20 years ago my first book, Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management, was published and sold over 100k copies, launching my career as an author. I’m grateful to everyone who has bought the book and supported my work over all these years.

As thanks: here in one short list is the best advice from that book and what I’ve learned in 30 years of leading projects and teaching leaders:

  1. Everything is a project. Every activity or goal in life can be framed as one. If you master how projects work you can master your life.
  2. The three things you need are good people, clear goals and wise leaders. If you have all three, success is possible. If you have two or less, good luck.
  3. Anyone can ship garbage on time. Many teams ship trash late. The quality bar in the world is low.
  4. Project management in many organizations is project rescue in disguise.
  5. All schedules are guesses. Better schedules consider more factors but you can never account for them all.
  6. Projects are made of people. People thrive on trust. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.
  7. Clarity creates speed. Going slow to go fast is a sign leaders have succeeded before.
  8. Good leaders earn trust, teach well and model behavior for everyone.
  9. Stupidity travels down. Fools at the bottom are easy to ignore. Stupidity from the top is hard to escape.
  10. Odds of success improve the smaller and clearer your goals are.
  11. Projects in trouble should have smaller teams and simpler ambitions.
  12. The iron triangle of cost, scope and time can not be beaten. You can not escape tradeoffs and if you try it will destroy you.
  13. The more goals you have the more ways there are to fail.
  14. All work lists should be in priority order. This is harder and more important than it sounds.
  15. You must be good at saying no, otherwise your yes means nothing.
  16. Most project failures were people problems first.
  17. Resilience beats perfection. Things go wrong but healthy teams grow from it. Calm seas make poor sailors.
  18. Learn from mistakes. Avoid blame. If you hide it or shame it you will repeat it.
  19. When in doubt, look up. Chronic problems are caused by leaders.
  20. Good people love systems that help them do good work. If they resist, something is wrong.
  21. (bonus) If you want to look back with pride, make sure your projects are used to help the world.

You can buy Making Things Happen on Amazon, Bookshop and other bookstores, in print, digital and audiobook formats.

One of my most popular books is The Myths of Innovation. It was published years ago but I’m still regularly asked to talk about the core themes of tech-hype, survivorship bias, the flaws of tech-determinism and what true innovation looks and feels like.

Recently I was invited to give a talk called Beyond The Myths of Innovation as the opening keynote at Interface – Québec this year. I briefly explained the Myth of Epiphany, but then told stories that are not in the book. It was an excellent event and I felt honored to be there.

They kindly recorded my talk and you can watch it here for free.

Four years ago, on August 4th 2010, I was hired at Automattic, makers of WordPress.com, as the first leader of Team Social. It was the beginning of a journalistic writing project that would become The Year Without Pants, an Amazon.com best book of 2013.

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There were many crazy things about the idea which is why I was so excited to do the project and why I’m proud of it now. I look back fondly on the entire experience, including all of the mistakes I made along the way. I still think often about the 20 months I worked on WordPress.com with my team and those memories stay with me today. If my biggest dream wasn’t to keep writing books, I’d probably still be there.

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg Toni Schneider, Mike Adams, Beau Lebens, Andy Peatling, all the great folks I worked with, and everyone who has supported the book since its release last year.