🐾 Coming Up with New Hard Steps

So how do you come up with a Hard Step? I'll take you through it step by step.

Before we start, we need a value to work with. Let's take this one, that I articulated at the beginning of the year:

Step 1: Come up with potential Hard Steps

When I try to come up with Hard Steps, I imagine myself in a situation in which I managed to live by my value. It worked out. What happened? Why did it work out? What was I able to do?

Fred did this back at home when he focused on what actions he would have needed to take to live by his value. What would be the instructions of a step by step recipe to get to that point?

I like to draw a timeline on a sheet of paper and pencil in the actions when I would have needed to take them. This way I can see what's missing between steps I already know of and I remember to not only think of the time of interaction itself but also of preparation, setup and other actions that take place outside the interaction I might have at first thought about, the date in Fred's case. You can think of this as a type of user journey or recipe for living by your value.

Next up I try to make the actions I came up with so far HARDER. To zoom in on exactly what is challenging about them. Whenever I encounter something that seems inevitable and potentially difficult to do, I ask myself what exactly is hard about doing this — how I might get stuck. And what I need to do, anticipate, or take into account to move through it.

In this first stage, I try to come up with many many potential hard steps, knowing I can polish them later. When I stumble upon a resource I need, a state I need to be in, social skills, potential distractions I need to avoid, I write them all down and know I can turn them into hard steps as I go along.

👉 Example — Potential Hard Steps Value: To approach scheduling as a conductor of my short and precious time on earth - The right calendar-, scheduling- and project management app to use. - Gaining a picture of a well-lived life at different time scales. - Navigating a good plan in the turmoil of spontaneous events and impulses - Not take on superfluous work projects I don't care about. - Not get sucked into my phone or TV. - A babysitter.

Sometimes what I find is a state I need to be in (Fred might have needed to be attuned to his internal experience), a resource I need to have in place (a babysitter in the box above, a break in the flow of conversation for Fred) or something I need another person to do (not get up and leave on Fred's date). When I stumble upon one of those states, I try to turn them into actions.

To do that, I ask myself:

• What do I need this resource for? What underlying action I need to fulfill does this resource address? The babysitter helps me "navigate child care constraints on my time."
• What is it that I can do to get closer to that state or resource, maybe long before the situation in which I want to live by my value ever comes about? Fred might want to meditate to find it easier to track his internal experience when much is happening around him.
• Is there a way to make these instructions ever more actionable, taking each slightly more concrete state I articulate and turning it into an action I can take? "Not take on superfluous work projects I don't care about" includes some of these more concrete steps: Reflect on what I care about regularly. Assess how new work projects relate to what I care about. Trade-off different things I care about. Remember to prioritize before spending time or committing to new projects. Remember opportunity cost before committing. Sitting with the discomfort of disappointing others. Etc..

But there is still more! Sometimes, when the thinking-through-it-step-by-step approach doesn't work, I use neat cheat-sheets to come up with Hard Steps.

One of them helps me zoom in on aspects of the situation that might be hard to deal with. To scan the context I am in for aspects I might need to take into account. The other helps me find concrete verbs to make high-level instructions more actionable. I'll tell you about the first one right now. The second one shall be revealed a bit later.

Cheat Sheet 1: Challenging aspects of the situation

Verbs that often go along with these aspects are added in grey. Check out the comments to see how I'd use these to help Fred find hard steps of his value (to act from a place of clarity about his own experience).

• Consequences living by this value might have (to) assess, accept, sit with, make space for, hear out, mitigate, prepare for, remember, change, ignore

Step 2: Screen and Improve

You have a massive list of possible hard steps. Yay! Now it's time to doublecheck and polish them. I usually go through my list of hard steps and try to figure out how each one could be better:

Cheat Sheet 2: Action Verbs 🦸🏽‍♂️🦹🏻‍♀️

That fourth one, writing an instruction that could be followed, is usually most challenging. That is where the second Cheat Sheet comes into play. When I find myself unsure how to break a single action that is not sufficiently instructive to act on into several more specific actions, I look at this list of verbs:

What does that look like in action?

Here is what that would look like in the example from before:

A Summary: What is not a Hard Step and thus kick-out-able?

• Hard Steps are not problems to fix in the product unrelated to your value. They follow the value, not the circumstance or product. I find this relaxing: your redesign does not have to address everything wrong with your product so you can live by your value, only the relevant Hard Steps.
• Hard Steps are not exclusively context specific. If you find a Hard Step that applies only when you talk with your grandmother on Tuesday afternoons over tea but in no other situation ever on earth, and your value is not itself about this specific situation, then it might be easier to practice your value in a different context.
• Hard Steps are not states, necessary resources, or outcomes. They might be the steps you need to take to achieve those states. Let's call this Outsourcing Agency: You see the problem you need to fix, but place the responsibility for solving it in your environment, treat it as out of reach. Take it back! How can you change your fortune? How do you position yourself to this obstacle to grapple with it and overcome it? If you don't know, ask for help — turning states and needed resources into Hard Steps is often way easier when working together with someone who looks at your situation from the outside.
• The consequences of living by your value are not Hard Steps in themselves. How you mitigate them and orient towards them, how you act to make the cost of living by your value bearable, all those might be Hard Steps.
• Similarly, goals and expectations that crowd out your value are not Hard Steps. Even though balancing different concerns and recognising crowding out could be very concrete Hard Steps — but again, this is about how you face the challenge, the internal process you go through to orient as you act, not about the external circumstances.
• Relatedly, having other people see or understand your value are not Hard Steps, unless your value is concerned with a form of connection that requires that specific way of them relating to you. Most of the time, how other people relate to you living by your value is something to take into account and how you orient towards that might very well be a Hard Step. But again: this is about your actions required to take this into account, not about the external outcome itself.
• Naming an action, but one that is abstract, high-level, most definitely not a plug and play instruction. No problem, just break it down more. Look for the Hard Steps hiding in your abstracted action by asking: What exactly is hard to do about this?