{"id":1276,"date":"2011-08-15T01:12:36","date_gmt":"2011-08-15T08:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eekim.com\/?p=1276"},"modified":"2011-08-15T01:12:36","modified_gmt":"2011-08-15T08:12:36","slug":"my-ideal-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eekim.com\/2011\/08\/my-ideal-project\/","title":{"rendered":"My Ideal Project"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had coffee with a colleague last week, and she asked me to describe my ideal project. I didn&#8217;t even have to think about my answer. My response:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Socially impactful<\/li>\n<li>Collaborative<\/li>\n<li>Very, very hard<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I love projects that make you stop and think, &#8220;How the heck are we going to do this?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I love projects where stuff gets done, not just talked about.<\/p>\n<p>I love projects that require you to gather as many smart, passionate, caring people as possible and to get them aligned and activated in order to even have a chance at succeeding.<\/p>\n<p>I love projects where everyone is working their butts off, learning, and having the time of their lives.<\/p>\n<p>I love projects that are meaningful.<\/p>\n<p>Not all of my projects are hard, but they&#8217;re all meaningful, and I feel very fortunate about that. Still, I&#8217;m constantly craving bigger, more impactful challenges.<\/p>\n<p>Recently, I&#8217;ve been turning down a lot of speaking opportunities. I love to give talks, and I want to give more of them. They&#8217;re great excuses for me to reflect and synthesize and tell stories. But sometimes, I get the feeling that people are asking me to speak as a proxy for actually doing something.<\/p>\n<p>The more my reputation grows, the more people give weight to what I say. It&#8217;s a nice feeling.  It&#8217;s gratifying, it&#8217;s safe, and it makes me uncomfortable. I hate safe.<\/p>\n<p>In theory, I know that all of this translates to more opportunities to work on the kinds of challenges I crave. Still, I would much rather have someone say to me, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to hear what you have to say. I want you to show me.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And when my reaction is, &#8220;Wow, that sounds super hard and super scary, and if we pull it off, a lot of people will be better off,&#8221; then I know that I&#8217;ve found the right project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had coffee with a colleague last week, and she asked me to describe my ideal project. I didn&#8217;t even have to think about my answer. My response: Socially impactful Collaborative Very, very hard I love projects that make you stop and think, &#8220;How the heck are we going to do this?&#8221; I love projects [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[216,361,396,1678],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4cTFX-kA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eekim.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1276"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eekim.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eekim.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eekim.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eekim.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eekim.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eekim.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eekim.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eekim.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}