
Ask HN: What habits distinguish effective execution from “spinning your wheels”? - toomanyrichies
I&#x27;m watching Ed Catmull&#x27;s 2007 Stanford talk (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc), and one comment he made which stood out to me is:<p>&quot;If you give a good idea to a mediocre group, they&#x27;ll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they&#x27;ll fix it. Or they&#x27;ll throw it away and come up with something else.&quot;<p>Jeff Atwood talks about something similar in his blog post, &quot;Cultivate Teams, Not Ideas&quot;:<p>&quot;I wouldn&#x27;t call ideas worthless, per se, but it&#x27;s clear that ideas alone are a hollow sort of currency. Success is rarely determined by the quality of your ideas. But it is frequently determined by the quality of your execution. So instead of worrying about whether the Next Big Idea you&#x27;re all working on is sufficiently brilliant, worry about how well you&#x27;re executing.&quot;<p>My question is- what are the key habits that someone can develop which would place them in the first group that Catmull mentions, rather than the 2nd group?
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WheelsAtLarge
Setting goals and moving towards them with your daily actions.

Also, it's a lot easier to do actions you know and can finish right away. If
you're doing those all day you're likely to be spinning your wheels.

Example, you can spend your whole day answering emails and feel like you were
productive because your inbox is empty but if you do that every day you will
not and have not done anything that will advance you in life. You're just
keeping busy.

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toomanyrichies
Link to Ed Catmull's talk here-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc)

Link to Jeff Atwood's post here- [https://blog.codinghorror.com/cultivate-
teams-not-ideas/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/cultivate-teams-not-ideas/)

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throway88989898
Accountability

