8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Tag: iterative efforts

Chapter List

  • Iteration Epics

    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.

  • Every Day

    Routinely, I drop myself headfirst into a daily challenge.

    There is an art to it.

    There is a goal embedded within.

    There is a entrenched motivation.

    Why? Well…

    As an example, imagine you want to be better at drawing hands. Hands are notoriously difficult to sketch. They are both familiar and complex. They are easy to draw poorly. So, what you opt to do is practice every day: each day, you tell yourself, you will draw hands. They will never be the same hands. The hands will be drawn from different perspectives in different poses and perhaps even in different media or styles.  But you will draw at least one hand every single day. Period.

    You’ve just crafted a simple daily challenge for yourself.

    No spreadsheets. No written reports. No accountability to anyone but yourself. You simply know that sometime each day you need to set aside a small chunk of time to sketch hands.

    And you’ll do this challenge for a month. Or maybe two months. Or, if you’re incredibly dedicated to learning to draw hands, you’ll challenge yourself for a whole year.

    At the end of the challenge what do you think the result will be? Yeah, you’ll be happy to take a few days off from drawing hands, but I can almost guarantee that the daily practice, the grind, the iterative epic learning will have improved your skills by a measurable amount.

    Challenge yourself to do something every day.  And then give yourself a hand.

  • Navel Gazing 

    I don’t think I’ll ever stop being fascinated by the simple idea that iterative work can lead to huge accomplishments.

    I was sitting down to write this post, pondering a topic, and I noticed that at some point last week I’d passed the one hundred post milestone on this writing project.

    Navel gazing could have easily followed, and maybe that’s all this post is. But I’d like to think that it is a self-referential example of my point, too.

    A few times per week for the last five months I’ve sat down with a hot tea and my keyboard and written out a few words on a topic related to the mission of this project: to talk about the fun and frustration of creative exploration, to poke at the obvious and pry into the obscure, and to generally reflect on the thousands upon thousands of aspects of what it takes to bootstrap oneself into a creative professional life no matter your career stage—the first person perspective version of that.

    And so I write, and often I’ve preached upon the simplest of simple topics: just putting in the work. Doing it. Actually writing, making, or creating—no matter how small or incremental it might seem.

    By example, one of the things I create incrementally is this collection of words, writing oft disconnected thoughts about the process itself: navel gazing upon navel gazing.

    One hundred posts later my incremental effort sits around forty thousand words: a short book worth of text and ideas posted here for people to read and enjoy. If that’s not something huge from a hundred little iterative efforts I don’t know what is.