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I’m guessing these responses really reflect people’s weighted averages (age*current average effort fraction) though I kept it simple and asked for just averages.
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Poll: where is the temporal center of gravity of all your live projects based on average age of start-dates?
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I suspect a healthy weighted average should be ~ (age-20)/2. So a 30 year old should be at 5, a 40 year old at 10, a 50 year old at 15 etc. Standard deviation should be ~average/3 maybe, so distribution spreads as you age and accumulate projects and get better at them.
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Other things being equal, people get good at starting in their 20s, at follow through in 30s, at finishing in 40s. No point learning food follow through until you’ve found a few good starts to bet on. No point getting good at finishing until a few projects have aged gracefully.
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I suspect most self-judgments on being good starters/follow-through-ers/finishers are really flawed because of the non-ergodicity of project management skill learning. You can’t learn good practices for the 3 phases in an arbitrary order. On,y one order actually works.
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My oldest live project, rather appropriately is probably “time studies.” Ongoing since at least 2003. 17y old. Second oldest is ribbonfarm at 13 years old. Then sparring-style consulting-fu, 10 years old. Breaking smart, 6 years old. My portfolio is getting long in the tooth
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Most projects worth pursuing long term don’t even actually start until they come alive after a year or two of futzing around and tinkering. Ribbonfarm took to years to get to ignition. My interest in time took 3 years to get to ignition with a journal paper (2004-07).
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The “ignition” moment is when an opinionated understanding of the thing meets enough stuff on the canvas already so you can see where you’re going. “Vision” requires not a blank canvas but an incoherently full one, the detritus of sufficient futzing, muddling, trial and error.
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Being a good starter in ambiguous, uncertain domains is about having a calibrated sense of how many false starts you can expect vs how many you can afford, to make commitment decisions. If it’s going to take 2y+10 false starts and you only have 1 y/5 starts in you, don’t bother.
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Good follow through is about getting “married” to a project and committing to it long term, once you decide you’re off to a good start.
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This sounds like yet another sermon about long-term thinking, but it isn't. It's a sermon about long-term *commitment.* It doesn't take much upfront thinking. I mean, fairly dim people seem to get married at 22 without much thought and make a successful 30-40 marriage out of it.
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Good finishing (n=4 experience, all in the 2-5 year range) is about caring enough to stick the landing elegantly. I’d rate myself a B- on this, though I’ve never yet fumbled an important finish when it mattered.
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While I rarely choke or quit on a finish, I also don’t have that magic strong-finish switch some seem to. Maybe 1 in 4 finishes I’ll get that closer-energy burst and sprint to the finish line, but 3 of 4 times I’ll kind huff and puff and stagger across the finish line.
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Quitting is a strength if you typically do it early, but a weakness if you typically do it late. If you’re gonna quit, do it before the ignite moment. For me the trigger is realizing something will take more false starts than I care to invest.
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