Whether you’re wrangling your team to reach a milestone this week or psyching yourself up to launch your course this month, you can ride the primo wave of a supportive process to get there.

You start your week with the best intentions. This is the one—you’re going to knock it out of the park this week. But by Friday, a dozen random tasks pulled your attention away from your goal. Exactly what your goal even was seems very, very hard to remember. 

In 5 simple steps, here’s what we’re trying at Pathwright right now:

1. Set your destination for the month, quarter, etc.

Project planning gets a lot simpler if you set your destination before embarking. If you’re not used to filling out a project brief, just try answering these three questions to set your destination:

How would you summarize the project in 2-3 sentences? Pretend you’re explaining the project to a coworker over coffee.

What potentially contentious or high-ambiguity questions surround the project? You’ll need to answer these with someone who’s qualified during planning.

What jobs to be done does this project solve for? If you’re new to JTBDs, here’s a great primer.   

The time frame is up to you. We work in six-week project cycles at Pathwright. After trying week-to-week and quarterly, six week chunks works perfectly for us. Your situation may vary, but I recommend not planning too far out.

Since you know your destination, what strategic goal for this week will take you there in time? If you’re planning to launch a new course by the end of the month, then maybe your goal for the first week sounds like “write a set of learning outcomes for my course.”

At Pathwright, we recently tried pushing ourselves to build a prototype the very first week. For a new feature, that meant developing an ugly but testable version. Prototypes shouldn’t look too nice, but they should uncover problems that were invisible before and would have derailed the project later. So maybe your goal for week one is “outline my course in Pathwright.”

For most of us, goals don’t work if we’re the only ones who know them. It’s too easy to downgrade my ambitions or reschedule the deadline. To prevent those outcomes, tell your team your destination and weekly goals.

Our company uses Slack and IFTTT for this. I set up these automatic questions to ping everyone…

At 9am on Mondays: “🏞 What's your goal for this week that'll help you reach your 6-week destination?”

At 9am on Tu/We/Th/Fr: “💪 What's your goal for today?”

At 3pm on Fridays: “🏁 How'd it go with your goal for this week?”

4. Be public about if you hit your goal this week.

Cheer with each other when you make it, and figure it out together when you don’t. Shame doesn’t belong here; you need to keep the process supportive, or it won’t work. Everyone misses goals sometimes for all kinds of reasons. Patterns of success are great to build on; patterns of failure are great for encouraging experimentation.

For missed goals, try asking these questions:

Was my goal specific and reasonable enough? It’s hard to hit a moving target, or a target that’s a football stadium away—try a tighter goal next week.

Did too many other things get in the way? I won’t always be able to, but I need to say “no” to things that get in the way of my goal—try saying “no” more next week.

Does weird stuff happen every week? Maybe I didn’t define the project enough before starting—try revisiting the brief.

Do I feel behind all the time? Maybe I don’t have as much open time for the work as I thought—try cutting scope.

Show your work from your weekly goal and tell your team a little about it. I’m surprised by how accessible work way outside my own discipline is—development project, sales initiatives, etc.—after a link and a few sentences of explanation. 

A quick screen recording of a new feature Robert worked on.

A Google Doc for a new process Paul spent the week developing.

A link to a beta version of a site Lindsay built.

So far, it seems like if we decide to show and tell about our work every week, anything can be show-and-tell’d. Again, we use Slack for this. It’s amazing to see a digest at the end of the week summarizing the cool things everyone worked on. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how amazing your own team is when you share your work every week.

That’s it! These 5 steps keep our teams on track at Pathwright. We’d love to hear if it works for you and what you’re trying on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

If you’re tired of not being sure your people are learning what they need to, try Pathwright. We built it from the ground up for ultimate clarity—from powerful outlining to seeing actual faces move from one step to the next. Get started free.

How to reach your weekly goals with your team or for your online courses.

A lot of people set out to start a business. The perception of flexibility, independence, respect, and potential wealth are big draws. The millennial way of expressing this is to found a “startup.”

How I Accidentally Launched a Business/Startup

A lot of people set out to start a business. The perception of flexibility, independence, respect, and potential wealth are big draws. The millennial way of expressing this is to found a “startup.” The underlying motivations for a startup are often exactly the same but with two scoops of trendiness and pretentiousness about “making the world a better place” plopped on top.

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with setting out to launch a business or startup. Pathwright is a little of both. But I think a lot of well-intentioned people have been sold a formula for starting a successful business that looks like this:

What should I do? = gain independence + flexibility + wealth + respect … (And, oh yeah, make the world a better place.)

