Follow-through and the power of small things

When you think of the Renaissance artist, Leonardo DaVinci what do you think of? Undoubtedly you think of his masterpieces like the Mona Lisa or The Baptism of the Christ or Annunciation. What you don’t think about is the startling number of pieces he left unfinished. Clearly, those of us who struggle with follow-through are not alone. Starting something is fun and exciting – carrying it through to completion is the difficult part. 

In the following paragraphs, we’re going to examine why follow-through is important not just for those around you, but for yourself as well. Then you’ll discover a few practical tips to develop stronger stick to itiveness.

The journey of an idea

Everything brought to fruition must go through several stages: the beginning, the middle, and the completion. Of course, that’s an oversimplification of the process, but for the sake of my point, I’m summarizing these three basic phases.

Anyone can start an idea because the beginning is fun. This is where you start out in your journey naive to the frustrations that certainly lay ahead. You have an idea for a best-seller, or you’re going to create an app that gets a million downloads, or whatever your idea might be. Unfortunately, ideas are a dime a dozen. In the following two stages, the rubber of your idea will meet the road. It’s the execution of this idea that must pass the gauntlet of the following phases.

The middle is what makes up the bulk of your ideation, testing, and product development process. This is where countless ideas are left abandoned on the workbench. Scott Belsky, author of the Messy Middle explains it this way: “In reality, the middle is extraordinarily volatile — a continuous sequence of ups and downs, flush with uncertainty and struggle.” This stage requires you to walk your delicate idea through the riggers of development. It’s where concept meets reality. In this vast stage, you figure out if anyone actually wants your new product. 

The messy middle is an emotional rollercoaster of a stage. One day you’ll have a family member tell you it’s the greatest concept they’ve ever heard of. And in the next moment, someone else will tell you how foolish you are to pursue such an endeavor.

If you make it through the middle, you reach the final ten percent of the home stretch. By this point, you’ll undoubtedly have some form to your product. You may be nearer the end, but you're not home-free. It’s this stage where you’ll find whether you have any gas in the tank. You’ve been through an emotional gauntlet… do you have the mental capacity, the physical strength, the emotional aptitude to walk this thing to the end?

The final ten percent can prove to be even more difficult than the previous ninety. By now the emotional lewer of the project has long faded and you’re relying solely on vision.

Starting small(er)

I’ve started and stopped a lot of things in my life. I’ve completed a few of those as well. For some of those projects I’ve abandoned they just weren’t worth the time and effort required. For others, I lacked the passion required. But for others, I simply got distracted.

So, at the beginning of the year, I made a commitment to follow through. It wasn’t going to involve anything great. I wanted to see if dedicated follow-through in one area of my life would spill over into others: follow-through as a husband, dad, and professional.

I chose something small because the goal wasn’t the actual thing itself, it was the follow-through or rather the journey in between concept to completion. Several things came to mind when I was coming up with my concept. Most of them were complex or difficult to complete.

So, I went smaller than I originally planned. I chose pull-ups – twenty of them, to be completed each day. Rain or shine, I committed to myself to do twenty pull-ups no matter where I was, or how I felt. 

The importance of follow-through

I am now three months into my personal experiment. Each morning, during the week, I walk out to my garage gym, set up my phone to film my twenty pull-ups, and do the task. I video them to hold myself accountable. I know that someone beyond myself (i.e. my wife) may ask me whether I completed the task for the day. My little video clip serves as my proof. 

To ensure it happens, this task is the first thing I do each day after my morning quiet time. I don’t do my pre-workout stretch or turn on the podcast I listen to during the rest of my workout until this task is completed.

How to ensure you follow-through

So, how do you make sure you do the thing you set out to do? There are probably 101 different steps and concepts someone might tell you. But I choose to keep it simple. After all, complexity is the enemy of completion. I have four steps I follow.

1. Make sure it aligns with your personal pillars.

I have four pillars that guide everything I do in life. If I’m going to do anything it needs to support each of them. 

If you don’t begin here, you could end up somewhere you don’t want to be. There’s no shame in abandoning it at the beginning if you realize it doesn’t align with your guiding principles. There’s a rule of thumb in air navigation known as the 1 in 60 rule. The rule explains that for every 1 degree a plane veers off its course, it misses its target destination by 1 mile for every 60 miles you fly. 

