What it takes to finalise a project and how to find people to help you with that.
Like every new year, we usually start off with resolutions of what we'd like to accomplish in the upcoming twelve months. However, throughout the year, our preferences may change and we sometimes forget about our big hopes, grandiose plans and inventive visions that we had at the beginning of January.
As with most projects, we need other people to get a project off the ground; not just to keep up our motivation levels, but also to produce the quality of work we want to see associated with our names.
In the last newsletter about my Kickstarter for This Year Will Be Different, I might have mentioned what I'm working on, but I haven't quite told you the story behind the story: publishing a book had been my resolution for 2013 (!).
So, how did I suddenly manage to make it work and what can you do to make your New Year's resolution stick?
It seems that once you set a deadline, spend money and include other people, it's far more likely you'll not just start another project, but you’ll finish it too. So, in other words, only after I assigned a budget to this side project, set myself a deadline and found a graphic designer, an illustrator and an editor, things finally started moving.
When you're at the beginning of your career or want to make a career change, you need to learn how to become your own client, which is a thought Lauren shared with me for the book.
Luckily, once you decide that you must start working on projects that fill you with joy and not just your bank account with money, you'll realize, sooner or later, that other people are also looking for projects that will help them evolve in the right direction.
If you share your vision and beliefs and are open about the reasons why you're doing what you're doing, it's not going to be for the sake of “money” why others will want to help you get your project off ground: I've been incredibly fortunate to find a team for This Year Will Be Different on Elance and Behance. I openly shared my vision and these highly-talented women agreed to help (yay!). While I had a budget assigned to this cause, it definitely wasn't how much I want to pay them once the book starts selling (hopefully). Having included other people in my project absolutely increased my dedication to making it work.
So, what's the project you need some extra pressure for and who do you need to get things started? Let's make this mail a project matchmaking: please respond with your exciting project ideas and I'll follow up on this cause next week.
