Your inputs are fixed the moment you start. The lever is on the output side, so hack the outputs to point where you're going.
Incentives run everything.
You don’t move toward a goal unless there’s a reward waiting for you at the other end. No reward, no movement. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s physics.
An incentive is just an output you’ve decided counts.
Here’s the move most people miss: hack the forced output with some you’ve tacked on yourself.
A client hires you to build a website. That’s the forced output. Fine. Ship the website. But while you’re building it, you can also be stacking a second output. And a third. And a fifth. Ones you picked. Ones that point where you want to go. Same hours. Same effort. A pile of extra incentives pulling you forward on work you were already going to do.
A 5-year-old sits down at a piano.
You can’t judge her on “sounded good”. She can’t do that yet. But “sat at the piano for 20 minutes” isn’t an output either. It’s nothing. Kids can sit for 20 minutes and learn absolutely nothing. And they do.
The right output is something like “played the C-major scale three times without a mistake.” That’s measurable. It’s produced. And most importantly, it points somewhere. It points at “becomes a pianist.”
Every stage has its own output. The output for a 5-year-old is different from the output for a 15-year-old is different from the output for a professional. But it’s always an output. Never inputs.
An output isn’t just a thing you produced. It’s a thing you produced that points in a direction.
Want to know if an output is the right one? Ask: if I keep hitting this output, week after week, where do I end up?
Here’s the part most people miss.
Let’s say you land a website design project. The client wants a site. They’re paying for a site. Ship them a site they love. That’s the job, right?
Sure. But that’s only one output. And the client picked it. You’re leaving a pile of outputs on the table.
You’re going to put in the hours no matter what. Design time. Client calls. Research. Revisions. Already committed. So the real question is: from the same chunk of input, how many outputs can you actually extract?
Only the first one shows up on the invoice. The other six? You name those yourself, and you collect them on the same clock.
That’s the hack. Same input. Seven times the output.
Most of those are nice. But the reusable template is the one that rearranges your business.
Next client walks in. Same category of project. You’re no longer selling 80 hours of custom work. You’re selling 2 hours of configuration and a premium result. Same price. Maybe more. You keep the difference.
Third client walks in. The template is sharper. Faster. You tuned it in the wild.
Tenth client? You’re running a small product disguised as a service. And you built it inside work you were already being paid to do.
That’s the point of naming outputs that point where you’re going. The site dies when the project ends. The template compounds on every project after it.
Nobody is going to pay you extra to build the template. Nobody is going to pay extra for the case study or the component library. The client doesn’t care about any of it. The client sees one thing: was I happy with my site?
And if the answer is no, none of the rest counts. A template from a failed project isn’t a template. It’s a warning.
So the rule is:
Deliver the client’s output first. Then collect every other output you named for yourself.
I’ve watched this play out more times than I can count.
Designer A ships the site. Closes the file. Moves on. Six months later she’s starting from scratch again. Same speed, same price, same exhaustion.
Designer B ships the site. Then spends an extra hour factoring the structure into a template. A week later he ships the next site in a day at full price. A year later he’s got an asset he can license to anyone in that niche.
Same raw talent. Same client work. Wildly different trajectory.
The difference wasn’t effort. It wasn’t hours. It was what they decided counted as output.
Don’t let anyone else tell you what your outputs are. They only have one score to give you, and it expires the moment the project ends.
You get to pick the rest. And you should pick them before the project starts, so you can design the work to produce them.
Every output you name is a small vote for who you’re becoming. What are you voting for today?
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Work in tiny chunks to give others the opportunity to interact with your work-in-progress and to sustain your momentum.