Pro Developer - Throwing Money Out the Window

Incremental successes

Building credibility is a similar approach. You've probably been spending all your time trying to do the job you were hired to do, right? Silly you. That needs to be dealt with, of course, but your priorities are all wrong if you truly want to change the world. Credibility is an incremental affair. You don't gain it by having one huge success. Furthermore, that's too risky. One huge success could easily turn into one huge failure. Instead of rolling the dice on all or nothing at all, we instead simply leave a trail of small successes, so frequent and consistent that there can be little doubt that betting on your opinions is a sure thing.

Even if the project you're working on now is scheduled for imminent failure, you can still get mileage out of it. The first step is shifting your thinking to a very fine granularity. Almost any task can be broken down into a sequence of small, consecutive actions. Let's say that you wanted to bench press 300 pounds, and you had a body that was capable of doing so. Here's two different descriptions of accomplishing that task.

Approach one:

Took a deep breath and lifted the weights.

Approach two:

  1. Set the alarm clock
  2. Went to bed at reasonable hour
  3. Got up on time
  4. Took a shower
  5. Dressed in appropriate clothes
  6. Walked to weight room
  7. Set machine for 300 pound bench press
  8. Reclined on the bench
  9. Grabbed the weight bar
  10. Took a deep breath
  11. Focused
  12. Invoked upper body muscles
  13. Raised weights to full arm extension
  14. Took deep breath
  15. Lowered weights to resting position
  16. Rose from the bench to conclude exercise

Yes, I know, it seems kind of silly to go to all that detail when all you did was lay down and just punch up the weights. However, the first approach shows only that you succeeded in one effort. In the second approach, you have 16 consecutive successes on operations that each could have failed or encountered problems. Now who would you rather put your trust in, the guy who did one thing right, or the guy who did 16 things in a row right? This is how you must approach every job you do. From the smallest coding task to the largest documentation effort, there are a host of things that you have to do right to succeed. Take the time to write them down so that you can always refer to your notes instead of having to recount your successes from memory.

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Christopher Duncan Christopher Duncan is President of Show Programming of Atlanta, Inc. and author of both the monthly syndicated column Pro Developer and the recent book for Apress, The Career Programmer: Guerilla T...

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