We tend to pass judgement on others based on their actions while passing judgement on ourselves by our motivations and intentions. This seemingly simple human insight sounds elegant and simple at the same time. What it’s really saying is that we have a very limited understanding of others even though we believe to have quite a developed understanding.

Critical to understanding a situation is why someone did what they did. Perhaps you should ask that 5 times. In organizations you will not always end up talking to the same person after asking the whys, but by digging in the real underlying problem will reveal itself.

Unless you’re dealing with a nature preserve with no human interaction at all for a few hundred miles almost every problem boils down to a human problem even if on the surface it’s a code problem, a marketing problem an understanding problem.

Look to motivation.

Give others more slack and stop assuming so much. Because you intrinsically understand your motivations and intentions you give yourself a pass when you do something that if you judged yourself only on your actions you’d be incredibly critical of. The same happens for others. This one incredibly simple but difficult lesson will provide clarity for a ton of situations where you may have been bothered by actions instead of intentions.

Thought exercise.

Think of times or look for times when you’re driving and you’ve been cut off, had to brake or ‘helped’ someone else not get into an accident. Most people have a visceral response, for many reasons. But this thought exercise is to reflect on whether you’ve judged those individuals by their actions or intentions and motivations. Think of times when you may have been overly focused on judging yourself on your motivations or intentions instead of actions. Driving is a great example for those of us who are not as conscienous.

Stop worrying about writing the perfect resume. IN fact stop writing that resume. There are other ways to show off your abilities instead of using something that will only provide objections to hiring you.

“I see that you have only x+ years of experience doing [insert whatever skill]” even though you probably rocked at doing that. Years of experience has some how translated to being full on expert. In some cases that is true but most of the time I believe it is overrated. So now I’ll stop my diatribe and get back to the main point of this article.

STOP WRITING RESUMES!

Let your projects speak for themselves. That’s right. What does a resume do? I’m not a 100% sure really because umm… people who are reading them are the mysterious gatekeepers. The recruiters and the HR screeners. The recruiter rarely has in depth knowledge of a role. They rarely have a firm grasp of what is  required. They simply follow a checklist. The job isn’t given to a computer yet because recruiters often still need to talk with the individual and in some cases negotiate salary and everything else. So why do you want to be stopped from your dream job because a recruiter is following a checklist VERBATIM. As in, you need x skill but you put synonym of x skill on your resume.

So skip that nonsense and get noticed for your projects. That’s right. Your projects. Create a blog, a case study, a white paper or something that can showcase your project. If you are worried that you can’t be that kind of person then that’s probably why you haven’t been doing it before.

So I’ll help you out with some ways to display your project.

Personal Blog

Now a days websites are super cheap and easy. For less than a 100 bucks you can have yourself a year’s worth of website. If you wanna keep costs WAY down then join something like tumblr, blogger, squidoo or wordpress.org. Write out your project and explain how it helped people, where you ran into trouble and how you overcame said trouble.

Find someone else’s blog to display the project. If you are adamant about not blogging then find a blogger or niche site that you can pitch an article about the project. It’s no different except now you just have to let the owner know you are interested in guest blogging on their site or being a guest contributor (everyone calls this something different).

Video

With youtube, vimeo and everything inbetween you can use video to display the final project. Instagram and Vine are awesome for showing how you fixed small projects if it’s a visual process. I.e. fixing a bug in a line of code may not make the best vine video. It’s incredibly cheap and while you may want to invest in some equipment for the long haul you can get started right away almost everyone has access to a laptop, smart phone or tablet. The sound and video will do if you are just showing off your projects and accomplishments.

PR

Look to your local stations and let them know you have just finished a project. Be proud of it. Tell them why it matters and why they should air it. Of course you should probably get your bosses permission to talk with them before you go all PR crazy.

Pictures

Snap pictures during the process even if they are just papers, plans, ideas, the team getting together.Throw them up on a pinterest board, instagram or twitter and make a few comments and hashtag some keywords related to the project that makes it searchable by others.

Presentation

There are a ton of slide sharing site, the one that comes to mind as a go to starter is slideshare (big surprise on the name there). Let people see what you presented on. If you want you can get creative and do an audio recording or video of the presentation and then screencast or just upload the entire ordeal to youtube or another video sharing site.

Think Creatively

Here are just a few examples of how to display your project and what you can do to start attracting attention. Let me know what you used and the end results.

Even better than just these is to be so great at what you do that others announce your accolades for your. The easiest person in the world to be is the quiet, humble type that has others speak of their acclaim. In other words, if you do such a great job others will start talking about you. This doesn’t happen over night. There is no such thing as an over night success, but with time many will say you WERE an over night success.

When it comes to building out apps it’s pretty easy to think it’s cheap. While in regards to say building a brick and mortar its insanely cheap its still your time. That’s something you can never get back. EVER. So you should list out all of the assumptions you are making to have your app a success and the cost to test them out.

Create an order of work for all of your risks. The biggest risk that most just assume is a sure thing is the problem/market fit, customer segments and channels. This boils down to thinking:

who are my customers?

where are they?

What’s the smallest thing I can build that they will buy?

