Video Transcript: Main Lesson - Week 4 Page 1 of 3

Last week, Cal and I encouraged you to pick a project that, if executed, could improve one of the skills
you identified in your research phase as being important to your career. But importantly, we gave you
a piece of advice that may have seemed strange. We told you not to start working on the project.

Why not? Well, we told you not to start working on the project. Because these kinds of projects are
notorious for not getting finished. Just getting them started is not enough. You want to actually finish
the project so you can see the results. These types of projects are notorious for not getting finished for
three reasons. First, these projects are not urgent. So there’s nothing going to be pressing you, telling
you you have to improve this skill. Actually, by definition they’re not urgent. Because if there was an
urgency at your actual job to finish a particular assignment or get to a certain level of skill, that would
happen naturally. So these projects are specifically designed to tackle the skill improvement that’s not
urgent.

Second, it doesn’t feel productive. Even though you’re making improvements that will one day be
very important for your career, it’s not getting the day-to-day work done that you need to do to feel like
you’re on top of things.

And third, these kinds of projects are hard. If you actually do this properly, it’s going to stretch you to
the very limit of your abilities. Picking a project that’s easy to do is not going to improve your skills. So
you have to pick something that is difficult to do.

These three things, the fact that it’s not urgent, the fact that it doesn’t help you with your day-to-day
feeling of being productive, and three, that it is mentally strenuous are reasons why it is notorious for
not finishing these kind of projects. We don’t want you to put this project on the perpetual back burner
of your life. We want you to actually get it finished. And so in doing that, we want to spend time this
week to procrastination-proof your project, to make your projects so airtight, so confident that you are
going to be in this project that you’ll finish it, that you can go forward knowing that it will actually get
done. And it will actually get finished.

So how do you actually avoid procrastination and get your project finished? Well, contrary to popular
opinion, we don’t believe that the correct approach is to jump right in and get started. That might work
with a single task, something you can do in a particular sitting. As we all know, a lot of procrastination
is just getting started. However, it’s quite different when we’re talking about a project. It’s not going to
just start on one day, but continue for perhaps months. In this case, we actually suggest the opposite.
You need to create a plan for your project that is not perfect, not a plan that will never change or be
inflexible, but a plan that will fully sell you on the idea of finishing your project. You should be 100%
convinced that the project is doable, and that when you do it, it will be successful. When you have that
crystal clear idea in your mind, you’ll eliminate the vagueness that keeps you from taking action. I’ve
had considerable experience with this myself.

As some of you may know, a couple years ago, I took on a project to learn MITs four year computer
science undergraduate curriculum well enough to pass the final exams and programming projects
over just 12 months. And during this process, when I announced the project on my blog, I got a
number of well-thought criticisms of people saying, this is clearly an example of the planning fallacy.
The planning fallacy is the idea that we can plan these elaborate projects and actually execute them,
that people constantly underestimate how difficult it is to execute a project, delays, obstacles, all of
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those sorts of things. Well, as many of you know, I did finish that project. And I did finish it on time. But
the criticism that I got at the beginning was not invalid. It was a very true criticism that I would have
easily applied as an outsider looking at my own project.

What was the difference? The difference was that I spent nearly a year planning the project before
I actually got started. I spent almost a year researching exactly the courses I would take, testing
the curriculum, testing the schedule, testing the studying load, testing the method. Everything was
planned and thought out before I started the project. And that allowed me to stay on track, despite
the fact that it was a project of this type, this self-taken-upon project which is notorious for not getting
finished, or notorious for not being done on time.

Now obviously, the project that you’re going to be undertaking is of considerably smaller scale. It’s
going to only be a couple hours a week. It’s going to be a project that, at most, lasts a couple months.
And it’s going to be something that you’re doing in your off hours. So we’re not asking you to spend
an entire year planning for every detail of the project. Instead, we want you to just spend one week
preparing an airtight case for your project. We want you to create a plan that is compelling enough
that if you had to convince a friend, if you had to tell a friend, look, I’ve got this project that I want to
undertake. And this is how I’m going to do it, that you could convince them to support your plan.

