May 21st, 2020
I'm now a full week into my think week.
The first couple days were weird, had a lot of anxiety and wondering what I'm doing with my life.
After 3 days in, I had a lot of "aha" moments. Fueled with energy and excitement about the future.
Now, I've hit a bit of a downturn. A lot of boredom, not so much energy, and a bit of sadness.
When I started this, I wanted to read 1000 books and watch classic movies. But what I usually do is watch YouTube and Netflix and sneak in some Twitter.
I wish I was the type of person that could get "lost in books", but I can't.
The important thing though, I am not doing any work, and I am not checking email, at all.
I haven't pushed any code, or looked at my codebase for over a week now, other than to fix one super urgent bug that a paying customer had.
I thought about checking my email this morning, but decided against it.
I know I have some stuff in there that will feel really urgent and stressful.
I have some things in place so that if there is something super-crazy urgent, I will be notified and I can take action.
When I checked my email on Tuesday, it turned into an extra 1.5 hours of work.
Now that I'm in the boredom stage of my think week, I'm antsy to get back. But a part of this feels like I'm not ready yet, like, I don't feel like I really know what I'll work on when I get back.
One thing I do is create "master plans" - for this think week, I'm making a concerted effort NOT to make a "master plan" for when I get back.
These "master plans" never work because they are rooted in hypotheticals and things you might be influenced by in books/podcasts/what you heard from someone else. Right now, I'm driving around the United States - any plan/ideas that I come up with are probably not going to work.
The only thing that is going to work is if I can come back to work with a new mindset and way of thinking that I didn't have before - a new way to approach every day that helps work become more exciting and where I can get out of bed in the morning feeling like I did in the early days of starting my own side project. I miss that.
Change is the only constant. I have to change myself, my outlook, my ideas, etc if I want to move forward faster and with more excitement.
Sitting around and doing "more of the same" does not invoke change and it does not lead to happiness for me.
If there's one thing that is true about the last 29 years of my life - it's that I've constantly changed and adapted for the better.
When challenges were presented to me, I rose to the challenge - this always led to overall happiness and fulfillment.
There are other times when I didn't rise to the challenge - and I regret those moments. I only regret them because, eventually, I rose to the challenge, but it took longer.
Because, for me, I'm the type of person that eventually has to get over those challenges - I can't live with myself if I don't.
The part that I struggle with is when it takes weeks/months/years/decades to actually accomplish these things, when I know it could have been shorter.
I'm reading a book right now about startups. One of the main themes is that failing at a startup should not be about the learning experience.
The more important thing is to have those learning experiences happen at the fastest velocity possible.
So, in other words, fail fast. Ask yourself how you can fail as fast as possible. Look deeper into why it's taking 6 months / 1 year / 3 years to fail at one idea, when you could fail at 10 ideas in that same time frame.
Because anything else is just wasted time. We can make the excuses that "we learned something" and that makes us feel like "we're OK with failure" which is, definitely, a good thing and par for the course on your first startup try.
But failing like that is "failing blindly" - if someone asks you why you failed, your answer will be rooted in hypotheticals and blurry logic. There are ways to fail faster with clear understanding (based on numbers, talking to real people, etc) - and I think the hurdle between failing blindly and this is our ego and our fear of failure.
The first couple days were weird, had a lot of anxiety and wondering what I'm doing with my life.
After 3 days in, I had a lot of "aha" moments. Fueled with energy and excitement about the future.
Now, I've hit a bit of a downturn. A lot of boredom, not so much energy, and a bit of sadness.
When I started this, I wanted to read 1000 books and watch classic movies. But what I usually do is watch YouTube and Netflix and sneak in some Twitter.
I wish I was the type of person that could get "lost in books", but I can't.
The important thing though, I am not doing any work, and I am not checking email, at all.
I haven't pushed any code, or looked at my codebase for over a week now, other than to fix one super urgent bug that a paying customer had.
I thought about checking my email this morning, but decided against it.
I know I have some stuff in there that will feel really urgent and stressful.
I have some things in place so that if there is something super-crazy urgent, I will be notified and I can take action.
When I checked my email on Tuesday, it turned into an extra 1.5 hours of work.
Now that I'm in the boredom stage of my think week, I'm antsy to get back. But a part of this feels like I'm not ready yet, like, I don't feel like I really know what I'll work on when I get back.
One thing I do is create "master plans" - for this think week, I'm making a concerted effort NOT to make a "master plan" for when I get back.
These "master plans" never work because they are rooted in hypotheticals and things you might be influenced by in books/podcasts/what you heard from someone else. Right now, I'm driving around the United States - any plan/ideas that I come up with are probably not going to work.
The only thing that is going to work is if I can come back to work with a new mindset and way of thinking that I didn't have before - a new way to approach every day that helps work become more exciting and where I can get out of bed in the morning feeling like I did in the early days of starting my own side project. I miss that.
Change is the only constant. I have to change myself, my outlook, my ideas, etc if I want to move forward faster and with more excitement.
Sitting around and doing "more of the same" does not invoke change and it does not lead to happiness for me.
If there's one thing that is true about the last 29 years of my life - it's that I've constantly changed and adapted for the better.
When challenges were presented to me, I rose to the challenge - this always led to overall happiness and fulfillment.
There are other times when I didn't rise to the challenge - and I regret those moments. I only regret them because, eventually, I rose to the challenge, but it took longer.
Because, for me, I'm the type of person that eventually has to get over those challenges - I can't live with myself if I don't.
The part that I struggle with is when it takes weeks/months/years/decades to actually accomplish these things, when I know it could have been shorter.
I'm reading a book right now about startups. One of the main themes is that failing at a startup should not be about the learning experience.
The more important thing is to have those learning experiences happen at the fastest velocity possible.
So, in other words, fail fast. Ask yourself how you can fail as fast as possible. Look deeper into why it's taking 6 months / 1 year / 3 years to fail at one idea, when you could fail at 10 ideas in that same time frame.
Because anything else is just wasted time. We can make the excuses that "we learned something" and that makes us feel like "we're OK with failure" which is, definitely, a good thing and par for the course on your first startup try.
But failing like that is "failing blindly" - if someone asks you why you failed, your answer will be rooted in hypotheticals and blurry logic. There are ways to fail faster with clear understanding (based on numbers, talking to real people, etc) - and I think the hurdle between failing blindly and this is our ego and our fear of failure.