How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between

Just Get Shit Done…stop talking about doing things and make them happen. Start small, scale down, make small models really fast, learn to fail faster, then scale up or scale down. It’s better to count your mistakes in minutes, then in years. Trust that others will contribute, add, modify, revise, inform, and transform what you do.

In contrast, good planning explores, imagines, analyzes, tests, and iterates. That takes time. Thus, slow is a consequence of doing planning right, not a cause. The cause of good planning is the range and depth of the questions it asks and the imagination and the rigor of the answers it delivers. Notice that I put “questions” before “answers.” It’

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While we’re busy with the tactical stuff, we often skip the important first step—of reflecting deeply about the reason our idea or project needs to exist and the change we’re trying to create. This first step is harder than it seems, because asking these deeper questions makes us feel vulnerable to failure. We’d rather press on unenlightened, doing

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