Personally Managed Success Techniques

Personally Managed Success Techniques -- ThinkingOutLoud DonaldNoyes 200605

--- Used for PersonallyOriginatingProject:

This is one way to start:

Have an Idea
Think about it, mentally picture that Idea coming together, from directions and sources you now may not know about.
Try ThinkingOutLoud -- Write some of the ideas down on paper, in a journal, a PersonalInformationManager, some 3by5 cards, the back of an envelope, a napkin, you name it. basically anywhere , if you are brave or foolish enough, you might even (after you have developed a fuzzy idea of what you want to do) publish it on a WebPage, Wiki, or discuss it in a forum with someone who shares or values what it is you are about.
CapturedIdea -- When you get something out of your mind (which I call your PersonalIdeaSpace) and onto or into some other media, you have a CapturedIdea?. You have spelled it out, made it into a story, your own IdeaClaim?.
LetIdeasPercolate, Allow your mind and your awareness to wander, searching for connections, reinforcements, enabling ideas or mechanisms from any and everywhere.
Start making a plan, (for a programming project) what language? what version? the 3 to 5 year old you have on your desktop, or perhaps the LatestAndGreatest (and most expensive) just hitting the Software marketplace? Spell it out, Write it down. Check it out. See what others say about it, ease of use, helps, wizards, etc. Then ask yourself, can you use it, do you know enough to dive right in, or should you invest in a course or book or two? Perhaps you know someone who already uses it. Ask, investigate, and learn.
Always start with the First Step.
- On a rerun of an old Tv series (Gunsmoke), one of the characters (a retired minister) who was now free to do what he could never do before, having been a prisoner of those who run things, handcuffed by protocols, procedures, and politics, decided to go West and carry the Gospel to Native Americans. He had an idea, he had limited means, and he began the fulfillment of his desires with the "first step" - get some lumber and take it to the place where he would build his church. He met opposition in the town folk who didn't agree that the minister was pursuing a proper course and refused to allow him to buy the lumber. With the help of Festus (Marshall Dillon's deputy) he was able finally to get the lumber, and with wagon and team he travelled to the site he had chosen. He then said to the Festus, "Now the first step is to build the church" Festus was puzzled, because according to his way of thinking this was the "second step". But to the minister, each new thing was a "first step", he did not see it as another step.
This is the flow in SuccessOrientedProgramming. As you claim your success, form in your own mind what you see as the "first step" in what should be done, then Do it, Succeed, ClaimSuccess, repeating until you see nothing more to do.
And as the minister was fortunate enough to get a little help from a friend, you to might find your friends to be door openers and helpers.
Not every "first step" will lead to success, and if it does not, reform, recollect, rethink, and start again with the first step you come up with. Keep trying this first step again until you succeed, claim success and move on.
If as it has been want to happen, you find yourself driven back a few steps, don't give up, there is always a "first step" from where you are, to where you want to be. Pursue it. Trite but true "the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step".

Made less trite now, every step in the thousand mile journey is the first step... even when it's the last one. ThankYou. -- WilliamUnderwood

Not so Trite, Not so Common

From YouAndYourResearch by RichardWesleyHamming:

You need a vision of who you are and where your field is going. A suitable parable is that of the drunken sailor. He staggers one way and then the other with independent, random steps. In n steps he will be, on the average, about 3n steps away from where he started. but if there is a pretty girl in one direction he will get a distance proportional to n. The difference, over a life time of choices, between 3n and n is very large and represents the difference between having no vision and having a vision. The particular vision you have is less important than just having one - there are many paths to success. Therefore, it is wise to have a vision of what you may become, of where you want to go, as well as how to get there. No vision, not much chance of doing great work; with a vision you have a good chance.
Another obvious trait of great people is that they do their work in such a fashion that others can build on top of it. Newton said, "If I had seen farther than others it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." Too many people seem to not want others to build on top of their work but rather they want to hoard it to themselves. Don't do things in such a fashion that next time it must be repeated by you, or by others, but rather in a fashion that represents a significant step forward.

To read a full transcription of the presentation at the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar, 7 March 1986 , see: http://math.ucsd.edu/~fan/reading/hamming.html

Here I will place a piece about how I am now here, still, after years on this wiki, as optimistic and forward looking as ever and believing that Success can be an Orientation, can employ methods, and is not just luck. I will show the wisdom of employing "first step" as a strategy and the importance of:

knowing where you are
knowing where you want to be
identifying and publicizing the success achieved when achieved
naming and preserving for reuse innovations developed in achieving that success.
set focus and effort when successful on the first step toward reaching your identified goal.

-- DonaldNoyes

Starting points and Stepping Stones

The vague idea is the starting point, the project is formed from what you want to do with the idea and where you want to go with it. Experimentation is the One stepping, where a retracement is made in the case of error, and where the trial results in a success, the establishment of a new starting point, based on the success stepping to the current position. The success is claimed, and a new first step toward the goal can be formulated and attempted.

Failed steps are not failures, they are the discoveries of steps which do not lead to success. The orientation and emphasis must always be on ItWorks (which is one of the measures of success) and not on what you tried that didn't work. Successes are claimed, and the claim is supported by testing the foundations on which one has come to stand, before commencing on toward the next starting point. (one does not claim total success, only that of the incremental achievement.)

-- DonaldNoyes

Success Rate

Serious questions: What's your success rate with this system, Donald? Honestly, how often do you apply it every day?

I am using it as I write this, since communication is vital in this newly formulated approach which outlines techniques which can be, and have been applied to what I term as "PersonallyOriginatingProjects". I have experience in working on large, local, national and international projects for hire and have found that systems and techniques employed in those projects are seldom based on personally controlled and managed steps.

The techniques outlined here I am applying to a project I started in February 2004, that of creating a Program (actually a series of programs) for enhancing KnowledgeProliferation using a structure I have chosen to call IdeaSpaces. So far the success rate for a total and finally completed personal project is zero! But for initiation of a mechanism, a preliminary plan and the completion of several of the FirstSteps the success rate is 100%. At least 20 versions of the program have been completed, but a version I can release publicly has not matured. Many personally useful features have been developed, but more are needed to make it viable for a user who is not familiar with what it does. Since it involves the collections of many years and eventually many users, there are integration issues I still have to solve. Being a SoloProgramming project, it has taken over two years to get to a point where the light at the end of the tunnel is visible. I am now targeting the end of 2006 or at the latest, early 2007 to make a targeted release. First to my associates, then to those expressing interest in testing and building with it. -- DonaldNoyes 20060513

As to successes in communicating the underlying concept of IdeaSpaces to others, I have but limited feedback, there does seem to be interest, but it has been a mixed result. From what feedback I have received, I have managed to confuse more people than I have enlightened. I was trying to use a concept (which I have now discarded) called ThinkingOutLoud. It is probably useful, but I cannot claim success in its use thus far. It depended on people being able to think about a subject as though they were of one mind. My use of it seemed only to have succeeded in responses that summarized to "I do not understand, but here is a question for you to answer". It was meant to be a multi-person thinking process, not Q&A.

The main test for PersonallyManagedSuccessTechniques is still ItWorks, (and an attendant "I know why it does"). One of the values of FirstStepping is that each step, each action, each implementation is well defined. If ItWorks, you know why. You celebrate the previous success and move on working to make the present iteration successful. While some steps result in failure, you have a continued emphasis is on making each iteration a success. From failures you learn what doesn't work, and also learn why it doesn't. Even failures can be viewed and claimed as successes of discovery.

Yes, I do use, modify, add, discard and change my thinking about these techniques, every day.

-- DonaldNoyes 20060516

CategorySuccess