Co. Design: Bre Pettis knows a thing or two about getting things done rather than getting them perfect: He's the founder of Makerbot, a company that turns out cheap rapid prototyping machines. No one would say they've been perfectly realized, but a key to Makerbot's success is that it has evolved in the real world, rather than foundering as just another great idea.
With that in mind, Pettis and collaborator Kio Stark gave themselves exactly 20 minutes to create a manifesto encapsulating everything they knew about bring a creative vision to life. They called it The Done Manifesto.
7 comments:
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THIS. Is such a great article. Instead of pretending to create foreign ideas for furthering our productivity- it brings us back to the basics: we JUST HAVE to get it done! It's as simple as that. And often times the fear of imperfections prevents us from just doing the work and seeing where it takes us-- we must avoid this at all costs. The most valuable piece of information I took from this would be-- just because you're finished a project, you do not have the license to do nothing. In fact the whole point of finishing is to get more done! I often times find myself encountering this issue.. and will most certainly keep this in mind at the end of my projects/ the beginning of new ones surfacing with finals week on the horizon!
Some of these rules are really great to understand and implement. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in what we are doing, that we don't realize the basics. One trend in this article is that people are so attached and focused on their product. It is okay to make mistakes, it is okay if it doesn't work and it's okay to find humor in what you're doing. I find that sometimes I feel like the odd one out if I have these philosophies, but I think they are important if you want to be happy. Stressing out about every detail will just leave you stressed.
This article does a great job outlining the correct sort of mindset when approaching projects. It is true that focusing on perfection is disabling and it's great that this article stresses just diving into the work and hammering it out because by doing that the work can develop at a progressive pace. I agree with Ariel that many people become attached to projects and this prevents them from moving forward. This is the case for so many projects, and oftentimes in hindsight people realize that too much energy was put forward trying to be perfect when in actuality just plunging forward would have been the most productive solution.
I really liked this poster. The most interesting steps to me were numbers 5 and 6: Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done. Obviously this poster is an efficiency over quality method though. Its interesting that they used a rubix cube as their example though because technically- unless the rubix cube is perfect, it isn't done. And who cares if you have 1 million unfinished rubix cubes by the end of a week.
I think there are some really great ideas here, but not all of them are ones we can adopt all the time. Like the thought about when a job isn't getting done you should give up on it. Giving up is rarely an answer our business can allow. And failure can not count as done in many things. Often failure is the beginning of something new, like getting to success. But there are also some really great ideas in here that we can use all the time. Things like laughing at perfection and getting things done so you can do more things, both of these ideas are really good things for all of us to keep in mind.
The ideas behind this infographic are good ones, but I'm not a huge fan of the poster itself. I looked at the pictures before reading their explanations, and it made absolutely no sense to me, other than the fact that I was looking at a rubik's cube over and over again. The explanations made everything much clearer, but I think a large part of anything infographic means that it should be able to make sense without necessarily having to read anything, aside from some labels or titles. The idea was great, I just was not a fan of its implementation. Also, "Done is the engine of more," seems incredibly vague to me.
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