Regret Minimization Framework

Ask yourself: When you are old, would you regret not having it done or finished? Thats how Jeff Bezos decided to quit his job and start Amazon. Surely it also motivated him to keep going in dry times, when motivation was low. Humans regret not having done or not having given their best shot at something. Visualizing yourself in your 80ies full of regret not having at least tried, is scary.

Pick the right project

Don’t set yourself up to a painful grind. Take up a project, which is not too hard, nor too easy. And don’t jump into the first idea, which excites you. It might turn out to be a ‘Schnapsidee’ (an idea, so stupid you might have been drunk when you had it). Sleep over it, wait a few days, think about it without getting too much into it. If it still excites you, it might be something worth following up.

Expect failure, but keep it small

Something will break. However you can design your fails to keep them small and learn from them. Small failures will not drag you down so much and won’t actually feel like one. If you design it thoughtfully into your process, its more like a test to validate (or invalidate) your assumptions through some feedback mechanism. Nobody can exactly predict what will happen. There are always risks involved. Taking small steps, which you can correct easily, won’t blow up your motivation or even the whole project.

See it as an experiment

If its something new, you won’t have that much experience. Like, if you write a non-fiction book the first time. Little experience will let you make many mistakes (which will look silly later, when you got more experience). Similar like the last paragraph, see everything in the project as an experiment to keep the emotions of failure within bounds.

Celebrate small wins

After many failed attempts a small win will look gigantic and motivate the hell out of you. Small wins are a validation of your assumptions and motivate to keep working in a certain direction.

Envision the success, have the goal in mind

This is a very powerful method, which helped me a lot. Imagine you have achieved it already! Imagine you are the guy, who made it. That after lots of hard work, you have won the game. Our brain works excellent with images and seeing yourself in your inner eye as a success is surprisingly motivating. Pick some role models, who write publicly about their success in the same field you are trying to get a foot into. Then follow them, read some older posts, study what they did to succeed and how they kept motiviated. You might grab some useful tips & tricks as well. This will help you seeing yourself in the same achieved position in a great detail. It’s easier to believe yourself, if you know its possible and others have done it.

Make a plan and keep it updated

With a plan if you loose motivation and don’t know what to do, check your next step and start working. A plan helps to structure the project. You are forced to think in small steps. You will have many question marks and your plan would be really bad in the beginning. But that doesn’t matter, because you will update it later and stay on course. Just don’t follow blindly a plan you made at day 1 without using the knowledge you gained at day 100. Equally bad and on the other side of the spectrum is to have no plan at all. This makes you directionless, which is demotivating. It makes it less serious.

Write down your plans and goals

On paper and yes with a real pen. Writing is a good exercise and commits you more to the project than just keeping everything in your mind. The goals can be written on a normal A4 sheet of paper. Setup a big whiteboard, get whiteboard markers and sticky notes to draft your plan in smaller steps. Sticky notes are super useful to visualise a path, you can remove and rearrange them anytime and very quickly on the whiteboard (magnets are also awesome to pin down papers you sketched with details). With the whiteboard marker you can add comments and split up the whiteboard into tables, depending how your project can be structured (such as ‘development’, ‘marketing’, ‘legal’, etc). There are also some techniques, such as Kanban to stay organized. The whole process of visualizing everything will give you more confidence and structure.

Make it a habit

It’s too easy to just stop working on your goals. Often there is nobody pushing us to keep going, we have to push ourselves intrinsically. Every day. Especially in the beginning. Later, when you are a good way down the road, motivation will also come from people, who love what you do and want to see more. Make it easier for yourself and try to get into a habit like start working on your project at a specific time. If its a side-project and you are employed, schedule to start working at 6PM and on weekends for example. Do this every day, so you get accustomed to it. If you want to get fit, schedule a small (really small) workout every day and grow it later. If you are in the habit to put hours of work into your goal at a specific time, you need less willpower to get started.

Be patient

Some things take time, don’t rush it unnecessarily. You should still move fast to get traction, but don’t save time in the wrong place. For example: It’s better to test and polish your software a few more weeks, so it works well and doesn’t have stupid bugs (not to be confused with adding features! Don’t keep adding every feature you might think is useful). If you rush it in the wrong situations, you just engineer your own demotivating traps.

Take care of yourself

Had ever a few days with little sleep, no fitness and unhealthy food? How did you feel? Not very motivated to make your brain crunching at your problems most probably. If are working so many hours that it affects your sleep, you are not doing yourself a favour. Same applies, if you have some bad habits of not getting your hands off of your smartphone, computer or tablet in bed. Get as many hours of sleep as you need. Eat good food and do some sports in between. Doesn’t mean you have to start jogging 5km dialy or joing the gym. It’s enough to get yourself sweating a couple of hours a week.