Wrong determination
People often think that persistence or not giving up will bring them to success. However, looking back to your past, how many times you tried, but did not get a good result? Your determination faced with more failures than successes or even only failures? Did you ask yourself "Why" and "What is missing to be successful"?
Let's talk about football. Does the football team want to win the cup or want to win all the matches? If you put your expectations on how to win every match, that’s more challenging and might be impossible. But if the goal to win a cup, it will give you a better chance and strategies like you do not need to win all the matches (by accepting the loss or draw in some matches). Or even have a long preparation to be the champion in the couple years rather than this year.
Having persistence and determination is good, but putting it on the right thing, and the right time is more critical. The journey to reach the goal is a long journey. And you can have a lot of strategies to achieve it. Knowing how to inspect and adapt the plan or strategy to help you reach the goal; once you failed, you learn from it, change your plan, and continue.
To reach the goal, you need to change.
I remember a joke about the drunk man on the dark street, finding for his lost key. He was only looking for it under the street light because of other places in shadow. (Streetlight effect)
Don't be like the drunk man, just looking for the key under the light, the key (to reach the goal) is not there. It's somewhere in the dark. Similar to your business or your product in complex environments (where the things you don't know is more than you know). The key to success is hidden, and you need to find a way of looking for it. But what is the right strategy to deal with the complexity? When we step in the dark, naturally, we step slowly, step by step, to know whether it's the right direction or not. If not, we step back and change the direction. That's an experiment with the explicit intention, to transparent, to inspect and adapt. That is empiricism.
Nothing wrong with a strong determination and commitment to your destination likes following to the north star. But be Agile on your journey. Sometimes, the failures will challenge your confidence, but it's necessary for your success. Through the failures, you learn and improve. Or even you need to decide to remove your luggage, to move faster and farther.
Conclusion
- Have determination on the long vision over the short term win.
- Have an open mindset and be agile to change and learn to reach the goal.
- Add failure in your process of success. Every time you failed, you learn from it, improve yourself and move on.
- Make a decision on the hard thing; sometimes, it will be removing something to move on.
- Know and consider when will be a potential investment and when it will be an experiment. Especially, in complex environments, the things you don’t know is a lot. If that is an experiment, optimize your investment to maximize the chance.
- Scrum is based on empiricism, it's the framework to deal with complex environments.