2. Develop constraints.

Constraints make sure you stay on track. This includes the how, what, and where of completion. I’ll elaborate on the when in a moment.

3. Don’t overcomplicate it.

We naturally tend to overcomplicate things. Rather than making things easier for ourselves, we add unneeded things that only make accomplishing the thing more difficult. This could be a self-preservation strategy to keep you from actually beginning in the first place. Maybe you want to start running. But before you do, you tell yourself you have to find the perfect running shoes before you will begin.

Instead of actually running, you spend hours researching the best pair of running shoes. When all along you could have actually been doing the thing you set out to do – running. If you want to start running, then start running. I'm not suggesting you run barefoot through the streets like the ancient Greeks, but don’t burden yourself with finding the best pair of shoes before you’ve run your first mile.

Allow yourself to get the early win and begin finding confidence. Don’t add unnecessary hurdles before you’ve even started.

4. Put benchmarks in place

You need to be able to measure our progress. Without benchmarks, you’ll soon wander into a state of undefined doing. You’ll lose sight of why you’re even doing the thing you’re working toward, motivation will fade, and before you know it, you’ll quit.

I’m sure you’ve heard that goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic.

So, let’s take a look at my little experiment and how it satisfies each of these. To begin with, I decided to do this as a way of practicing follow-through. Follow-through is important for every area of my life and therefore worth developing. 

My constraints are simple: 20 pull-ups, every day (completed in the morning before breakfast), for 12 months. As far as not overcomplicating it, I kept it as simple as possible. I thought about making it 50 pull-ups or running a certain number of miles each day.

But I want to remove as many barriers as possible from discouraging myself from completing the task each day. There have been plenty of things that have made it difficult to follow through: I’ve traveled, I’ve had the flu, but thankfully, I’ve been able to check off my 20 pull-ups. As far as benchmarks go, I measure it each day (completing my 20 pull-ups each day), and ultimately I’ll hit my goal if I reach Dec 31, 2022and have done it every day.

Going slower or faster (but choose)

There are two time constraints for completion: slow and fast. Or put it this way: methodical and expediency.

It brings to mind one of Aesop's most well-known fables, the Tortoise and the Hair. We all know the outcome: the tortoise wins the race because he goes slow and steady but keeps at it. But the hair, a much faster animal, loses because he decides to take a nap halfway through the race and is defeated during his afternoon slumber.

Of course, there are many things to be learned from the story: don’t underestimate your opponent, don’t assume your victory before it’s in hand, don’t sleep on the job – but there’s something else to be gleaned. Both animals completed the task of finishing the course, but at entirely different speeds. The tortoise was slow and methodical, but he got the job done and won the race because of it. Setting aside the hair’s loss, he exemplified another rate of completion: speed. In fact, his speed even allowed him to take a nap in the middle of his progress.

To complete a task, you need to choose between one of two rates of completion: slow or fast. If you choose to go a little slower you’re choosing a more intentional, methodical path to completion. You might think of a book that requires a great deal of thought and research. It’s not something you’ll be able to finish in a weekend.

And fast might entail testing out a new online product. You put up a landing page, direct some early traffic to it, and gauge the level of interest in it. Not that you’re going to stop at this point, but you get the idea out there quickly. Either of these two speeds will get you there. It just depends on your goal and personality. But a moderate speed is like a lukewarm bowl of porridge: after a couple of bites, it’s left alone, abandoned on the kitchen table. 

When I was designing shoes, we often had to come up with several designs at a time in short periods of time. The design process was often called “quick-n-dirty.” Completely opposed to the ideal of a young designer fresh out of college with thoughts of submitting beautiful designs he had spent all day as you might expect in a couture design house.

The concept was akin to what we call an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) in the start-up world. At first, it’s not about producing the most beautiful product. You just want to get something out there in order to get your reps in and start getting feedback whether it’s from internal testing or from early users.

Conclusion

I am three months into my follow-through experiment – the early stages of the messy middle. Do I have what it takes to see it through to completion? Stay with me to find out.