ICM Pitfalls · Clief Notes

ICM Pitfalls

Everybody’s posting about what to do with ICM.

Let’s take a moment to focus on things that may trip you up.

There’s a lot of great content in here right now about what you should be doing with ICM. The builds, the workflows, the wins. I love it. But I want to talk about the other side of it for a minute.

The stuff that quietly wrecks your workflow. The small things you don’t find out about until you’ve already learned them the hard way. Most of these I learned by doing them wrong first, so take that for whatever it’s worth.

1. Copying builds instead of learning from them:

The builds people share in here are incredible. But almost all of them are built for a very specific situation. When you download one and start pulling pieces out to make it fit your world, you leave things behind. Orphaned rules. Edge case handling that made perfect sense in their context and now quietly fights your normal workflow in yours. You don’t see it because these things get intricate. It runs fine right up until it doesn’t, and then you’re hunting a problem you built into it on day one.

What I do now is I don’t adopt a build. I study it. I want to understand what it’s doing and why it’s doing it. Then that reasoning becomes part of my toolset, and I build my own thing with it. You’re trying to import the thinking, not the template.

2. Skipping the part where you map your own logic:

Before I touch a single folder, I sit down and think about what I would actually do if I were doing the task by hand. If this happens, I do this. If that happens instead, I handle it that way. And if it shows up some third way I didn’t expect, then I need to do this other thing. You write all of that down. That is the work.

ICM is about being intentional with your context. You cannot be intentional about something you never thought through. Skip this step and you’re just decorating a guess

3. Going too fast:

This is the fastest way I know to make ICM fall apart. Everything is now now now, go go go, get it done. ICM does not reward that. The whole method leans on you slowing down enough to be deliberate. When you rush, you skip the thinking, you grab somebody’s build, you bolt it together, and you ship something that was never solid underneath. You have to be willing to sit with it.

4. Thinking iteration means you failed:

You are going to get things wrong. That is not a sign you’re bad at this. That’s the price of building something that actually works. I’ve hit workflows on the first shot and only had to tighten them up after. I’ve also missed the mark several times in a row and had to stop and rethink what I was even trying to do. Both of those are normal. The pitfall is believing it’s supposed to come out right the first time. It doesn’t. Getting it wrong and trying again comes with the territory.

5. Not knowing when to adapt and when to walk away:

This is the other side of iteration, and it’s its own trap. Tweaking forever is just as dangerous as quitting too early. At some point you have to be honest with yourself about whether you’re refining something that works or polishing something that was wrong from the start. Sometimes the move is to tighten the workflow. Sometimes the move is to drop it, keep what you learned, and start clean. Knowing the difference is a skill, and it only comes from reps.

6. Building in the dark:

This is the one that cost me the most. I built alone for a long time. In my own head, in private, not letting anybody look at what I was doing and not asking other people questions. It stunted me. I didn’t start growing until I put my work in front of people who would poke holes in it. Somebody asking “why are you doing it that way” is worth more than another hour alone at the keyboard. I needed other eyes to see my own blind spots, and I couldn’t get there by myself.

7. Not writing down the why:

Document as you go. Not just what you decided, but why you decided it. That’s what lets you look back later and actually understand your own logic instead of guessing at what past you was thinking. It’s also what you hand to someone when you ask them for feedback. Building in the dark partly means building with no record of anything. If it all lives in your head, nobody can help you, and that includes future you.

How it all connects:

Here’s why I wanted all of this in one place instead of seven separate posts. These aren’t really seven problems. They’re one process, and each pitfall is just a spot where people fall out of it.

It starts with intention. You map your own logic before you build. That same habit is what lets you learn from someone else’s build instead of just copying it, because now you can see the reasoning underneath theirs.

Intention is also what keeps you from rushing, since you can’t be deliberate and in a hurry at the same time. When you build deliberately, you already expect the first version won’t be the last, so iteration stops feeling like failure and starts feeling like the job. The more reps you put in, the better you read whether a workflow is worth tightening or worth dropping.

Writing down the why is what makes all of that repeatable, because you can follow your own trail back. And opening it up to other people is what catches everything your own eyes miss.

Miss one and the rest get shaky.

Rush, and you skip intention. Skip intention, and you can’t learn from a build, you can only copy it. Build in the dark with nothing written down, and nobody can help you see what you broke.

That’s the whole thing for me. ICM isn’t hard because the method is complicated. It’s hard because it asks you to slow down, think honestly, write it down, get it wrong, try again, and let other people in. Every one of these pitfalls is just a shortcut around one of those, and the shortcuts are exactly what get you.

We learn together we grow stronger together and we win together 🤓💪🏆

Bas

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