“To change one’s life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.”
– William James

I got this quote from Michael Bungay Stanier’s book Do More Great Work. Great Work, you see, is what lights you up, it’s what makes a difference. Great Work is the work that matters.

I can picture you right now, reading that phrase and I just know you’ve got an idea. Something you’d love to do. An area you could really make an impact in, that would build on all those things you kick ass at, the things you’re truly passionate about, the stuff of heroes.

I know that’s what made me buy Stanier’s book and probably all those others who’ve launched it to the #1 rank in it’s category on Amazon’s Kindle store.

So why aren’t we all out there doing our Great Work?

Can you imagine if each of us managed just one piece of Great Work this year? Not just for how awesome it would make us feel (although that would be pretty amazing). But for the difference it would make in the world when everyone was out there doing something more. Something that pushed beyond the same old same old we spend so much of our lives in.

So what’s stopping us?

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Awesome time presenting to the Beantown .NET Developers last night (thanks, Ben Day!).

My secret plan is to travel far and wide, getting developers excited about working for startups.You know, like an evangelist or something…

Update 1/1/13 – This is the version I presented at Agile 2011:

What Lean Startup topics would YOU like to learn more about?

In celebration of my 1 year anniversary with Microsoft (who’d have thunk?), I sat down with the man that started it all: Jesse Liberty, to attempt to answer the question, “what exactly does an Evangelist for Startups do?”

Yet Another Podcast #30 Abby Fichtner–Microsoft Evangelist

Abby Fichtner is a Microsoft Evangelist specializing in startups in the New England area.
She joined Microsoft recently after a fateful discussion with Jesse at CodeMash 2010, and discusses Startups, Agile programming and being a Microsoft Evangelist.

I had the pleasure of attending the Continuous Deployment Breakfast with Eric Ries last week. Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup methodology, Co-Founded IMVU who’s known for deploying code to production as many as 50 times per day!

In Agile, there’s this notion that there’s someone “out there” (e.g., the Product Owner) who has all the answers about what the product should do. However, Lean Startup says no one has all the answers. This, of course, makes sense in a startup where where the customer is To Be Determined. But I wonder if it doesn’t hold a bit of truth even for more established products… does one person really hold all the answers?

And so – if we’re not sure what the right thing to build is, our most important task becomes learning.

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