An Iterative Approach to Life

If you read the about section on the blog then you already know that I am a geek at heart. I’ve spent more than 20 years in the software development space which is on a perpetual quest to get more efficient at pushing new products and features out the door.

When I first got started large projects involved a tremendous amount of pre-planning that often did not guarantee success. By the time the planning was complete the need for the project had often changed or the window had closed. You can imagine everyone’s frustration. The company didn’t become more profitable and those who were pouring their hearts and souls into the efforts felt like failures.

It’s not all together unlike the ginormous efforts that many of us make to change things in our personal lives. We make a New Year’s resolution to get fit. That results in setting an often unreasonable goal, purchasing expensive equipment and memberships, and an inevitable crash and burn when the changes necessary for sustainability don’t stick and we revert to old patterns.

The same kind of thing happens when we want to clean up our financial lives. We hear that someone out there has paid off $165,000 of debt in 6 months and we’re ready to sign up for whatever strategy worked for them. Maybe it did, but they are apparently the anomaly.

The Agile Manifesto, originally written to improve the software development process, has been more recently applied to business processes, and so why not the rest of our life? If you have been intrigued by recent movements in minimalism or financial independence, you may find the concept of Agile For Life a useful complement.