Precontemplation at scale
There are people who do things this way: they put all of their effort into the thing, and boom—the thing is done. Then they move on to the next thing.
I am not one of those people. Maybe I will become one later, but for now I am not.
My bottleneck is not in doing things, but in stopping being scared of doing things.
This is why I do a hundred things at a time, not just one. Each of those things takes six months to get done. Or less, or more, but I think that "six months" is a good number to keep in my head. "Whatever I want to get done, if I start now, it will only get done in six months."
- If I start a startup, it will have its first users in six months.
- If I start coaching, something will come out of it in six months.
- If I give a talk, it might affect people straight away, but I will only find out in six months.
- If I want to switch from coding to management, it will get done in six months.
- If I want more clients for my consulting, they will appear six months after I have decided that "yeah I should start looking".
This means that preparing the ground becomes very important.
Stages of change
Cue the diagram of "Stages of Change" I heard about from Matt Goldenberg:
If I want to get something done, and right now I am too scared to do it, I need to start with precontemplation. The earlier I start with precontemplation, the earlier I will move on to contemplation, then to determination, and then to actually doing the thing.
This is why Twitter is working so well for me.
Twitter is a tool for doing precontemplation at scale. If your bottleneck, like mine, is in being scared and not in lacking skills, then you also need a tool for doing precontemplation at scale. Can be friends, can be Twitter, can be anything else.
Case study:
- When I was transitioning from coding to management, I publicly mused "I want to switch from coding to management" on Twitter.
- Then I told some people about how management is better than coding.
- Then I told more people.
- Then I said "I wonder if I can do it by my birthday" (which was in about half a year).
- After a while I set my Twitter name to
Artyom (stopping coding on Oct 5, 2020). - In a couple of months before the deadline I started taking actual steps—hiring more people, etc.
- On the deadline I said "okay, I am not coding anymore". Boom.
Side-note: everybody said "you will probably give up after a while", and indeed I resumed coding in about a month and then stopped coding again. THIS IS ALRIGHT. Not only do things take 6 months, but they also take 3 tries. That's another good number to keep in your head. See The best self-improvement trick so far: a giant board for a method to convince yourself that things take 3 tries and it's alright.
Going a bit further
- From precontemplation to contemplation: when I feel I am ready to move from precontemplation to contemplation, I tweet the thing and say it's a "working hypothesis". This works surprisingly better than I expected.
- From contemplation to determination: At least for ideas and working hypotheses, I keep a public list of "what I currently believe": Idea origins. This helps to solidify things in the "determination" stage.
Precontemplations I am currently doing
These are just a few recent examples I found while scrolling my Twitter timeline.