Category: Troubleshooting


Simple is Good

Filed Under: Troubleshooting by apingel — View Comments
June 8, 2010

Robert Fulghum has a story about a church board meeting where they needed to figure out how to

    a) Fill in the potholes on the entrance side of the church driveway
    b) Slow down drivers on the exit side of the driveway to keep the children safe
    c) Do all that without too much expense.

The best proposal? Leave the potholes on the entrance side. Dig new potholes on the exit side. Seal them all up to prevent further deterioration. One of the church members volunteered to do it for free.

But that was too simple. Instead the board debated for hours and hours about paving and building speed bumps and posting signs and how to fund it and when to do it and who to hire… and it never did get done.

I’m not quite sure where it comes from, this urge to “complify” things. Maybe Hollywood, with its intricate strategies and dramatic unveilings. Maybe too many big corporations, with their 5-year plans and elegantly-worded mission statements. Maybe it’s still a remnant of aristocratic traditions from royal courts, sneaking its way in after more than two centuries of anti-nobility attitudes.

But but I think most often we reject solutions that are simple, elegant, and effective, in favor of “solutions” that are complex, difficult, and risky…..so that we can justify saying “I can’t do it, it’s too risky.” It’s a sneaky way of avoiding what you fear without ever having to say “I quit” out loud.

Simple solutions are often very effective. You should give them a try sometime.

Many thanks to DM at Heart To Heart for posting this story.

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How to Brainstorm – tips

Filed Under: Troubleshooting by apingel — View Comments
May 13, 2010

I’m really not sure if I’m the best one to be writing this post, because brainstorming comes really naturally to me. I love coming up with new ideas, and I love playing around with existing ideas to come up with new combinations. Ideas are just pure awesomeness to me.

So I don’t know if I can tell you how to brainstorm. But it’s an important thing for an entrepreneur to know, so I’ll see what I can do.

Define the Problem

This step isn’t strictly necessary, but it will make your brainstorming a lot more effective. What, specifically, are you brainstorming? I prefer to write at the top of my record (see below) what it is that we’re looking for, eg “Ways to make money from this skill” or “What else would you like to see on this site?”

Don’t Judge

A lot of the ideas you come up with will be terrible. A larger percentage of them will be OK, but not stellar.

There is no way around that.

You cannot brainstorm if you are intent on only having good ideas. It cannot happen.

It’s a little like cleaning out your garden hose in the spring. There’s fresh clean water in the tap, but the only way to get it coming out the hose is to blow out all of the air and the dirty water.

So it’s important to just write down every idea you have, even the ones that are obviously of no use. (Brainstorming ways for my cousin to monetize herself, I wrote down “give people hugs”.) If you’re analyzing enough to determine that it’s a bad idea, you’re judging too much.

And related to that…

Go for Volume

I read an article several years ago about an art teacher who decided to try an experiment. One of her pottery classes was told that they only had to turn in one pot, and they would be graded on the quality of that pot. The other class was told that they would be graded on how many pots they produced; quality was not a factor at all. So class 1 spent all semester working on one pot, to make it as good as possible. Class 2 spent all semester making pot after pot after pot.

The result? Class 1 made some pretty good pots. But class 2 made better ones. It turns out that quality is better than quantity, but… quantity selected for quality trumps both of them.

Later in the planning process, you’ll select for quality. For now, just aim to get lots of ideas. Seth Godin recommends trying for 111.

Get a record

I’ve done this before, and it feels awful: you get excited about brainstorming, and you get tons of good ideas, but you don’t write them down. The next morning, you can only remember 4 ideas, and two of them are lousy ones.

How you choose to get a record is up to you. Since one of my brainstorming team is 1000 miles away, we do our brainstorming online; everyone has to type their comments anyway, and the transcript of the conversation is our record. Using a wiki or Google Wave means you can sort your comments as you go, so that you have an organized hierarchical record of all your ideas.

Less cutting edge but just as effective is an audio recorder. You may have one of these built into your phone; otherwise they’re not terribly expensive.

At the stone-age level (but in some ways better than the audio recorder) is to have someone writing everything down on a whiteboard, overhead, or piece of paper. This method allows everyone to see what’s going on, to review what’s been said so far, and you can organize your ideas as you go with mind mapping, headers, or whatever seems best to you.

Next Step

What the actual next step is depends on what you were brainstorming for. But in most cases, you’ll want to look down the list, and discuss which idea(s) are worth keeping. In some cases you’re only looking for 1-3 ideas; the rest will be discarded. In other cases (like deciding how to monetize yourself) you’ll pick 1-3 to implement right now, and keep the rest of the list for later.

Resources For Further Reading
Step-by-step guide to brainstorming

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Setting Goals: the Sweet Spot

Filed Under: Personal Development, Time Management, Troubleshooting by apingel — View Comments
April 10, 2010

In baseball, a batter has two opposing factors to consider: the farther out on the bat they hit the ball, the farther the ball has potential to go. But the further in they hit the ball, the easier it is to swing hard. Somewhere about 4/5 of the way out the bat, there’s a “sweet spot” that perfectly balances the two factors to maximize the distance the ball can go.

In weight training, pushing too hard will increase injuries and make you take time off your strength workouts. But pushing too little means you’re not working as hard as you could be, and you don’t gain muscle. There’s a sweet spot of weight that’s just the right amount to maximize your buildup.

In yoga, stretching too far will cause your muscles to rebel and cramp, or tear. Not stretching far enough means that you don’t progress in your capability. There’s a sweet spot that’s just the right amount of stress and stretch.

Goal-setting is in a similar bind: set goals that are too high, and you’ll face discouragement. You are excited about the dream, but you don’t see any way to get there from here, and the steps you can see feel overwhelming. You get a sick feeling in your stomach, and turn on Seinfeld re-runs instead. Or you do try to reach your goals, and get burned out and sick.

But set goals that are too low, and you’ll be equally discouraged. The idea doesn’t excite you, and even if you finish it you won’t feel that you’ve accomplished anything. Finishing that goal doesn’t encourage you to go on to the next, and you turn on Seinfeld re-runs.

Now in baseball, the sweet spot is a simple matter of calculation. A physicist can calculate available torque, tensile strength of the bat, mass of the bat and ball, etc, and tell you where the sweet spot is.

In yoga and weight training, not so much. The only way to figure it out is to do a bunch of yoga or weight training until you start to get a feel for the Goldilocks “just right” feeling.

Sadly, goal-setting is more like yoga than like baseball. I can’t tell you exactly how much work is too much; it depends on what else you’ve got going this week, and how hard any given task is for you, and whether you like to perfect your work or just get to good-enough. Add in the fact that you may be challenged and excited by a level of work that would overwhelm me, and the situation’s more or less hopeless for quantitative calculation.

But it doesn’t mean that you can’t find the sweet spot, or that it’s not worth trying. I’ve reached the point where I can almost always make a plan for the week that will make me feel proud of my accomplishments, and move me forward on my projects, while being easily accomplishable (in the face of unexpected developments, maybe only barely accomplishable). And that’s a great place to be: I make progress on my goals, week after week, while never getting burned out or beat up by my workload.

If you’re not sure, I would start some sort of journal or log. After each week, record what you planned to do, what you actually got done, and how you feel about it — burned out? Pleased? Overwhelmed? Excited? As you keep an eye on what you’re doing and how you feel about it, you’ll get a feel for where your sweet spot lies.

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