We’ve all heard the saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (if you haven’t heard it before, I guess now you have!). However, that first step can feel like an insurmountable challenge to overcome. Let’s talk about the science, stories, and my own personal experience on starting and adopting a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) mindset to my professional and personal life.

The physics behind starting

Have you ever tried moving an object, let’s say a hefty wooden chair on a carpet floor, that was at rest? You might recall that in doing so, you require a large amount of effort at first which normally results in a jolt of energy pushing the chair forward just as you’re about to give up. The odd thing is that when that chair is in motion, you require less effort to keep it in motion as you push it. Why is that?

There’s a couple things going on here:

1. First, when an object is at rest, a force, called static friction, keeps that object at rest and prevents it from moving as a result of the contact between the chair legs and the floor.

2. Second, Newton's First Law states that an object at rest tends to stay at rest. This is due to inertia which is a physical property of an object to resist change. 

The max static friction in the graph above shows the amount of force required to overcome the object’s tendency to stay at rest and propel it (quite literally sometimes) into motion where kinetic friction takes over requiring less effort and staying relatively constant. Now stick with me here…

If we apply the same concept above to the mental effort required to “just starting” (whether that’s homework, studying, cleaning the house, starting a new project, or writing this very blog post), it helps to know that the beginning will require more energy than the rest of the process.

What happens after you start?

Shell started off selling decorative seashells in the late 1800s, today they are an energy company with a valuation of over $225 billion. 

Continuing from the example of moving a chair, let’s say you mustered the force to move that chair but soon realized that your original destination is no longer the best one. So with your momentum, you redirect the chair and place it in the optimal location. Relatable enough, right? (at least it should be to my upstairs neighbor, if you’re reading this…)

The point I’m trying to make here is that you don’t have to get it right from the first time. Once you make a decision to start and get over that initial mental wall, you will uncover new information that guides your momentum to where it will have the most impact. But, if you stay still, then “an object (or idea or goal) at rest will stay at rest” and the rudest reminder to us all is that time does not stay at rest.

Adopting an MVP Mindset in Life

What is MVP? A minimum viable product (MVP) is the simplest form of a product that can be released to test an idea. It includes only the core features necessary to solve a specific problem and provide value to users. Below is my first experience with MVP (before I even knew the term):

During my 2019 internship as an Environmental, Health, Safety, and Sustainability Engineer at Raytheon’s Largo, Florida facility, I was tasked with doing something related to sustainability. As a bright-eyed junior, fresh from the college classroom, this was my first time in a large company, much less a legacy U.S. defense contractor, so naturally I had high hopes of changing the whole company in 3 months. 

After noticing employees not correctly segregating their paper waste, I had this inventive idea to make a tool that would translate pounds of various wastes (like cardboard, paper, plastic, food waste, etc.) into equivalent metrics. Aka your 1 ton of improperly segregated paper is the equivalent of wasting 17 trees. 

I had high hopes this would let the employees see the negative impact of their careless trash-throwing habits, and inspire change; however, that was not the case. After presenting my work to my manager, she told me that my project would die after I left. My tool, while a nice concept, wasn’t solving any meaningful problem and employees had their own issues to worry about. I didn’t want to believe this, but she was right. I was so focused on my solution to a made up problem that I didn’t think about what was actually needed.

Long story short, after that experience, I dug deeper to find out struggles at the operational level after the implementation of company-wide sustainability goals. This led to my creation of a tool for EHS Managers to compare and contrast GHG emissions of various waste management options (landfill, recycling, incineration, compost) for their site’s unique waste profile. That tool actually solved a problem. I ended up training all NA EHS Managers on how to use it, earned my Six Sigma Green Belt, and it was used after I left to create data-driven business justification to recycle 50 tons of construction debris. 

Not every route you go down will be the best one; however, that “negative” feedback is just as crucial as the “positive” feedback to navigate you to your north star, whatever that is.

Summary

Every day is a new start. Every day requires pushing through that max static friction and inertia. Start small, start with something familiar, and start (most importantly!) with empathy to yourself first. Before you know it, you’ll find people, information, and opportunities along the way that guide you, your product, your work, or whatever to heights you could never even have imagined when you first embarked on your journey.

References

[Graph of Static & Kinetic Friction] Probabilistic Contact State Estimation for Legged Robots using Inertial Information - Scientific Figure on ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Static-and-Kinetic-friction-force_fig1_368923273 [accessed 20 Jul 2024]

[Photo of Seashells] Photo by Stephan H. on Unsplash