Pascal Laliberté

Pascal Laliberté, from Ottawa, Canada

Everyone Wants Progress

A weekly post for software creatives. Every Saturday AM.
everyonewantsprogress.com

I’m a contributor to Bullet Train, the Ruby on Rails starter kit, mostly on theming and UI components.

Coming soon, a week of office hours to advance a bit further on your Hotwire app, all of us as a group.

Ten articles, one a week, on buyer psychology.
To help with your products, help with freelancing, help with sales.
sharpen.page/ten

ReadWith (readwith.club) — A novel way to lead reading groups.

I’ve been recording my reading notes in ReadWith for these books.

If you could read 3 books, if only you knew a friend who wanted to read it too, what would you read? Give me a shout with your answer.

A few specialized service offerings, and a couple products from over the years.

Design is best when done in tandem with the implementation. Knowing the limits of the material you work with makes for a better design.
There’s a particular urgency to surpass ourselves and to part with our ego, so that we know how to construct things rather than just react to things.
Most times when we hit an either/or mindset, there’s usually a third way.
We’re complicated people, and we’re full of paradoxes. Learning to bridge those paradoxes helps us be better with others.
There’s a way to achieve multiple things at once, so long as you ruthlessly put things in the right order. That way, the first thing will feed into the second one and into the third, and all the way down, letting you achieve them all.
To-do lists are only a little helpful, because they’re usually written as wish-for lists. I found that writing have-done lists to be the most helpful kind of list to write.
Constraints are something to welcome. Annoyed? That points to something important. Afraid? That’s an even better sign you’re on the right track.

I value being intentional and thorough, getting to the bottom of things and doing the right thing. Going deep brings joy.
I value starting small, iterating, doing what matters, betting on the long-haul and respecting the natural rhythm of things. Instead of taking a big ambitious bite out of life, why not bet on what will always be true, like the power of compound interest and doing stuff that’s a little scary but at your level?
In relationships, I value authenticity, complicity, openness and truth. Open up. It’s scary but it matters.
And I value improving myself and making a good environment for others to grow in. Stepping on some toes? Better to step on your own first.

These questions help me stay true, and they help me make good choices. I hope they’re useful to you too:

What am I so convinced of? Any time I feel conflicted, agitated, or that my options are limited, I inspect and identify my mental models, those invisible lenses through which we distort how we see reality. I make it a habit to put my finger on my mental models, so I drive them and they don’t drive me. Every time I did this, I was able to solve the right problem, build the right thing, and help people in the way they needed the help. And the second question is:
What will I be celebrating? Instead of writing lists of things to do, or of things I want to achieve, I write lists of things I’ll have achieved in a future place in time. I call these have-done lists. That subtle change of position helps me visualize what’s essential, what’s central and what to ship first, and also what’s a distraction and what to ignore until after that date. To write these lists, I use Taskpaper for Mac with a custom stylesheet.

Hope they help.

Subscribe to Everyone Wants Progress, my newsletter for software creatives. Every Saturady AM.