In my experience, friction is the real killer of everything.
It is not the lack of experience, knowledge or even time. Yes, all of these are of course constraints that we have to deal with, but nothing kills as quick as friction.
When I refer to friction here, I do not imply that progress needs to be fast, it is completely fine (and expected) that we should be stuck with certain aspects for longer.
In fact, progress should be slow at times, progress varies a lot throughout the lifetime of a project.
However, once progress already is slow, the time to regain momentum is critical.
Once you have realized that the progress ship has come to a halt, you usually have two choices.
- You can push through so that maybe our progress ship can pick up a bit of momentum.
- You simply put the progress ship in full astern, you focus on another aspect, perspective, or completely try something different.
The real (killer) problem arises when (2) is not feasible or even possible. There may be no other alternative path that you can try, no other aspects that you can switch your focus on.
The only alternative for (2) is simply abandoning ship.
This is where (1) also becomes dangerous, pushing might only cause more damage to our beloved progress ship.
You will try and try again, but no matter what we do it (feels like), things only get worse over time.
This, my dear sailor, is what I call the friction reefs.
This is where most projects come to die a slow and painful death.