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.

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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Start with an ambitious, high-potential idea, but challenging and full of ambiguities — the rough shape of a nascent great idea. It typically isn’t new, but solves many problems in a simpler, more intuitive way. It ignites people’s curiosity and self-motivation. At the end, it should seem “obvious” so that others want to copy, because there aren’t ... See more