#1 Career + Excellence: Non-linear Path of Hard Things
Many great things do not see the light of the day, it would be much better if they would. Let's breakdown what that path looks like and how to drive past the common pitfalls.
Path from 1 to 100 is never linear.
More like 1 --> 25 --> 17 --> 20 --> 60 --> 40 --> 70 and so on.
Take an example: You have a great idea that should move your KPI significantly.
And, you go on to the path --
Data analysis to figure out if that really makes sense (finding important table names/sources, signal logic and data reliability prove to be a challenge)
Discussions with stakeholders (engg team, product, leadership) for alignment (may take more effort than you thought)
You build first model (that might suck) and results don’t make sense
Identify some silly bugs (maybe during a shower) and you’re are back on track. Motivated to make big progress
Meanwhile there is a big escalation, that takes your focus (calendar gets disrupted, you slowly get that in order while your mind is still on that idea)
You try find extra hours (sometimes after dinner, during lunch, before kids wake up) to make progress on your brain child
* While working on this, hours zoom by, it is net energy additive (because you find your zone)
You get the point of the path.
Now, long story short, two possible outcomes:
The product/feature ships, huge success and you feel highly satisfied.
The project gets disrupted/deprioritized and it goes no where.
However, there is a silver lining:
You feel alive as you could find a reason to jump out of bed in the morning
Learning is durable, and your true passion for the “thing” made genuine new connections with people
Inside, you know you added value
With more experience, one learns to embrace non-linearity. In fact, navigating non-linearity is a superpower and you can harness with each opportunity (small or big).
Go build great things!