We’re told that if we really want any part of this delicious pie badly enough and use the right methods, then we too could create the next Facebook, Uber, Apple, or ________. I’d argue from experience (and the research) that this is the wrong equation. It’s wrong in that it leads well-meaning people to approach starting a business with mindsets that don’t usually end well:

🍪 The cookie-cutter mindset leads people to attempt to start a business with someone else’s playbook or ready-made kit. Most of the time, this means that someone up the chain — the people peddling the playbook — are the only ones making the real money. This is easiest to see in multi-level marketing, but it’s pervasive in entrepreneurship books, blogs, and the like.

💡 The genius idea mindset stems from a belief that million+ dollar products are made from brilliant ideas. In startup land, this mindset leads people to focus on honing their pitch for some new, innovate idea and courting venture capitalists to fund it instead of getting good at actually creating something someone would actually pay for. All the successful business people I know understand that ideas alone are worthless.

🔪 The serial entrepreneur mindset is one that many aspire to, but very few people can actually pull off. Sure, there are the rare people uniquely able to start or turnaround just about any type of business, sell it off at a profit, and then move on to the next. But the problem is that the people who buy these businesses tend to be wealthy people looking to maximize their investment. This dynamic morphs the business into the big business stereotype that’s all about maximizing profit for the owners at the biggest cost to employees and customers they can get away with.

Millions of people fall into one of these mindsets, so it’s no surprise that there are billion dollar industries built around preying on their hopes and dreams through multi-level marketing schemes, get-rich-quick style books, courses, seminars, and even many MBA programs.

So what’s a better way to think about starting a business or startup?

Well, I think the first step is to back up and ask a more fundamental question first: What is my ideal work?

Not only is this question less complicated, it also helps determine whether starting a business is the right goal in the first place.

Your trade is the thing you’re well situated to accomplish that energizes you so much that you’re willing to put in the thousands of hours it takes to get really good at it.

From my own experience, Mark and I were fortunate enough to be born twins with big imaginations into a family that allowed no TV/video games but used library cards liberally. That situation taught us to be creative as an alternative to being bored. We’ve been “addicted” to creating new things together our whole lives.

At Pathwright, my best days are still when I get to creatively architect how all the aspects of Pathwright work effectively together. That’s the type of thing I’d do (and have done) even without pay. Mark designs and directs the code that makes software a reality and feels the same way about his work.

While having a clear picture of your trade leads to greater satisfaction for you and those around you, it’s not quite enough to answer the question: should I start a business?

I think the next question before going off to start a business is: how am I uniquely motivated to put my trade to use? Answering that type of question requires a raw, honest self-introspection that can be difficult to accomplish by ourselves, but I think one helpful way to answer it is to identify your core value.

“A core value is a principle without which life wouldn’t be worth living.” 
— Dave Logan

You likely have a different core value from your spouse, friends, and the people you work with. Core values are often principles like:

Your core value is the primary motivation that drives the important choices in your life. (If you’d like help figuring out your core value, try the “Click Down” method with someone who knows you well.)

None of these values are better than the others — there’s no right, wrong, better, or worse answer. But uncovering your core value can help you determine the scale at which you can best use your trade.

For example, Mark and I both share a core value of “impact.” We’re fundamentally motivated to see what we do have significant impact on others. But if our core value was “stability,” we’d be much better off using our trade to earn a safe and reliable paycheck from another business/startup rather than starting our own.

But since our core value is impact, applying our creative skill towards helping people teach and learn was a natural fit. Our mission at Pathwright is to “multiply the impact that teachers make on the world” largely because that’s our best hope for making the impact we’d like to see using our trade.

Additionally, there’s no way for us to have that kind of impact on our own. To do something that big, we need a team of talented people to come along on this journey with us. That meant we needed to make enough money to pay ourselves and other talented people to create something that didn’t yet exist.

And voilà, we ended up “accidentally” launching a business/startup.

I’ve used the word “accidentally” not because we didn’t know we were creating a business or startup but because that’s not what we were fundamentally motivated to do. So far, all we’ve been doing is applying our trade for the maximum impact. For us, that meant launching a new software business or startup or (whatever you want to call it).

I don’t think there’s anything special about us in particular or our approach. In fact, all the people I’ve met and read about who’ve created far more successful businesses or careers than we have share some form of what I think is a better, simpler equation for figuring out what one should do with their life:

Your Ideal Work = Your Trade + Core Value

Sometimes that means creating a business or startup but most often it doesn’t involve anything nearly as risky or time consuming. And sometimes that equation even results in the independence, flexibility, wealth, and respect that people get trapped into thinking is good enough reason to start a business. But the reality is that none of those things matter nearly so much as doing the thing you were made to do within the scope of what you value most.

How to Reach Your Goal Every Week

How I Accidentally Launched a Business/Startup

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