*Prologue
I LOVE AMBITIOUS PEOPLE. People who talk about their dreams, and the air seems to crackle around their words. People who remind me that the human spirit is truly unlimited, and the world outside my doorstep is blooming with possibility. I need these people in my life, especially when my circumstances seem to paint a different picture. Sometimes I even get to be one of them, encouraging others with the potential I see around me. But as inspiring as someone with creative vision may be, seeing new possibility and making it real is hard and lonely work.
I am comfortable with big visions. Big visions are perfect, and as far as I know, perfectly attainable. No one can smear the canvas that exists in my head. It is when I pull out my brush and begin mixing the paints that all the problems start happening. The big vision, as lovely as it will eventually be, has to be born like anything else. It starts out a primitive, unformed and frankly very bloody mess. It matures into an idea that is ready to take its first steps into the world, stumbling on pudgy, unfamiliar feet. In the beginning, it needs constant care and attention to develop into maturity.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough for one person with vision to nurture an idea and help it grow. Whether we’re working independently or with a team, we need the support of others so it can develop into something that can stand on its own. At the very least, we need people to understand it, to push back against it, to encourage us as we make it, to buy it, to use it, to tell others about it, and ultimately to help us make it better.
I’m writing this book from the perspective of someone who has spent over a decade helping people bring big, ambitious projects into the online world. Because of the collaborative, community-driven nature of my approach, I used to describe it as building a nation.
One of the problems with framing this work as “nation-building” was that these words make us biased toward the outcome — this new world being created. We focus on building the assets that will make the nation function and sustain itself. The air-tight business plan. The brand that people adore. The story behind it all. The well-designed website. The top-rated content. The friendly social media strategy. The innovative products. The mailing list with the clever incentive to sign up. All of these things, and more, can come together to make an impressive-looking nation.
But that’s not what a nation is. A nation is people. Building all of these things before we have the people is like building sidewalks before we see where the people actually walk — we end up with a lot of unused sidewalks, and a lot of muddy paths criss-crossing to bypass them.
There is a beautiful marketplace in the city I used to live in called Waterside. It is, as you would expect, right on the river, and it’s full of light and art and beauty. It is also basically a ghost town. No one goes there.
How do we avoid our big visions becoming ghost towns? How do we avoid our work getting bypassed for the muddy path?
We need to take our focus away from what the big vision looks like and put our focus instead on the people who that big vision is for. Instead of spending our time alone in a room, creating what we want to make by ourselves (or with our team, for that matter), we need to bring our big vision down to where the people are, and start collaborating with them to create one small thing after another, eventually adding up to something big.
Of course, when we step back after a while of doing this, we will see that the big vision we have created often looks nothing like what was in our heads to begin with. It is far, far better. The process of collaborative creation led us to new and wonderful discoveries and took us down paths that were previously invisible to us. We could never have conceived it in the beginning, because there was so much we couldn’t have known until we began putting the work out into the world.
This isn’t easy, of course. It means changing the way we think about our creative process and broadening our definition of “collaborator” to include the people we’re creating for. It means admitting, in public, that we don’t know things. A lot of things. It requires a willingness to say, “Oh hey, you know that thing I said I was doing last week? Well, I discovered this new thing this week, and now it’s going in a totally different direction.” And it requires an openness to receiving feedback while we’re still in the middle of making something, and honestly evaluating that feedback while not losing the clarity of our vision.
But it’s worth it. Not only will we have made something better than we dreamed, but we won’t have to worry about whether our work can sustain itself, financially or otherwise. We’ve already proven that it can, over and over and over, with small endeavors that were allowed to go out into the world and build their muscles, proving their worth and sustainability over time. And we never have to worry about people not using the sidewalks — because the people who will be using them are a crucial part of the process.
Building small to build big is a concept you will see repeated often throughout this book. If you find yourself with limited resources, this should be a relief to you — those limits can actually become a gift. If you find yourself struggling or in the midst of failure…
- You learn nothing from your successes except to think too much of yourself. It is from failure that all growth comes, provided you can recognize it, admit it, learn from it, rise above it, and then try again.
- —Dee Hock
Every major leap forward in my life has happened after a truly painful experience. Having to put groceries on a credit card goaded me into starting my first business over a decade ago. The pain of an overloaded client schedule and the loneliness of working alone pushed me to build a team, even though I had no confidence in my leadership skills. The agonizing defeat of a business failure that led to me laying off dear friends and collaborators pushed me to hone in on what I really wanted to do with my work and life. The jarring experience of getting laid off myself forced me to ship the first version of this book in 6 weeks, living in a very practical way the things I’m sharing in this book.
The many bumps and bruises on that path of self-discovery eventually led me to where I am now, leading strategy for our team at &yet, a design and software consultancy that works with compassionate companies on a wide range of projects, from developing realtime communications software to designing high impact conference experiences.
I believe in the creative power of setbacks, frustration, and limits. It may be human nature to desire comfort and safety, but in the end, it’s the rug that’s yanked out from under us that often does the trick of getting us moving.
If the rug has been yanked out from under you, or if the circumstances in your life threaten to hold you back from your big vision, this book is especially for you. I’ve been up on the mountain top with plenty of money, comfort, and ease, and also down in the valley with none of it. No matter where you are now, any less-than-ideal circumstances can become the constraints that give urgency and focus to your big vision.
I am a strategy person. (I even have a strategy for eating my toast in the morning, butter-side down so I can taste it.) I like strategies that are simple enough that one person can do them, and scalable enough that entire organizations can build the principles into their processes. I like strategies that are self-perpetuating, where each part feeds the other parts, so if you are working on one thing, you are working on everything. And I like strategies that honor people and do not seek to manipulate or exploit relationships. These are the type of strategies I am giving to you.
I hope the tools in this book will help you see a clear path forward to not only creating your dream as a contribution to others, but to building a life that is truer, more meaningful, and more full of joy, passion and creative fulfillment than you can currently envision.
May today be the beginning of new possibility for you.