The 3Ps
A Framework for Saying Yes to the Right Work
I kept getting lost.
Not lost in the woods. I didn’t drive a stick into the ground and study its moving shadow to decipher north from south. I’m no Boy Scout.
I kept saying yes to the wrong projects.
I knew the kind of work I wanted to be doing, and that clarity is the first step. But knowing and doing are two different things. At some point, you can’t just talk about your thing; you have to do it. So how do you start?
For me, it meant saying yes to the right projects and no to everything else.
It sounds simple, especially when I see the words here on the page. And it would be if we were all Spock-like, unencumbered by our humanity. But when you’re on the hook for your own project, things get murky. Simple gets overridden by fears, hopes, dreams, exhaustion, miscommunications, and irrational judgments.
I needed a compass. So I created one:
The 3Ps: People, Project, Price
When a new project inquiry comes my way, I run it through this filter:
People: Will I enjoy working with these people? Will they enjoy working with me. Will we be a good fit? No project, at any dollar amount, is worth it if the people aren’t a good match.
Project: Do I even want to do this (be honest!)? Does it fit the vision I have for my business? Am I excited about spending weeks or even months working on this?
Price: Will I make enough money to do my best work and live my best life? Can I stop robbing Peter to pay Paul?
In an ideal world, all three boxes get checked. When they do, saying yes is easy. But even when one area isn’t perfect, having this framework helps me make clearer decisions about whether to move forward.
I’ll be exploring these ideas in future posts, how they work in practice, when saying no is actually saying yes to something better, and how to choose work that aligns your vision with your service to your clients.
Greetings Joe. Your father and I were classmates at Holderness and have reconnected late in our lives. He and I are probably over-educated for our blue-collar careers, but I know that I enjoyed my choice. In fact, even my MBA degree fostered my design capacity when designed and built hard spaces and, now, when I shape land (soft spaces).
Your 3 P's fit my criteria for any job, even if my wallet required me to reduce the weight of any criteria. Since we own full responsibility of our happiness, I always tried to leave my "scent/mark" on my projects, both hard and soft. That usually meant something artistic, oftern unexpected, source of energy, whether via repetition and/or contrastic. Here, in Louisiana, we refer to that added touch as "lanaipe"- hopefully, I spelled it correctly. This was my way of "pushing" the boring job to become exciting for me and to meet my quality standard.