Most “big projects” are just a long sequence of small ones that didn’t fall apart.
I. There Are No Big Tasks
There’s no such thing as a big project. There are only small ones that took longer.
The Hoover Dam wasn’t “built.” It was poured—one bucket, one shovel, one argument at a time. The Apollo Program didn’t “go to the moon.” It ran a few thousand small experiments until one of them ended up there.
From a distance, those things look heroic. Up close, they look like paperwork, late nights, and people who were good at finishing what they started.
We love the illusion of scale. We call something “big” because it’s comforting—it gives us a reason to postpone. “This is too important to rush.” “We’ll do it right when we have time.” But every delay, every meeting, every new layer of planning is just avoidance with better stationery.
Most people don’t fail because they take on too much. They fail because they never learned how to do the small stuff with care.
II. Excellence Is a Habit, Not a Grand Gesture
Everyone thinks they’ll rise to the occasion. They won’t. You fall to the level of your habits.
I’ve seen teams say they’ll bring their “A-game” for the launch, the investor demo, the big deal. Then they trip over the basics: missing metrics, vague tickets, poor handoffs. They think they’re saving their focus for the big thing, not realizing this was the big thing.
A “major release” is just a thousand tiny acts of clarity: a clean commit message, a useful comment, a meeting that ends on time, a Slack message that actually includes context. If you can’t do those small things with precision, you don’t get to the big ones.
People don’t suddenly become excellent when stakes get high. They just get louder.
Excellence is repetition—done calmly, when no one’s watching. It’s how you send an email, how you review a pull request, how you decide what “done” actually means. Do those right, and you’ll build momentum. Do them sloppily, and you’ll spend the next quarter cleaning up your own trail.
III. Complexity Is Inevitable. Confusion Isn’t.
Every ambitious project starts with a mountain of unknowns. You can’t remove complexity, but you can move it around until it stops blocking you.
That’s what breaking things down is for—it’s not “process,” it’s self-defense. You take the scariest part and make it smaller until it’s testable. You turn one giant question—“Will this work?”—into a dozen smaller ones you can actually answer.
That’s all Agile ever meant before it got turned into ceremony: shrink the risk until you can see it.
Don’t build the full thing and pray. Don’t plan for six months. Don’t pretend a roadmap is the same as progress. Instead, isolate the riskiest assumption and run the cheapest, fastest test possible.
You’ll still make mistakes, but they’ll be smaller, cheaper, and less humiliating.
This is the quiet art of good product work: not eliminating uncertainty, just containing it.
IV. How to See the Small Tasks Hiding Inside the Big Goal
Recognizing that “everything is small” is one thing. Acting like it’s true is harder.
Here’s a simple way to start acting like a grown-up about it.
1. Define “Done,” but be specific.
Don’t say “launch the feature.” Say, “100 users used the feature this week and engagement went up 15%.” Vague goals are the perfect hiding place for procrastination.
2. Work backward.
What has to happen right before “done”? And before that? Keep going until you get to something you can actually finish today. That’s your starting point.
3. Hunt for the unknowns.
Mark every task that includes an assumption. Those are the ones that will blow up on you. Break them into smaller experiments until the unknowns are small enough to survive contact with reality.
4. Ship the smallest thing that matters.
Don’t ask “what’s the full version?” Ask “what’s the smallest real thing that will prove we’re not insane?” That’s how you move from planning to learning.
The trick isn’t building fast—it’s building with feedback loops tight enough that being wrong is survivable.
V. The Compounding Effect of Small Steps
Big things don’t happen all at once. They just stop looking small after enough time.
The Hoover Dam feels mythic now, but in 1933 it was just people doing careful work in awful heat.
The Apollo missions look like destiny, but they were just well-run experiments chained together by teams who didn’t romanticize failure.
That’s how most real progress works. You do the small things well. You stack enough of them. And eventually, people start calling it vision.
The secret is that there is no secret. Just consistent, disciplined, small steps—executed with clarity, attention, and some measure of grace under fatigue.
Stop waiting for your “big moment.” Identify the smallest useful thing you can do today, and do it well.
Do that again tomorrow.
Excellence compounds.
So does neglect.