8. Minimum Viable Action
I used to be a total perfectionist, until I discovered there’s an easier way to get things done.
Just like a company creates minimum viable product – a version of their product that works just well enough to offer to their first customers – there is also minimum viable action:
Action that does nothing more – and nothing less – than you need it to do.
Listen to this episode to learn how to take action easier.
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Hey, it's Sarah Arnold-Hall, and you're listening to How to Take Action.
I am the queen of making things harder than they need to be, and if you are like this too, then you're gonna love today's episode because I'm gonna talk about how to get yourself to do stuff a much easier way.
So I've got an idea that I'm gonna share with you. When an entrepreneur creates a product for a startup, they are required to create what is called a Minimum Viable Product, an MVP. And that essentially means that they're creating like a prototype, a thing that they can get out into the world just to test it. Because instead of creating like the entire product straight away, the Minimum Viable Product is the minimum version that needs to happen. Like it's got none of the bells and whistles. It's just got like the absolute necessary pieces to test the idea and see if it works in the world. So I'm thinking about something like Facebook, which initially started out as something completely different from what it is right now, and they just put out this version and just tested it and put it out to the world like immediately and just waited for feedback to see what would happen. And then they adjusted it from there.
And so off the back of this idea of having a Minimum Viable Product , I've come up with this idea of the Minimum Viable Action and what a Minimum Viable Action is it's an action that does the job, does nothing more, nothing less, than the job it needs to do.
And I think the minimum viable action can have a lot of different names. So the other day when I was writing emails, I was calling this the Minimum Viable Email. For some reason, when I go to write emails, my brain is like, it needs to be perfect. We've gotta get this absolutely right. It needs to like convey everything. And I start to question myself like, should I put dear or hi or should I have sincerely or best or thanks on the end? And you know, do I need to have paragraphs and how many exclamation marks do I need to put? Should I have this exclamation mark there? Should I, should it be more of a formal tone? And it's like you start to get obsessed or I start to get obsessed, I should say, with like creating this final product almost when really a Minimum Viable Email would do it, it to, to get the result that I want. I don't need to worry about whether it's is dear or hi. What matters is I'm the question that I'm asking or the conversation that I'm having, and so I've been making myself do Mini Viable Emails, which is really just emails that do the job they ask the question, they say the thing, they're still polite and nice, but they don't need to be stressed over.
So I came up with a four step process for writing a Minimum Viable Email, and it looks like this: one, you write the first thoughts that come to your mind. Two, you do not edit. Three, you press send. Four, you save a million hours of your life and the person receiving it doesn't even notice a difference. So the Minimum Viable Email is just one example of where this might show up in your life, but you could also do the Minimum Viable facebook Post or a Minimum Viable Podcast.
I just created a Minimum Viable Podcast about regret. It is like, I don't know how long it's gonna be once I've edited it, but like a minute, two minutes long, and it's a podcast episode and I know some people create 40 minute podcast episodes, which is fantastic and amazing, but they don't have to be that long. What is the key, what is the point? I need to get the idea across the, the, the thing that I'm talking about. So the Minimum Viable Actions for that is just show up, record it, publish it, that's it. And it can be two minutes, it can be one. It could be one second if I wanted it to be, if I could get the idea across in that amount of time. And so I wanna offer that. You don't have to do that too. You can be on a quest like me for the Minimum Viable Αction that's gonna get you the results.
Think about how many decades of your life could you save if you just started taking Minimum Viable Actions. Where are you making your life harder than it needs to be? Where are you over complicating it? Where are you making things ridiculous? When they actually could just be a thing, when you could just send the email, when you could just pick up the phone and make the phone call instead of turning it into a giant drama of perfectionism and creating everything up to like the ultimate final result. What if you didn't need to do that? What if you could just do stuff and create.
