ReWork

priorities, product mix, or focus. And most important, you can change your mind.
    * Jim Rutenberg, “Clinton Finds Way to Play Along with Drudge,”
New York Times
, Oct. 22, 2007.
    * “Fascinating Facts About James Dyson, Inventor of the Dyson Vacuum Cleaner in 1978,” www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/dyson.htm
    † Russ Mitchell, “The Beat Goes On,” CBS News,
Sunday Morning
, Mar. 29, 2009, www.tinyurl.com/cd8gjq
    ‡ Eric Ransdell, “The Nike Story? Just Tell It!”
Fast Company
, Dec. 19, 2007, www.fastcompany.com/magazine/31/nike.html
    * “Mary Kay Ash: Mary Kay Cosmetics,”
Journal of Business Leadership
1, no. 1 (Spring 1988); American National Business Hall of Fame, www.anbhf.org/laureates/mkash.html
    *
“Stanley Kubrick
—Biography,” IMDB, www.imdb.com/name/nm00004o/bio
    * Mission, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, http://aboutus.enterprise.com/who_we_are/mission.html

CHAPTER
PROGRESS
     

     
Embrace constraints
    “I don’t have enough time/money/people/experience.” Stop whining. Less is a good thing. Constraints are advantages in disguise. Limited resources force you to make do with what you’ve got. There’s no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative.
    Ever seen the weapons prisoners make out of soap or a spoon? They make do with what they’ve got. Now we’re not saying you should go out and shank somebody—but get creative and you’ll be amazed at what you can make with just a little.
    Writers use constraints to force creativity all the time. Shakespeare reveled in the limitations of sonnets (fourteen-line lyric poems in iambic pentameter with a specific rhyme scheme). Haiku and limericks also have strict rules that lead to creative results. Writers like Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver found that forcing themselves to use simple, clear language helped them deliver maximum impact.
    The Price Is Right
, the longest-running game show in history, is also a great example of creativity born from embracing constraints. The show has more than a hundred games, and each one is based on the question “How much does this item cost?” That simple formula has attracted fans for more than thirty years.
    Southwest—unlike most other airlines, which fly multiple aircraft models—flies only Boeing 737s. As a result, every Southwest pilot, flight attendant, and ground-crew member can work any flight. Plus, all of Southwest’s parts fit all of its planes. All that means lower costs and a business that’s easier to run. They made it easy on themselves.
    When we were building Basecamp, we had plenty of limitations. We had a design firm to run with existing client work, a seven-hour time difference between principals (David was doing the programming in Denmark, the rest of us were in the States), a small team, and no outside funding. These constraints forced us to keep the product simple.
    These days, we have more resources and people, but we still force constraints. We make sure to have only one or two people working on a product at a time. And we always keep features to a minimum. Boxing ourselves in this way prevents us from creating bloated products.
    So before you sing the “not enough” blues, see how far you can get with what you have.

Build half a product, not a half-assed product
    You can turn a bunch of great ideas into a crappy product real fast by trying to do them all at once. You just can’t do
everything
you want to do and do it well. You have limited time, resources, ability, and focus. It’s hard enough to do one thing right. Trying to do ten things well at the same time? Forget about it.
    So sacrifice some of your darlings for the greater good. Cut your ambition in half. You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.
    Most of your great ideas won’t seem all that great once you get some perspective, anyway. And if they truly are that fantastic, you can always do them later.
    Lots of things get better as they get shorter. Directors cut good scenes to make a great movie. Musicians drop good tracks to make a great album. Writers eliminate good pages to make a great book. We cut this book in half between the next-to-last and final drafts. From 57,000 words to about 27,000 words. Trust us, it’s better for it.
    So start chopping. Getting to great starts by cutting out stuff that’s merely good.

Start at the epicenter
    When you start anything new, there are forces pulling you in a variety of directions. There’s the stuff you
could
do, the stuff