice feels pretty circular. To stay motivated, do it for 3 years. If you can commit to something for 3 years, you already have the motivation.
Regardless, I disagree with this advice. Give it a month, tops. If you don't enjoy the process after a month and the goal is 3 years away, you won't get there.
From my experience, I stick to doing things because of the rewards along the way. After a month of playing an instrument, learning a language or trying a hobby, I will likely produce something that makes me want to keep going. It won't take 3 years.