You may not be actually solving a problem. 

It’s a terrible feeling but your GREAT idea may not even be remotely what they want solved. You have to be in love with the problem and NOT the product. When you think your solution is the ideal fit for the market but none of the market subject matter experts agree, it’s a sign you’re in love with your product and not hte problem.

Talking with who you think your customers are ask them the last time they had experienced the problem you think you’re solving. How they did it. Inventing a form of erasable ink may be brilliant but if someone who wants something that can be easily erased only goes to pencils then you have a problem (let’s ignore transformative products like bottled water, phones & cars).

Ask questions on who, what, where and why. Then listen. Get out of the way of your potential customer and the subject matter experts. If you can watch them all day long.

Control is one of those things that you think you have. The need of control rises from fear. What do you fear? Loss of vision, direction, glory?

For startups it could be that your potential customers aren’t a fan of your solution. So you start obsessing and controlling more the areas where you can. This only makes solving the solution harder.

Control and the need to control are a result of the rise of fear. Fear can be many things. Listen to your concerns.

Your physiology is in a feedback loop with your emotions. For example, if you are depressed, your body will consistently slump and slouch, which will influence your body to become more depressed. Feedback loops get more intense if not interrupted so, over time, that feedback loop may eventually result in a physical illness. (And that, in turn, gives you another excuse to be depressed, etc.) Conversely, if you are in great physical condition, it’s easier to have a positive outlook.

Moving through the challenges of any startup you’ll begin to wear some. Negative thoughts will accumulate for many. The worry that you may have thrown yourself into troubled waters may arise after multiple hiccups. Your body and mind will start to assist each other in the spiral that you are in. Many schools now cover this idea that our body’s reflect our emotional state and our emotional states can reflect our body.

Act out feeling sad and feeling happy or confident and your poise changes. Our brains constantly seek out the same. We work in absolutes when we are feeling challenged, threatened or weak. So does our body try to work in absolutes. So to counter act that- during standing meetings with the team why don’t you all offer up poses like feeling confident, strong, in command, creative. This may seem silly but there is positive impact.

Earlier in the day the better. The less the feedback loop can start up again.

Laughter:

Why not spend 10 minutes with the team watching something delightful.

Or 10 minutes in a circle laughing and pointing at each other.

Done in the morning this can help the team refocus into a positive loop (hopefully) which means we react and seek out things that reaffirm our loop….meaning posititivy for the rest of the day and a stronger culture for it.

Thanks to biology our brains seek to find consistency. That means if you’re in a positive mind you react and acknowledge things that are positive and reduce the level of negativity. If you’re in a negative mood. The same goes. You react negatively, seek out negative information and ignore positive results.

This can be why prolonged depression and fear can be so hard to break free from. As an entrepreneur this could mean that in times of fear you’ll tend to recognize all of the fear making signs and thoughts. It’s no easy thing to break but you can do it.

Absolutes

Absolutes make you completely and utterly unproductive. Fears of these often cast you in a black and white setting. If you fail this sale you and your service/product are utterly a waste. You’re a failure.

This is obviously not true. In a better mood, a less fearful mood you wouldn’t even think that or if you heard a peer say that to you. What would you say?

Something in line with “that’s not true. What’s the worse that can happen? Have you done a sale like this before? Did it turn out ok whether you failed or succeeded?”

You’d provide some additional questions and insights to remind them the world is not falling. When engaged in fighting against yourself. Learn and listen to what your absolutes are.

“Your product will never be good enough”

“People will laugh at you”

“They will think you’re a loser”

Whatever it is. List them, learn them, understand them and then ask what is the worst that can happen? Absolutes in outcome do not allow you to be flexible in your endeavor for success. Have a mission that you are absolutely about but do not let absolutes control your mission.

It’s hard to know when you set down a project forever and when to keep hitting the brick wall. The only thing you can possibly do is to figure out what are some good metrics to determine if you’re weakening the wall.

More often than not you will not have an intelligent set of tools refined enough to do said task. It is also hard to learn from other entrepreneurs because they are looking in hindsight where it only made sense to do their action.

Ambition as we traditionally think of it is drive. When someone wants to really badly to be a lawyer. We say they are ambitious. I’d like to take that and turn it slightly. I want you to think of it more like the desire to fill the gap between what you can do and the standards you set for the future you.

It’s a fine line between ambitious and cloaked avarice. The latter is the burning desire for collecting wealth for the sake of wealth. Ambition, instead, is the manifestation of being the best you every day. Driving deep into the gap between what you are now and what you want to be tomorrow.

The easiest way to close this gap is to take on all of the discomfort you can. I don’t mean overwhelm yourself but to accurately and forcefully improve aspects of yourself that will make you an order or two better than you are today.

Ambition and drive can be, as I see it, one in the same. The major difference is the massive goals you set to improve yourself. It’s hard to know just how far  you’ve gone when you have no means to measure it. For the ambitious it’s metrics that we need. This will get rough in some of the areas like empathy and communication, but there are ways to do it. Without it, you are kind of lost.

Ambition is the burning need to close the gap between who you are now and what you intend to be tomorrow.