😩 You can't will away the work.
Or: how the learning comes from the painful, hard doing, and finding ways to shortcut it misses the whole point.
I want the answer, now.
I’d say I’ve put in my time, having banged my head against this problem for near to 4 years now.
And now, I can see how it will become the thing that we all need it to be. It’s still a little hazy, this path, but at least it’s there.
So let’s just get there.
It feels excruciating now, to have to patiently test and try every little hypothesis. I keep feeling like I’ve “earned” the answer already so I should just load up on the best resources out there and “just get it built” and “launched”.
Only: I have to keep reminding myself - I’ve haven’t actually done anything yet.
I haven’t actually gotten anywhere.
All that wandering in the desert has allowed me to map out the terrain of this beautiful, forsaken problem space; it’s built up my instincts and my gut on where lies mercy and where, misery. It’s allowed me to finally find the mountain where my goal lies, somewhere at top, shrouded in mist.
But I haven’t actually really started climbing this mountain. Here I stand, with my little team, just meters up from the “start”. As grateful as I am to finally be on this mountain, I have to remind myself I haven’t actually gotten very far.
Each morning I have to forget the burden of thinking I should be further along for the time I’ve spent on this. This is the process. For more companies than we care to really talk about.
We all love to glory the overnight successes but the more I get to know the true stories, the more I realize it’s all myth. Mirage. There are so few miracle companies that “magically” find product-market fit in the first 6 or 12 months of setting off. Airbnb, Notion, Figma, Webflow, the list could go on and on … they all endured years of wandering in the desert, coming face to face with death many times, and still they persisted.
So no: there are no miraculous answers, just an ability to climb the mountain faster, armed with the instinct and insights I’ve gathered over these years.
No matter how much I might wish to hurry along “progress” by way of shiny UIs and noisy launches, I remind myself this is the ultimate gift.
To finally be on the path. To be able to do the work of climbing it, step by step. To notice and gather the minute clues around me that will come in handy later. To take the time to build the team and early users in just the way that will make sure we don’t flame out later.
This is the gift. And the work. And the process.
So yes there is urgency. But no rush to will away the work.