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The Outline Method

Written by Abdul
Last modified Aug. 28 2021

Rather than start off and introduce you right away to the 60 Day Framework, I thought maybe it might do everyone some good if we started with the 60 Framework. Now, this is an abridged version, which we can perceive to be 60 minutes or 60 hours. The goal is for it to be a stepping stone in your path to success. I will introduce to you what I call the outline method which is a subset of the 60framework.

People often ask me how they should turn ideas into tangible products or services that people will use. Honestly, it's not rocket science it's actually a very very simple process that anybody can replicate and you don't have to be technical you don't need to have a degree in a specific field and by all means, you don't absolutely have to take a paid course or spend thousands of dollars learning something that you're not comfortable doing to be able to achieve this goal.

Now that doesn't make this process any easy though,  it still requires a tremendous amount of work the ability to be a self-starter, and to have a clear-cut and honest-to-self mindset. Throughout this process, you're going to have to be honest with yourself on what you can achieve,  what time it will take you to achieve it in and then take baby steps to actually get to the goals that we set together. The idea with the 60 framework is to be able to see what can we achieve in 60 minutes or 60 hours that allows us to have the stepping stones for our 60-day framework Journey.

Setting Attainable Goals

In this case, you can have any goal it could be that you want to start a course, it could be that you want to write an e-book or you want to actually create a product, a software product or service, or start a business. It could be absolutely anything but it needs to be a tangible goal that you know you can achieve either now or in the future.

So we always start with our goals and we work backwards and we say if our goal is to create an ebook for example then what do we need to do to actually achieve that goal.

The best way to look at this is to say what are all the parts that make up that ebook. 

So how the front and back cover
You have the contents inside 

Now that's actually only two parts but these are the main parts and you can break these down even further into their individual parts. 

For example, the front and back covers can be broken down into front and back graphics as well as about the author’s content and anything that you would like to see on the front or back of your cover.
 
As for the contents themselves, you want to break it down as you would an outline for a long essay. Write down the table of contents and what actually is going to make the meat and bones of this book. Then write down subsets of each of the items in the table of contents.

I call this process the outline method.

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Understanding the Outline Method

The beauty of this is that it can be applied to absolutely anything you want to start. Let me give you another example let's say you want to actually start a software-as-a-service business formerly known as a SaaS. Now, this actually doesn't seem attainable for thousands and thousands of people, and the first question that they think of is well I don't know how to code or if I know how the code I don't know what to build or if I have an idea I don't have the money to do it or if I have an idea and the money I don't know how to execute it.

In this case, what do you do again you break it down using the outline method.

What inherently is a saas?  It's software that solves a problem and a very specific problem hopefully. Now the idea is to not only create this bit of software but also to distribute it. So those aspects are the two main components of this outline.

Breaking it down into parts

So we have the problem and then we want to look at what are the steps that are needed to be taken to solve that problem. We want to make this actually more concrete so let's use a real-world example,  there is software out there that allows you to extract personal information or emails from websites that you visit. Now this bit of software has tremendous real-world applications and use cases and can be sold to many people. 

So using the outline method we actually break the problem down even further into its parts we want a small bit of code that extracts let's see emails from a web page that we visit. We don't necessarily right now have to build the whole structure in a design or anything of that sort all we need is a bit of code that allows us to extract that specific information only and that's it. 

Once we have that we can work on and see how all our users interact with this bit of code we might not necessarily need to make a full-fledged front-end software we might be able to get away with starting off with making a Chrome extension for example. Now, this allows us to get a small bit of our software out to a wider market of users at a reduced cost.

Applying The Outline Method

The idea I'm trying to drill home is that we can use the outline method in order to produce tremendous results just by breaking things down into their component parts and then be actionable on them that's the key here. 

Whenever you make an outline be sure to know what are the steps that you need to take to complete that line item in your outline.

 As you go through completing those steps you'll notice that you have a better picture of the final product of whatever it is that you're trying to achieve.

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