Another example was when I realized that I didn't have to, this is gonna sound so silly for anyone who does, who doesn't spend their time posting online, but for me, I always thought I had to have a photo because on Instagram you can't post without a photo. Like it makes you put up a photo cause the whole platform is about putting up photos. But Facebook doesn't make you do that. But I had gotten in the habit of always putting up a photo with my posts on Facebook. And then it crossed my mind. I was like, wait a second. I could just treat Facebook like it's Twitter. And just write in the, in the box and then just post it like we used to in the old days. We could just make a status. When I first joined Facebook, that's what everybody did. We just made statuses and oh my goodness, my statuses are so embarrassing. Sometimes Facebook comes up with those memories, and my ones are like, I'm like, delete, delete, delete, delete. What was I saying? What was I thinking?
But the point is, I kind of wanna go back to how we used to do that in the sense of just treating the online space like it was something you could just post, instead of needing to have this perfect creation. Which I think a lot of people feel the pressure to do now, especially since so many people use social media as their job. Like there's content creators out there. Their content, they're getting paid directly for their content, which is not me, by the way. I've never had, I've never taken payment for any of the content that I create, like I don't have any ads or anything on any of my content, but because so many people do, and there's so much professional content out there now, it can really feel like you have to create this perfect content.
Another example is, let's just say your goal is to meditate. You don't have to meditate for an hour every day. When I meditated for 365 days in a row, some of the days I was just counting like deliberate breaths. If I just sat there, closed my eyes and breathed in and out, I would count this because it was continuing the habit on. I mean, I wouldn't count it if I was just breathing throughout the day. That's not really meditating. But if I was deliberately meditating for just a few moments, that's meditating, right? That's still getting more benefit than if I wasn't doing it at all.
So I think it's really key to start thinking. How we can get ourselves to just do the Minimun Viable Thing that moves us forward, that gets us a result, that actually gets us going in the right direction that we need to go in without all the fluff, without making it so hard for ourselves.
Derek Sivers, who is an entrepreneur and a writer, talks about how the goal is not to write more. The actual goal of writing is to just get the idea across, and so he has this whole idea around getting all your ideas out onto a page and then distilling it down to only like the most important key words, highlighting those, deleting the rest, and almost having an outline and then just publishing that outline. His books are actually just like a bunch of tweets, practically, like a bunch of tweets that make sense and all fit together but, there's no more fluff than needs to be there.
He is a master of the Minimum Viable Action, and I think there's so much freedom in this idea of the Minimum Viable Action. Like today, when I was doing my hair getting ready for this episode, I was thinking like, oh, I'm gonna have to create an episode and blah, blah, blah. And I had all these thoughts and I was thinking, oh, do I have to do it now? Do I, oh, could I do it later? Maybe I can squeeze it later in my day. And then, I realized, no, like I'm making this harder than it needs to be. All I have to do is sit down in front of the camera and the microphone and press record and actually create something that matters that can impact people. And I was like, oh, I can do that. It might take me five minutes, it might take me 20 minutes. It doesn't matter how long it takes, I just have to create the Minimum Viable Podcast that's gonna go out there and help someone, because that's really my goal, ultimately is just to help with this podcast, I wanna help people take action. So I'm like, that's all I have to do. Why am I trying to make it into this perfect podcastness? It doesn't need to be. It can just be a Minimum Viable Podcast.
Minimum Viable Dinner is one of my favourite things to do ever. I can't stand cooking at all. I really hate it. . So if it's my turn to cook, I am making us Minimum Viable Dinner what do we need to have? What do we need to get in our diets? What is important? How can I make this as easy as possible and as yummy as possible? And like the least amount of effort required? How can I do the Minimum Viable Dinner that I can make? I think that's a good one.
I would love to hear what Minimum Viable Actions you are taking in your life. So if you're watching on YouTube, then definitely leave me a comment about what your minimum viable action is that you like to take or that you're going to start taking, cause I think it could make a huge difference. It's making a big difference in my life.
So, That is your challenge for this week. Take some Minimum Viable Action and I will talk to you in the next episode.
Hey, if you enjoyed listening to this podcast, you're gonna love being coached by me. We're gonna solve your specific action taking struggles so you can hit any goal you set.
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