There are two general schools of thought for achieving success.
The first approach to success is Slow and Steady. If you break down your major goals into small, manageable achievements, you will eventually reach them all. This approach is perfectly encapsulated by the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu, whose most famous quote is known throughout the entire world:
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
The second approach is best defined as Giant Steps. Like the John Coltrane album of the same name, sometimes success comes in the form of a huge, disruptive event that changes everyone’s frame of reference.
This is the approach that most of the world’s most famous innovators and visionaries live by. The iPhone was Steve Jobs’ Giant Step. Tesla is Elon Musk’s Giant Step – the list goes on.
It’s true that none of these successful tech entrepreneurs achieved their fame and success overnight. None of them could have succeeded without many long years of trial and error. But their approach was always of the Giant Step variety – taking massive actions and compounding them into a rock-solid matrix of achievement.
This approach has a lot to offer web agency owners looking for a way to propel their careers forward. If you prepare yourself for massive actions, you will be able to capitalize on opportunities for massive gains when they occur.
How Do Massive Actions Work?
At this point, it’s probably a good idea to define massive action. The best way to do that is to cover what massive action is not:
- Starting a hundred different far-fetched projects despite not having the resources necessary to complete any of them is not massive action.
- Shifting your attention from starting a project to stopping it because some detail isn’t just right is not massive action.
- Trying the same thing over and over again even though it doesn’t work is not massive action.
- Setting intimidating goals can be massive action, but adjusting them later on in order to be “realistic” is not massive action.
The Giant Steps approach to success requires putting thought and energy into setting the stage for massive actions when they can be taken. It means going above and beyond so much, and so often, that it becomes the status quo.
This means expecting more of yourself in nearly every situation. It means raising your standards and consequent expectations that are designed to lead you towards your personal vision of success.
This way, when opportunities arise – and they will – you will be able to capitalize on them to the fullest possible extent. You will be in the perfect position to leverage a small benefit into a major advantage. But this requires careful planning and reliable infrastructure.
Putting Giant Steps Into Practice
Here is an example of how the Giant Steps approach could work in a real-life web development situation:
You’re a small-time web developer with a few years of professional experience, looking for a way forward in a tough, competitive industry. You might be a one-developer operation, or you could have a few employees – in any case, you’re far from the big-time web developers drawing in six-figure projects.
One of your past clients works for an enterprise-level company with more than 1,000 employees. You developed a personal blog for them a few years ago, but kept in touch with them afterward and maybe even convinced them to sign up for a website retainer agreement.
Nonetheless, it was a small project and you never really expected anything more from it. But that client who spent the last few years climbing the corporate ladder is now a major decision-maker at that company, and web development is one of the areas under their purview.
It turns out that they spent tens of thousands of dollars and countless man-hours trying to develop a web portal application for their customers, and the web agency they entrusted the job to hasn’t delivered a quality result. Your previous client asks you the big question:
“Can you make a better web portal application? We need it done yesterday.”
This is the kind of opportunity that a Giant Steps thinker doesn’t pass up. But how can a small web agency complete an enterprise-level web application in one-tenth of the time it took a major development agency to do the same thing?
Set and Achieve Unrealistic Expectations Through Collaboration
Most web agency owners would be intimidated to have to deal with a situation like this. The ability to jumpstart your career working for major enterprises is clearly desirable, but you don’t have the resources to deliver results on that level.
But someone who is accustomed to taking massive actions wouldn’t see things that way. In fact, you don’t have to have the resources you think you need – you just need to find people with those resources and leverage their offerings to meet your needs.
Instead of telling your client that you just can’t do it, you can pull resources from other web developers and white label services to create an instant, scalable team with all of the skills you need to complete the task. You can create and lead a team of developers to face the challenge and deliver the results right on time.
Yes, you’ll have to pay all those collaborators for working with you, but you gain something valuable in return. You have transformed yourself from a small-time web developer to one capable of handling huge projects and stringent deadlines for a major enterprise – you just entered the big leagues in one Giant Step.
The Giant Steps Method – Prepare for Massive Actions Beforehand
The above example illustrates how big-picture thinking and leadership mentality can generate long-lasting success in the world of web development. But actually putting those thoughts into practice takes planning, clarity, and communication.
If you’re scrambling to put a team together at the last minute, you’ll never have time to implement and deploy communication infrastructure critical to any large-scale project. You won’t be able to find all of the talents you need at the drop of a dime – you’ll need time that you may not have when a big opportunity falls into your lap.
You may have even found yourself in this situation before, yet been unable to capitalize on it properly because you lacked the infrastructure to make it happen. This is natural. Like billionaire Virgin Group founder Richard Branson says, “Opportunities are like buses – there’s always another one coming!”
You have to prepare beforehand and be ready for that bus when it comes. This means establishing contact with white label web developers like UnlimitedWP and thinking ahead of what you would need to capitalize on a major project if it came your way.
Reach out to us and let us know you’re interested in taking Giant Steps to web development success. Our team will help you make it happen.