
Get specific (2008) - duck
https://sivers.org/get-specific
======
sivers
No need for the (2008) thing in the title. This is actually a new article from
February 2018. I had an old post there, but completely re-wrote it last week,
keeping only the title and URL.

Thought you guys might like a programming example that I edited out of the
article:

Back in 2004, I wanted to be a great Ruby programmer. I had dabbled, but
wanted to accelerate my learning to the expert level.

So I called Tony Robbins' company, and signed up for a personal coach. We had
a phone call once per week, to help me stay on track achieve my goals.

On the very first call, when I said I wanted to be a great Ruby programmer, he
asked, “What does that look like? How will you know you're great?”

Whoa. Hmm. I had never actually defined it. He was waiting for an answer, so I
picked something. I said, “If I have read all of these six Ruby books,
completed all of the exercises in them, and memorized what I've learned.”

He said, “How many chapters in all?” So he had me go add up the total numbers
of chapters across all six books.

Then he had me predict how many chapters I could do per week. I said 6.

Then he said, “OK so now you've got your plan. One chapter per day, six days
per week, including doing the exercises, saving what you've learned in flash
cards and quizzing yourself later, and in 12 weeks you'll be a great Ruby
programmer, by this definition. If by then you don't feel great, we'll pick a
new goal.”

And just like that - a year of vague procrastination was now a specific list
of goals to be achieved each day. It helped me more than anything.

It's tough to talk about because it sounds so simple, but man, it's effective!

~~~
ronilan
I like the premise but...

Football analogy: run your playbook, keep moving the chains. This works for
most games, but sometimes QB needs a read option.

Music analogy: if you got all the notes down how will you play the jazz?

;)

Ps - thanks for writing through the years and especially for this:
[https://sivers.org/kimo](https://sivers.org/kimo)

~~~
sivers
Thanks Ron!

------
Kuiper
The example Derek uses in this post about looking for a booking agent reminds
me of an anecdote he told several years ago (as I recall, it was part of a
speech or a Q&A he did at Berklee College of Music) about how he went about
reverse engineering the process for getting into Rolling Stone -- he phoned
Rolling Stone masquerading as someone working for a label trying to find a new
publicist, and asked if they had any recommendations. From this he got a list
of publicists that Rolling Stone liked, which were the publicists who were
most likely to be capable of getting him written up in Rolling Stone.

I actually put a version of this into practice several years ago when I was a
looking at how to break into the world of trade publishing -- I had a
manuscript for a fantasy novel, and decided my ideal outcome was to get
published by Tor (a name that appeared on the spine of many of my favorite
fantasy novels growing up). I went to the bookstore and compiled a list of
books that had Tor's name on the spine, then went through the books and
identified the ones that were most similar to my own manuscript in terms of
subject matter/tone, length, and target demographic. Then I opened each book,
flipped to the "acknowledgments" section, where most authors take the time to
thank their agent. This game me a list of agents who A) represented books
similar to mine, and B) had successfully sold books to Tor.

I think the lesson is that if you don't know the specific way forward, it's
often as simple as starting at the goal and working your way backward -- want
to know which publicists are on good terms with Rolling Stone? Ask Rolling
Stone. Want to find out which agents have sold books to a specific publisher?
Grab some books by that publisher and open them up.

~~~
aidenn0
Did you ever get the novel published?

~~~
Kuiper
That book remains unsold, mainly for lack of trying on my part -- around the
time that I was ready to start sending out query letters, I landed some
contract work working on visual novels. Getting my first contract involved
spending a week or so assembling a writing portfolio to satisfy the company I
was applying to, and once I had that portfolio, I started sending it off to
any visual novel company that posted a classified seeking contract writers,
with a pretty high success rate. (My portfolio started as a collection of ~5
writing samples; with each opening that I applied to, I would pick out the 3-4
writing samples which seemed most relevant to the position I was applying for
and just send those. Each job I completed gave me another writing sample to
add to the portfolio, and the longer I kept working in the visual novel space,
the more specific I could get with tailoring my writing samples to the
positions I was applying for, so the result was sort of this "snowball" effect
where success beget more success.) Once I had my foot in the door, my inertia
continued to carry me forward from gig to gig, and visual novel work
eventually became my main source of income (I quit my "day job" back in 2016).

Having a steady supply of contract work kind of sapped my motivation to
continue doing any writing on spec; the appeal of toiling away privately on a
novel with the hopes that it will one day get published becomes a lot less
attractive when you have offers from people who are willing to pay you to
write _right now_. Once the contract work started, I also sort of rationalized
procrastinating on sending out query letters for my unsold novel with the
reasoning that my query letters would be a lot more impressive when I could
start them with a paragraph listing the visual novels I'd worked on as a
contractor, along with information about the number of copies they'd sold.

That being said, although I never sold that novel, the time I spent working on
it certainly wasn't wasted -- most of my early gigs in the visual novel space
came as a direct result of the strength of my portfolio, which included parts
of the original manuscript. So, while I didn't sell the manuscript, it did
help with the first few critical steps of my writing career.

In an interesting quirk of fate, the editor that I'm working with for one of
my current visual novel projects is also a senior editor at Tor, so despite
never sending out those query letters, I somehow managed to stumble my way
into a working relationship with someone at the publisher. Perhaps the moral
of this story is that all roads lead to Tor. :)

~~~
sudouser
great writeup, got a website or portfolio?

~~~
Kuiper
It's not a complete portfolio, but I keep a list of projects I'm currently
working on at
[http://kineticliterature.com/now/](http://kineticliterature.com/now/)

~~~
aidenn0
Oh, you're working on Necrobarista? I remember seeing the trailer a while ago
and it intrigued me.

[edit]

I realized this comment was relatively vacuous, so I suppose I should say what
it is that intrigued me. I had trouble putting my finger on it, until I
realized that it's mainly the fact that while it is clearly a VN, it has its
own distinct aesthetic. Too often I feel like VNs made outside of Japan try
way too hard to look Japanese. This can work well, or poorly, but it
constrains things both in terms of style and target audience.

Obviously the production values don't hurt either :)

------
d--b
Well, it is sort of obvious that you need to get specific at some point to get
anything done.

The problem is we tend to resist the work needed to get specific, because:

1\. it kills the dream. Dreaming about being a successful actor is nice.
Getting specific about working as a waiter while taking acting classes for
years is not exactly the fun part. Yes, maybe it's stupid to dream about stuff
that won't happen ever, but it's completely human, and it should be totally
fine.

2\. sometimes it's good not to dive into specifics too early. You may have
your goals wrong, or you may have multiple specific ways to get there, but
need to carefully mature your thoughts about the problem so that you take the
right decision. To take the same example as the article: if a musician comes
to you saying: "I need a booking agent", well perhaps the first question to
ask is "why?" rather than "who?".

------
abhiminator
Interesting article.

As the saying goes, the first step is always the hardest; and from my personal
experience, I can attest that writing (especially through the old school 'pen
and paper' way [0]) can serve as a very effective tool in de-cluttering the
mental muddle that comes with formulating anything new.

Think of writing as an extension of the brain's working memory -- by
offloading cognitively taxing task of keeping track of nitty-gritty details of
task at hand, the prefrontal cortex gets a bigger pie of the mental energy --
which helps one to focus on the stuff that actually matters.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/19/science/researching-
the-b...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/19/science/researching-the-brain-of-
writers.html)

------
0xCMP
I think something that usually keeps me from doing this is that I don't want
to accidentally set the wrong specific goal and make myself go off in a
tangent.

~~~
EmilStenstrom
In practice, my projects more often fail because I don’t do anything, than me
going off in the wrong direction.

