Prabodh Kumar Enumula

If you’ve watched cricket in the 90’s, you would have heard of the Australian player Micheal Bevan. He was famous for pulling victories out of no where for Australia and in my view, he is one of the greatest finishers of the ODI cricket. M.S.Dhoni also belongs to the same category and finishing things off (and not only because he had great technical skill ) made him one of the great players from India .

Whether it is a sports team or product dev team , I see a pattern. There are lot of skilled players who are great starters, they have great new ideas, they set the initial momentum really well and things roll. There is abundance of talent for great starters but not so much for great finishers. I have summarised two important things which can help one become finisher

Don’t fall into the trap of false achievement/completion

While it is good to break down goals into targets, we must make sure we dont set false finish lines. It gives sense of achievement even before you complete things.

When you are making progress towards your goal, you must move your finish lines too. If you don’t, false sense of completion will make you loose steam in the middle and make you crawl at the end.

Eliminate your Biggest risk at the beginning

This has been said by lot of people in lot of settings, but we tend to miss this while implementing something. We tend to leave certain things which are not interesting to us, mundane or which we are not confident about completing them to the last phase of the cycle. This is usually a recipe for disaster. Whether you like it or not, eliminate your biggest risk at the beginning.

Like i said at the beginning, if you are a finisher , you will be more valuable in your team. Go finish your things. I will stop writing now and finish my pending story.