🏃🏽‍♀️Running to stand still.

Or how not to mistake motion for progress.

I haven't hit publish in 10 weeks. Or more importantly - I haven’t written any words meant just for me, in 10 weeks.

On one hand, everyone around me says that's understandable.

In that time, my dream cofounder quit her job and started on Milo full-time. We built a beta product to just introduce to the world but which hit the most wonderful chord with parents and took off on tech twitter. We worked with the incredibly talented OAI plugin team to launch a baby Milo plugin amongst some of biggest household names out there. We had parents being some of the first users of GPT4 in everyday, practical use cases.

On the other hand, not writing is not okay with me. For the contract I have with myself. Writing to me is so much more than telling anyone out there, anything. It has always been, and always will be, an outlet for me. A way of processing a complicated, hard word. One that has only gotten more complicated and hard as time and life has gone on.

Over the last year, as hard and unclear as things have been on the work side, I’m most proud of the progress I’ve made in my writing. There was a good chunk of time when I was writing at least 750 words every single day. And I was publishing every Tuesday. That felt good on a deeply personal level.

But for the past 10 weeks (and tbh, for the past 4 months), all that has gone by the wayside. It’s felt nothing short of insanity. Working out, eating well, seeing friends (hell, seeing family), reading (for work or fun), breaks (forget weekends, we rarely had multiple hours off except to sleep) - all of it went out the window.

To be clear: there are times that is absolutely warranted - I’ve had the privilege of needing to do it before. It’s all very YC-like actually - run at a full out sprint to do all the things as quickly as possible because there is a moment and an opportunity.

But just as important it is that we ran that fast to meet that moment, it's just as vital that we ease into the marathon now. With intention and purpose and discipline.

Because otherwise there is an allure, a siren’s call, in the frenzy. It draws you in and drowns you in empty accomplishment.

At the end of the day, at the end of the week, if all that motion doesn’t translate to tangible progress, it’s all for naught. It’s an utter waste of the opportunity.

So the past couple of weeks, even though it's felt excruciating to "slow down", that’s exactly what we’ve had to do.

Stop piling on new features and users and things so that we could take the gift of learning and metabolize it. Dig in and understand what’s working and what’s not - from product to process.

That doesn’t mean we haven’t been shipping. Au contraire: the shipping can’t slip. It’s that we've been shipping things that fix the foundation. That make it more solid. Reconsidering and unraveling things slapped together to rebuild them with care and intention.

We're been implementing and practicing holding to the right processes. Instead of A and I just trading thoughts over desks and Zoom, we actually throw them into an Asana board and prioritize. Because easy to lose sight of: this is the foundation we’re building the rest of the company, the rest of the product, the rest of the team on top of. Rush this, compromise on this and it’s a slippery slope on the rest.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Or: when you have to go fast, go slow. However you express it, now is the time to take care with what we build into our very DNA.

We're trying to make the turn from a possible flash in the pan to a rich vein of everlasting gold.

And that means doing the things that feel frustrating and slow but set the team, the product and the company up for true success.

This also means that I get to get back to the fundamentals that I too was ignoring or not giving its due - talking to users, digging into product minutiae. Writing proper, coherent spec docs. Reading. Thinking. And yes writing. I'm at my clearest, my best, when I'm writing. When I'm connecting dots from my mind, through my fingers, onto the page.

In the past 4-5 months, the words just wouldn’t come. Because I never sat still long enough to do them justice. That’s telling in its own self.

Not for everyone. But for me.

When I'm writing the words and thoughts and insights are flowing. And motion translates to progress - within me and the company.

And that’s all that matters.

Otherwise I'll just be running to stand still.