Method Initiative (Round 4) – Exercise 6: 10 People Closer to Your Field
The purpose of Exercise 6 of Method Initiative was to get more advice, but this time from people “closer to your field.”
This means we’re going a step beyond friends and family to people who may actually have some experience in the field of your project. Since my project is creating a story-telling session with nature as a theme, initially I was looking to talk to people with story-telling event experience: people from The Moth (story-telling events) or from the Toastmasters club (speech practicing events).
The Value of More
I did reach out to those groups, but after a few advice sessions, I started to realize if I keep talking to similar people, I’m going to get similar advice. Who else could I talk to? I was lucky enough to receive some good advice: think broader, what other kinds of people do you need to connect with if you’re going to do this event?
I didn’t need to only talk to people who have experience with story-telling events, I needed people with any experience even slightly related to my project – I could get advice from people who rent their venues out and hear what advice they have, I could talk to people who have MC’d or hosted events before and know what it’s like to be on stage and orchestrate a live event, or I could talk with people who have spoken at a live event before. I could even talk to people who like telling stories. All of these people would have very different perspectives on my project and accordingly different advice! Once I realized this, the task became a lot less daunting.
As my scope got broader, the advice I received got more varied, and therefore better! I started to hear new ideas and thoughts from perspectives I hadn’t heard yet. The project started to change shape and evolve…Not into something totally different, but into something more refined. Something better thought out. Something that seemed more “ready.”
Josh’s 7 Principles of Initiative
In Josh’s book, Initiative, he identifies 7 principles that are fundamental to the methodology:
- Personality matters less than skills you can learn.
- The idea of a lifetime comes once a month.
- Better than a great idea is an okay idea plus market feedback, flexibility, and iterations.
- Start where you are with what you have.
- Pitch and they’ll judge. Ask advice and they’ll help.
- The problem leads to the solution.
- Almost nothing inspires like helping others so much that they reward you for it.
With each exercise, you see these principles come to life. All make sense on an intuitive level when you hear them, but as you do the exercises you start to feel them. In particular, I think principle #3 has really started to resonate in me – almost any idea can be good if you are able to query enough people and get enough varied feedback. It evolves to solve a problem. It’s like a universal puzzle piece that changes form to fit whatever space you need to fill.
The one that I “feel” the least would be principle #7, but it’s one that I want to feel and motivates me to keep going. If my project was not only something that was fun and entertaining, but something that people were thanking me and paying me for, I think the feeling of inspiration that principle #7 describes would be amazing.
The Conversations
It’s safe to say that experience and iterations in these conversations have really taught me to fine tune. Whereas with 10 friends and family members, I felt like I had to justify my project and give long explanations for why I’m doing it, with people who are already in the field, I started to feel the pressure to get to the point. I started whittling down to the “need to know” info so I could start getting advice and waste as little of their time as possible, and I think it had even more of a positive effect on the people I talked to beyond just gratefulness for not wasting their time: the responses were more enthusiastic. When I was spending a few minutes talking about myself and why I want to do this project, I think that actually made most people bored and tuned out. Once my “pitch” was just a simple, one sentence “I want to do a story-telling event with a small group of people taking turns to tell stories with a theme of nature and the environment”, I actually got more enthusiasm and positive energy about the project.
Going into this exercise, I felt a little apprehensive – I was going to be talking to a bunch of people I don’t know on the phone and asking for advice. What if they judge me? What if they think I’m just wasting their time? What if they think it’s a silly idea? But after a couple calls, I pretty quickly started to gain confidence in the calls and it got much easier. By the last 3 or 4 people I was just cold-calling people I thought might be able to help that I had just Googled. I wouldn’t go so far as to say calling people became fun, but I understood the value in just talking to as many people as I could.
I was lucky in that almost everyone I talked to seemed positive and eager to give me advice on the project. I had originally anticipated a few people that would probably not want to bother to take the time to talk to me, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that even the people I cold called were generally really nice about giving advice. As I talked to people from different backgrounds, I also got advice beyond what I expected! I foolishly thought I probably heard most of the “good” advice already and was just going to hear the same things over and over again, but as I spoke to people with different perspectives, I realized there was still a LOT more that could be added, or at least considered, for the project, and it involved in small subtle ways. Sometimes just in mind, if not on paper.
Because everyone I talked to were, for the most part, people I’ve never spoken to before (some were even cold calls), I would say most didn’t seem particularly interested in hearing about how the project evolves, but a few did, and that made me pretty proud and happy to hear. For the ones that did seem genuinely interested in my project, I would go deeper into why I wanted to do this project, and where I see it going, and in that framing, the peopled I talked to seemed a lot less bored by that info as more excited for the potential of the project. I will be genuinely curious to see if anyone I talked to goes out of their way to email me later down the line to check on the status of my project!
The Next Steps
For the next steps in the project (one of which I already completed and posted about), I’ll be doing some on-paper, drawing board time work for the project! A visual model and a financial analysis, both of which I’m actually excited for. These are things I’m much more comfortable with than talking to random people for advice. They will, undoubtedly, help me understand new aspects of my project that I hadn’t considered before now, and hopefully put me in a good position to go into the final exercises, the toughest of which is to talk to and get advice from people directly in my project’s field.
As always, if any of you have any thoughts or advice for me regarding my project, I’d love to hear it.
Onward and upward! The Campfire continues to grow brighter and brighter.
