Create less barriers

This week, I want to thank you for keeping me encouraged and energized to write.

I’m saying this because I considered skipping writing this week. I failed a little overwelled over the week as one project that I was tasked with got a rocky start and had things come up that I had not expected.

Since some of us are overachievers, setbacks push us to question our approach and doubt our ability to succeed. We, overachievers, prefer to have everything perfectly done and accomplished. When things don’t go according to plan, we tend to put everything else in question. So, there I was, feeling terrible about things I should have done or planned for, and so forth and so on. I quickly noticed that I was going down a rabbit hole, so I stopped everything and every thought.

I dropped everything and started listening to Effortless, a book by Greg McKeown, one of my favorite authors, as I often do when I hit the brick wall.

In Effortless, McKeown reminded me about the power of simplicity, as he puts it. The steps not taken are the most valuable in every process, project, or task. The above statement means that every step we can remove from what we need to accomplish to simplify our getting to the finished line is worth removing. 

By removing any unnecessary or not value-added step, we bring value by saving time and eliminating complexity since complexity can quickly kill creativity. I’m so grateful for inspiring books like Effortless. I hope you are a book lover like me.

This week, I will keep it short. I will encourage you to start small. Anything you want to do and feel like it was just too much to start, or you don’t even know where to start, just think of the smallest step that can take to get you started, and then start with that small step.

I learned the power of simplicity during the many Agile classes that I’ve taken. I even read the Agile manifesto and went through a few Scaled Agile (SAFe) classes, yet when life got in the way, I quickly reverted to the naturally overwhelmed mode and almost forgot everything I knew. 

If you are unfamiliar with the Agile methodology, please don’t overthink it. Agile is a mindset that advises developers, Information Technology (IT) project managers, and basically anyone with any project in life to keep things small and flowing consistent pace. Agile believes that if we take small complete steps, it is easy to adjust when we make mistakes rather than waiting to complete a major project and finding out at the end that the project or task was a failure. 

For example, if you take the Agile mindset and want to follow it to cook pasta. You would start by first putting the water on the stove. You will taste the water’s salt first before placing the pasta in the boiling water. Then you will add the pasta and monitor it, and then you will start the sauce process separately and monitor that until you can combine the sauce and pasta in the end. If the water is too salty, you will be able to fix this mistake cheaply by dumping the water and getting a fresh one, and starting over.

Have you taken a non-Agile steps to cooking pasta, you will go through the entire process and only taste the end product. Have you tasted the end product and realized that the pasta was too salty, you would have made a very expensive mistake because you would need to start the pasta from start to finish and waste a lot of resources. Agile recommends that we take small, finished steps to enable us to fix mistakes at a low cost. The Agile mindset is wildly adopted by major software companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix, which encourage their developers to create miniature prototypes of products that can easily be thrown away if defects are found. If you take the Agile mindset, you will take small incremental steps in everything you do.

Therefore, stay encouraged. It is okay to fall from time to time, and it is completely fine to make mistakes or to even doubt yourself because we are all human. We will fall prey to these feelings sometimes. However, don’t let these feelings last and take you down.

My encouragement for you this week is to take small and consistent steps that are easy to take every day so that on the days you feel overwhelmed and swamped, you can still at least take these steps and still keep your promise to yourself.

My promise to myself was at least five hundred words every week. I took this advice from McKeown’s Effortless book. Because I kept this promise very small, it was still easy for me to keep it although my week has been rough. Thank you for keeping with me.