Exercise 4 — First full conversion

Take one line from the last thing anyone said about your work — a review, a note, a remark in passing that stuck to you — and run all five steps on paper. Fifteen minutes, and you are not allowed to like it until the fifteen are up. Pay particular attention at step two: ask what your version of the failure actually runs on, because fear and enthusiasm produce identical over-commitment and require opposite loads.

How to tell it's any good. Three tests. Hand the drill to someone else and see whether they could run it tomorrow without asking you a single question. State the cheapest way to pass, and confirm it is not also something you might do by accident. Then read your stop condition and ask, honestly, whether you would honor it in a month — when the drill has become a thing you are good at and slightly proud of. "When I feel ready" is not a stop condition. It is the absence of one, wearing a coat.