Lesson #2: Design Your Destination

We're going to hop right into your second lesson... in just a second. Bear with me.

Let's pause for a moment, and talk about the past.

And passion. And ghosts.

You've got a folder on your hard drive full of dead, half-finished projects you tried to forge in the fire of PASSION. Or maybe your Project Graveyard is in a real life paper notebook. Or maybe the ghosts live only in your heart.

The key thing is… they're dead, and they're haunting you.

(It's that Zeigarnik Effect thing again.)

Those projects are dead — they're haunting you because you killed them.

Not on purpose, of course, but they're dead by your hand nevertheless. It was an accident. You only did what came naturally… you know, that whole "trying all roads from the beginning and ending up who the fuck knows where" thing we talked about in lesson 1.

The best way to implement a grand plan is to start with small pieces you can actually finish and ship (aka Ship in Six). The worst way is to try to do it all at once. That way leads to madness, or Mr Procrastinator in the Library with the Infinite To-Do List.

So leave your bad habits where they belong: the past. Resolve to start fresh, today. Make this project different. Let Ship in Six work its magic for you.

How can you guarantee your project will live?

Focus on your reader, your customer, your user so tightly that everything else falls away.

When you outline:

• Does this reader require all this background information, all these introductory chapters? Or would they rather jump straight into solving their very specific problem?
• Does this student care if it's 3 hours of video, or 10? Will they even sit and watch 10 hours? Would one hour of video and a specific lesson plan get them a better result, faster?

When you design:

• Does this beginner user need all these fancy power user features? To start with?
• Does this power user need the hand-holding of a setup wizard? Or can enough of them figure it out, for now, that you can ship and get a few users off the bat?
• Does this technical type require the prettiest, pixel perfect graphics? Or is it a nice plus that can come later?
• Or… does this user require a pleasing and non-stressful experience for this one specific task, more than they require any number of other features?
• Or… could this user be served by a shell script, a spreadsheet, a phone call, a paper workbook…?

When you're working on a project for yourself:

• What do you really need?
• How do you usually work (or cook, or get around, or approach finding a new job, or live in your house)?
• How much and how fast can you realistically do, or change?
• Where/how have you fallen down before and how can you make it easier to succeed?

There's no such thing as one-size-fits-all.

Different people have different needs, desires, pains, goals, budgets, foibles, abilities and tolerances. No matter how "basic" the thing in question is. Really!

Try this example on for size…

What's more basic than baking a cake?

Everybody's got a kitchen with an oven, right?

Well, no, as it turns out. Many people in India like cakes and lack ovens. What do they have? Gas burners, and pressure cooker pots. So an observant & thoughtful someone came up with a way to bake cakes in a pressure cooker. Now it's A Thing.

Pressure cooker cakes… who knew? Easy: The guy or gal who paid attention and asked the right questions.

To continue our kitchen parable — let's assume, ok, that everybody who matters to you has a kitchen:

• Who are they?
• What do they need in that kitchen?
• Why are they looking to build or remodel a kitchen?

Some people use their kitchen to cook 3 meals every day, fresh and never frozen. Some people use their kitchen to can, jar, and bake. Some use their kitchen to cook once a month and freeze 30 days of meals. Some people use their kitchen just to entertain.

Some people are tall, some people are short, some people are in wheelchairs or can't stand for long periods of time.

Some people don't cook at all, but install a fancy kitchen as real estate bait to sell their house.

Even when it comes to such a basic human behavior as applying heat to food and eating it, there's infinite complexity and lots of opposing needs and use cases.

You can't possibly serve them all with one product.

Repeat:

You can't possibly serve everyone with the same product.

That's why it's absolutely critical to ask the right questions and get nice & crispy with your answers! And to start small.

The best way to get big is to start small.

And the best way to start small is to focus tightly on your reader, your customer, your user.

For this lesson's challenge, you'll apply these questions to aaaaall those notes you took in Challenge #1. You're gonna tighten up your project so you can actually get 'er done!

Keep your eyes on your inbox… your challenge will show up later today (to give you time to digest this lesson!). :)

Amy

PS: Haven't done #1 yet? Now's a good time. Don't feel guilty, just do the work. It's early days yet — don't fall off the wagon before it's even started to roll!

Did you get this lesson from a friend?

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Here's what comes next

• WEEK 1 — Start at the End, Design Your Destination,
• WEEK 2 — Cut Without Remorse, Break It Into Bites
• WEEK 3 — How Do You Stay Motivated?, Finish Something Microscopic
• WEEK 4 — The Myth of the Big Win, Creating the Little Win Habit
• WEEK 5 — The Life Changing Magic of Shipping 1 & 2
• WEEK 6 — Myth of the Big Launch, The Fear of Shipping
• BONUS WEEK 7 — You Shipped! Now what?