Documenting is scary because it's committing
I was sitting across from a prospective client recently, a founder who runs a fascinating marketing research firm. When I started describing how we could work together, he said, "We don't need to deconstruct our “genius” — we need to document all of the boring stuff.”The way he said it made me think, isn’t that precisely what makes something great? A commitment to doing the “boring” stuff, consistently, for a sustained period of time?I spent a full week in June at a state park with 99 other members of my extended family celebrating our 50th annual family reunion. 100 people! Fifty years!!!Legend has it my grandfather’s sister invited their other sister and family to join hers for a trip in 1976, and the rest is literal history. My grandfather’s siblings and their kids (and now their kids’ kids’ kids) started to show up for the last full week of June every year. And they just kept doing it, for 5 whole decades.My curiosity about our family tradition had never been more piqued than it was this year.
How exactly did this come about?
Was there a single special person who made it happen and made it stick?
Are we like, really remarkable people with super special DNA?
I spent quite a bit of time asking my older family members all of those questions. It turns out, we’re a pretty typical family. Not special at all. There were people who carried the burden of organizing and communicating over the years, but there was no one person—it regularly changed hands.
The reason my family celebrated a 50th annual family reunion is because people simply kept showing up every year. They booked the cabins, packed the cars, made the drive. It’s a pretty boring story, actually. A pretty boring story that’s leaving a really cool legacy.So sitting there with this prospective client, I thought: Athletes, performers, surgeons, whoever—they all put in a million reps before anything looks great. The million boring reps are the greatness.Why is committing to the boring stuff so hard? Because committing our time, attention, and effort to anything is scary—and it should be. All we have is this one life to live.
Deciding "this is how we do it" means admitting you've decided not to do it a different way. And what if there’s a better way?That's one of the (many) reasons people struggle with developing a single source of truth for their teams. Documentation isn't just an administrative task—it's an act of commitment. And we avoid it for the same reason we avoid any commitment—because it makes something real that felt much easier to leave undefined.My family didn't build a 50-year tradition by doing something extraordinary once. They did something ordinary, over and over, until it became extraordinary.Committing to the boring stuff—and meaning it—is the whole game.
Elizabeth