When Doing Something New, Use The Petri Dish Method

What items in my weekly to-do list usually look like

1. Take a webinar
2. Finish that idea and launch it on product-hunt
3. Start that customer support blog

As a rule of thumb, anything that makes it into my to-do list has to be done
unless it becomes completely redundant!

But how do I go about it?

Because most of the time so I know very little about how to actually get it done.

For example – let’s talk about taking a webinar

List of things I already know about taking a webinar

1. What’s the topic and why am I doing this. I.e. what’s the value that I want to create for the audience.
2. That I am supposed to use zoom
3. And that people do take webinars and some ebven make a lot of money

I have no idea about any of the rest

And don’t even get me started about my marvelous storytelling skills! lol

So how do I go about it?

There are a lot of things that I must know in order to pull it off!

But I don’t!

There are a lot of unknowns…

1. How do I define who the audience is?
2. Is what I am offering really relevant to them?
3. Will they show up?
4. How do I get my message across?
5. What’s the right time in sequence to send reminders?

Mind you it’s a weekly to-do list with at least one or two similar tasks that in themselves have a lot of sub tasks and a lot of unknowns

That leaves only one practical way to make it happen.

The Petri-dish Method!

You start with the questions

1. What are the core essential elements without which the task cannot be completed?
2. How can I test the whole experiment at a much smaller scale?
   • Things are far easier to control!
   • Take a lot less time!
   • And still give a fairly accurate idea of all the unknowns!

But…

You already know all the crap about this line so here’s something you’ve missed

When stakes are high nerves are high

With a lot of unknowns high nerves and your dilated pupils looking closely at the million ways it could fail and how catastrophic your life will be after that…

The worst part?

With all that pressure and so many unknowns, the brain just looks for a reason to abandon and run in the opposite direction!

As a result, you become an abandoner instead of a finisher!

What if it wasn’t so catastrophic?

In fact what if it didn’t matter all that much at all?

Then I bet you would do it as an experimenter doing it for the first time…

Because that’s what it really is!

You’re doing it for the first time it’s a goddamn experiment!

If you do if it’s something big where the consequences will be big… that’s unnecessary pressure!

Instead, try it out on something expendable.

Then take the learnings and apply!

Experiment on the Petri dish learn the proportions and then apply the knowledge while building the factory

Start of people also call it Lean/MVP approach