Amy Hoy is creeping up my list of people I respect. She has incredible insight into building web apps, shipping products, and being successful at things in general. All of these things are values shared by the New Method community. So when Amy talks about something, I tend to listen.
This time she discusses the lie of winning big, failing big, how we trick ourselves into caring about the wrong things, and the power of habits among other things. This time though, she does it with a video, which shows a little of her personality. You can hear the drive in her voice. It's cool.
But I want to push back on Amy just a little. She talks a lot about "big fails" really just being a series of small failures. She's not wrong, but that could lead you to think that doing the little things, staying disciplined in the small day-to-day grind, will help you avoid failing on a major scale. The truth is, while discipline is vital, you need more than that. You need to make good decisions, not every time, but more good ones than bad ones.
I've seen very hard working, disciplined, highly-habited people fail because they simply made poor decisions. Trying to meet the needs of too many people too soon, lacking product focus, not researching/knowing their customers, shipping too early or not shipping early enough...these are decisions that could derail the most disciplined person.
Of course, that's a nitpick. I imagine she'd agree, but this video is simply about building habits that reduce the micro-fails through the life of a project and not about making decisions, necessarily. Anyway, worth a watch.
Curing the Lie of the Big Win (and the Big Fail)
The video is about 12 minutes long, so save this one for later if you don't have time right now.
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