I love the idea of incrementalism. In fact, I have a confession. The original intent of this website, the whole first draft of the plan, was to write one hundred percent about the practice of incremental work, iteration, and working through challenges, gamification, and step-by-step efforts to a bigger goal.
Instead, I simply made it a single chapter, and—you may have noticed—I talk about it with a bit of bias and abundance.
Oddly enough as this explanation post (I’ve been writing one, in order, for each of my topics on every Monday for the last twenty-some weeks) came up in the queue, this project is simultaneously approaching it’s two hundredth post. In fact, this may very well be it. And now well into my tenth month of writing an article for every weekday of this year so far, I’m approaching eighty thousand words of content on this site.
Eighty thousand words is a book. Printed, you’d pick it up, hold it in your hand and think “Jeeze, this guy’s got something to get off his chest. This is a thick book.”
I’ve made that. I’ve written it. I’ve posted it. I’ve refined it, tweaked it, supplemented it with citations and definitions. I’ve sent it out into the world for the better part of a year for anyone to read. And I’ve done it all a few hundred words at a time, each and every weekday, iteratively and in increments.
If that doesn’t hammer home the point I’m trying to make I don’t know what else does. Either way, under the category of Iteration & Epics I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.
Terms FROm this POSt
- bias
- It’s hard work thinking differently than others, and I often think of bias as a mental shortcut we all take so that we don’t need to. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s outright dangerous. But it recognizing it makes us more human, I think. That’s my bias.
- gamification
- Wrapping something abstract and exciting around something else that is (seemingly) boring, to add challenge, achievement, or game-like aspects to a task or goal to trigger our human need to have fun with everything we do. Milestones. Points. Prizes. All these things take the mundane work we need to do and turn it into a kind of reward-based play. Or we just waste a lot of time making up fake rules to avoid doing the actual work.
- incremental
- If you’ve never come across the old adage “Rome wasn’t built in a day” you’re missing out. I tend to lean into the idea that when people are saying this they are trying to tell you good things take time, but my hot take on this is turn of phrase is that great things are built stone by stone, day by day, year by year: incrementally, be you talking about an ancient empire or some obscure skill and hobby.
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