Small Wins

Going to an Ivy League school, you're trained to imagine that a successful professional career involves tackling big ideas and changing the world in grandiose style. In my four years of professional life, however, I've come to realize that the big wins that make headlines are often not obtained through sheer force of will and intellectual brilliance. Instead, high-level success is the emergent property of low level discipline and tactics. In this time, I've come to realize that tactics is a necessary, although not sufficient, component of successful strategy. This may seem obvious, but the American educational system often downplays the real work required to manifest actual change. Inside the academy, people spend their time primarily talking about what to change, but spend very little time thinking about how to effect that change. Policy is a much more acceptable research topic than politics.

As a result, I didn't have much operational experience going into my first job. When I showed up, I was surprised at the sheer volume of tracking, task management, and project management that I was asked to do. I saw this as a gross inefficiency and spent many hours trying to avoid it rather than excel at it. In particular, I think that I had an intuition that this level of process was an indication that the organizational structure wasn't correct - with a better structure, wouldn't most of this go away?

Having watched many, many projects succeed and fail, however, I can safely say that having a baseline level of operational ability is a necessary, although not sufficient, prerequisite for success. While small teams (<5) can thrive without structure, as the size of a group grows, the more important it is to have a de facto project manager.

I think that this point, that small wins combine and compound to create big wins, has one other interesting result, which is that the importance of a task is not always directly related its intellectual difficulty. Indeed, task management is often not the hardest thing despite the fact that at times it is the most important. Taken further, I think that this also reflects an interesting truth about founding businesses or building successful products: the best product or company is often not conventionally hard - indeed, with everything equal, an easier product is probably a more valuable product to build than one that is difficult. Sometimes just doing something, rather than thinking about that thing, is the best way to create something that lasts.