The purpose of the plan is not to follow it exactly, to be rigid, to be unchanging when new things
come up. That’s not the purpose of the plan at all. Indeed, when I did the MIT challenge, after the first
week, I originally had planned only to write the final exams. After the first week, based on feedback,
I decided to also do the programming projects. So my plan completely changed only a few days into
the year-long project. You’re going to have the same thing. You’re going to set up schedules. You’re
going to set up a particular way of working. And you’re going to make adjustments to it, both because
of things that come up with your life, and also because of things you’re going to learn going through
this course. That’s not the reason to make the plan.

Think of the plan as if it were a business plan. Business investors know that you’re not going to follow
the plan exactly. What they want to see in the plan is that you fully thought through the business idea,
that you’ve thought through some of the foreseeable consequences. And some of the most obvious
obstacles you’ve already thought ways of working around. Essentially, they want to see that you’ve
thought through some of the obstacles. So when you encounter one in the future, you won’t give up.
You’ll be able to think through that one as well. And I want you to think the same way about your
project. Plan how you’re going to spend your time. You should know exactly how many hours your
project’s going to take each week, and how you’re going to get those hours out of your week. If you
just say that you have a 10 hour project, but you have no accounting for how the hours are going to
come out of your week, you haven’t planned enough. If you don’t plan for inevitable complications,
what happens if you can’t work on it for a week, if you get sick, or if you have a delay, how will that fit
your schedule? If you haven’t planned for the most obvious foreseeable types of problems that will
come up, then when something unforeseeable comes up, you’re not going to be able to deal with it.

The reason that we’re asking you to go through this, to make this airtight plan, and we’re going to go
through the lessons in more detail for exactly what your plan should look like, what elements should
it include, and how you can do these different types of planning procedures. The reason we’re asking
you to do this is because we know. We know that this type of project is the kind of thing that people
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procrastinate on. It’s the kind of thing that people never finish. Because they don’t have to do it.
There’s no real urgency. There’s no daily feeling of productivity. And it can be mentally tough work.
But because you and I both know how important it is to practice your skills to reach a new level of
performance, to not just do the job that you’re currently doing, but to do a better job, to do a higher
level of ability, requires this deliberate practice. You need to think ahead. You need to outwit your own
procrastination that’s going to happen in the future.

You need to foresee these problems happening, so that when you feel the urge to procrastinate, you
can look to your plan, look to yourself in the planning and say, I knew how to handle this. Because I
thought about it ahead of time.

So here’s what success looks like for this week. Take that high level idea that you came up with in
the last week. Take this high level brainstorm for a project and plan out all the details. Figure out what
all the work is required. If it’s going to involve coordinating with other people, like Cal’s project where
he submitted to a magazine, or if it involves some objective criteria that you’re applying for, figure out
how you’re going to deal with those obstacles right now. If it requires setting aside a certain amount
of time, figure out how many hours per week you’re going to have to set aside. If you do have to set
aside time, realize that that time has to come from somewhere. Figure out where in your schedule
you’re going to find the time. If you’re going to wake up early and start working on it, if you’re going
to set aside time on the weekend, if you’re going to set aside time to do a little bit of extra work after
work. Figure that out now, so that when the situation comes up, you’ll know how to handle it.

Also, try to plan for some very obvious foreseeable consequences. What happens if your workload
suddenly increases, or if you have some unexpected appointments or personal issues? How are
you going to make sure that even if you have to take delays on your project, even if you have to
take a short hiatus, that this project is not just going to go to the back burner. It’s not just going to be
something that you started but never finished. Take this time to think about it. Don’t get started on
your project yet. Use this week to really think through your project and create a concrete plan.

Cal and I have a little rule of thumb that we like to use to describe when you know you’re ready. If
you could take your plan and pitch it to a friend, they would be confident enough that you are able to
succeed that they would be willing to bet $100 on your success. If you don’t feel you could convince
someone else that this plan is doable and it’s successful, you haven’t thought through all of the
complications enough.

Start working on this this week. Next week, we’re going to move into actually starting your project and
how to focus while you’re working on it.