This is why you can’t finish anything

About Death Valley

Today I want to touch on the topic of managing your personal and team projects. You see, each project both team and personal is subject to the same law: the Death Valley.

When you get started, there’s a burst of energy, you’re coming up with new ideas and taking more and more assignments. Energy spreads, but results are far from the expectations and the end of the project is far away. Then comes the valley of death.

So the Death Valley comes from the so-called Emotional Cycle of Change and here is its graph.

Until I learned about the Death Valley all my pet projects looked like this.

Numerous hacking projects and ultimate hacking tools were buried by the enormous weight of the valley of death.

So the Emotional Cycle of Change consists of 5 stages. Let’s say you’re picking up a new hacking project.

Stage 1. Uninformed Optimism.

Your hacking target is new and tempting. You will learn so many new useful skills or maybe practice something you waited forever to get your hands on. It will be so much fun and enjoyment! And image this hacking thrill when you finally successfully pwned your target in so many ways! Heck, you can even get decent money out of it if it has bug bounty. Pure pleasure!

Stage 2. Informed pessimism

You spent so much time and effort with almost no feasible results. New tricks you hoped to learn seem not working or maybe you aren’t that smart to pull them off. It becoming obvious that this target isn’t exactly a piece of cake. Maybe it’s even that one time when your target is well programmed and has proper protection measures implemented.

Stage 3. Valley of death or Valley of despair

It’s the lowest point. So far it seems you achieved exactly nothing. With no vulnerabilities found you feel like either your target is impenetrable or you’re too stupid. Maybe… you just lost it. Maybe you’re not good enough for hacking, not even speaking about bug bounties. And with so much time spent with no benefits gain, maybe it’s not worth it. Maybe it’s just time to give up.

Stage 4. Informed optimism

You did something and suddenly things seem not as dark as they used to be. Maybe you took a break, came up with new ideas, researched your target hard enough to get an insight, talked to your mentor, or maybe found just one minor bug which showed you that your target is not perfect. Either way, you’re starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.

Stage 5. Success and fulfillment

You finally did it, you sneaky bastard! Slowly but surely you hacked the poop out of it! You finally start feeling like yourself again and feeling proud of your new achievement. You’re thinking there might be lessons out there. But what are they?

Solutions

And now I’m gonna give you 3 easy tricks to overcome this issue. No, no. I won’t. I’m sorry, but it’s just not how things work in real life. I’ll give you some tips, that might help you manage Death Valley. But it’s always gonna be there. And it’s up to you to find your personal best way of getting out of it.

• Number one tip is to keep in mind that Death Valley will always come. No matter what you start, if this is something new, you will end up in the Death Valley. Your emotion graph might look different, but no matter how hard you try, you can’t escape being in the valley. It’s the law of psychology. When the despair hit and I think maybe this whole project is a total fail, It really helps me to remember that this is just a stage. And it will pass like all the stages before it.
• Flexing, also known as “Stop starting and start finishing”. Often the valley comes when there’s too much effort spent with very little results. And your energy is spread across many different points. Maybe your goals are too ambitious and you should split them into multiple projects. It’s a good idea to cut from your project anything that isn’t 100% essential. Make it as bare-bones as you can to make it possible to get out of Death Valley. You can always polish, add more features and do additional stuff later on.
• Resolve as much uncertainty as you can. When you’re doing something new sometimes there’s so much uncertainty goes on, that you can barely manage it. You can make a plan for your project resolving any uncertainty that you have. I like to ask for help with this because I often find myself being too confused with all entanglement of emotions that goes on. Dealing with uncertainty and making decisions is really hard for our brains, so eliminating all this really helps to get out of the valley.

So, please, please don’t give up. It’s better to complete a shitty project than never finish a perfect one. Just finish your project and make a new one, and do it 1% better. Not 100%, not 10%, but just 1%.

Final Thoughts

So those were my thoughts on project and change management. I think that skill of dealing with the valley of death might be the most important skill for my entire career. And the good thing is you can use it everywhere as this emotional cycle of change is universal across all humans. I go through it on every video I make and this knowledge helps me not to give up. And the more I think about Death Valley, the more I start to feel like it’s even not a bad thing…