Standup
This morning I find myself wildly off schedule with that anxiety pang in full effect. I ended up spending most of yesterday (day 10) working on my take home assessment for InsuranceCo. I also got off track on day 9 and ended up spending most of that day working on frontend architecture, authentication APIs, and setting up testing pipelines on the app API server.
I really want to pick back up visible motivating momentum. The completed API work is valuable and important but also isolated, boring, comfortable, and invisible. Public progress is motivating momentum - I need to get app mockups done so that I can publish marketing material.
My goal today is to concentrate on mocking up the UX in UI code, ignoring the server entirely. Fortunately, the front-end architecture work that I got side tracked with makes it easy to shim out my API server requests with local state containing testing data. I’m planning on focusing on two areas of the app for the "money-shot" screenshots - the "course editor" and the "course tutor" screens.
I say I went off track because my goal with moving the MVP work up was to start to make enough progress on visible UI elements that I can start to take screenshots. Architecture, authentication and testing doesn’t move that goal forward at all. The work isn’t completely useless and I could even rationalize that it’s laying a foundation for the UX work I want to do, making it easier and faster.
That wouldn’t be true though.
Honestly the truth is just that I just didn’t know how to start. I had a complete blank canvas in front of me - no predefined data schema, no redline designs to implement. No real mental model for what I wanted to build. So I fell back to what was comfortable and what I knew, whilst working on the unknown in the back of my mind. I was hoping that as I thought through the problem from a perspective I do understand, I’d get more insight into the perspectives I don’t yet understand. I’ll write about my process on this later.
Momentum, grit, and discipline
In the standup update, I mentioned “motivating momentum” a few times, as if it was a thing. What I mean by that is a sense of forward progress of the project as a whole that forms a tight feedback loop of psychological reward. Woof.
If you’re an individual contributor (IC), have you tried management before? I have and found it utterly unrewarding, precisely because of the long feedback loops. When you complete work, how long does it take for you to feel satisfied that you completed the work? As an IC programmer, these loops are very tight - you have a bug, you fix the bug, you get the psychological reward. As you do larger work, the loops can get longer, in the order of weeks. If you move to management, you’re dealing with people now and those feedback loops are now in the order of months or years and may never close.
For myself, I’ve found the key to engaging in large work is to keep those feedback loops as tight as possible. Test-driven-development is great for this - red test, write code, green test, reward. Long feedback loops sap motivation and can make you feel like progress is stalling, causing a demoralizing effect. You’re a week in and it seems like nothing is changing, at least for the better - you’re not receiving feedback from the system you’re building that you’re making the right decisions.
Building “momentum” in your product or business is a way to handle some of the necessarily long feedback loops inherent in building large things. An internal sense of global progress can push back against a local sense of stalling and give you a different kind of feedback loop that’s shorter. The thing is, you can’t tap into momentum unless you’ve built it.
Momentum is the direction and quantity of the product velocity and mass of an object. Basically, how fast is something moving.
The change of motion of an object is proportional to the force impressed; and is made in the direction of the straight line in which the force is impressed.
- Newton’s Second Law of Motion
The object in this analogy is whatever you’re working on, and force is the work you do1. In my case, there are 2 objects - the business entity and the whole enterprise in general, and the specific application that I’m trying to do.
When framed this way, the work you do on your project establishes a kind of “motion” - from idea to real thing. You literally put in work to “move” your project into realization. You can even model the process as a free-body diagram:
The block is your startup or app. It’s mass, m, could be thought of as the “size” of your idea - are you starting a development consultancy, basically just exchanging time for money, or are you trying to invent a new industry? Are you building a new todo app or are you building an AI backed global learning platform? Gravity, g, is the inherent difficulty in building an app or starting a business. The normal, n, is your personal difficulty in building an app or starting a business. If you’ve done it before and have money and business connections, the n vector is likely to be relatively small in magnitude. Doing it for the first time as a nobody makes n very large.
Listen, this is a really fuzzy analogy, but the point is that this object is heavy, and requires a tremendous amount of work to move. This is self evident when you think about it - if it was easy (requiring low amounts of work), somebody would have done it before and more importantly, the rate of success would be high. We’d have all kinds of highly profitable companies selling simple applications and solving easy problems.
We don’t, though.
We have a handful of huge technology giants that basically own the mindshare of most of our day to day technology interactions. These giants exist precisely because it’s hard to do this, and the success rate is very low.
This tremendous amount of work needs to be expended - and the only thing I know of that can expend that kind of energy instantaneously is an uncontrolled thermonuclear reaction - and those aren’t usually considered good here on Earth. This energy needs to be expended over time.
This equation describes the change in momentum of a particle as a constant force is applied over a time period. Relax, I’m done with the math just to describe an analogy. Basically it tells us that for a given constant force applied over a time period, say the amount of work you perform on your project every day, you’ll get a constant change in momentum. The motion of the object will increase constantly with the constant application over force over a time period.
To bring it back to startups and application MVPs, the momentum of our project is directly proportional to the work we do. If we stop doing work, the project becomes subject to prevailing forces. We have to constantly be doing work to make any progress in this task.
Not all work is equal, though. If you recall the free-block diagram above, the amount of work to move that block up the incline is the sum of the force vector F and the normal, N. Optimal work is directly along the vector F, but there’s a trap that’s easy to fall into - doing work that’s highly orthogonal2 to F. When doing such work, it almost doesn’t matter how hard and how long you work at it - you’re never going to make the progress you need.
So what kind of work is orthogonal work, when it comes to trying to build a business and build an MVP product? Uh, don’t shoot the messenger here, but:
spending more than a day per co-founder on legal structure
writing employee handbooks, contractor agreements, detailed business plans, any modeling or forecasting before you make money
spending more than a day on your branding
detailed persona reports or in depth UX studies
formal meetings
marketing analytics
…basically anything that isn’t directly related to:
making something to make money
asking people for money
Unfortunately a lot of the above work is what people like to do when they try to “start something”. It’s easier than actually doing non-orthogonal work and it’s easy to feel like you’re building momentum without actually building any.
Non-orthogonal work isn’t equal either - enter the human element in all of this. There’s no way we can discuss the idea of a person, or group of persons, trying to perform such immense amounts of work without discussing the psychology involved in this kind of work. I’m not a psychologist, I’m just someone who’s done enough therapy to honestly believe I understand how my own mind works, generally. I have no idea how my experiences generalize.
If you ask most people what it takes to succeed in performing such large work, I’d guess that most would answer something along the lines of “motivation”. I think it’s something that everyone has experienced, and potentially even experienced success following acting on motivation. However, as I’m also sure most people have experienced, motivation is fickle - it can be highly situationally dependent and often fail you when the pressure is on and you’re feeling high levels of stress.
Grit is a fascinating concept if you’re familiar with it. Basically it’s a proposed personality trait responsible for perseverance. The original study mixes in the concept of passion or motivation - passion is supposed to be the driving force, and perseverance the ability to withstand failure, obstacles and adversity. I prefer, instead, to group perseverance and discipline into my definition of grit.
Discipline is the antidote to the fickle nature of motivation. Building productive habits will win out over relying on motivation every single time. When you show up and do work just because you always show up and do work, no matter how you feel about it, the work gets done.
For the last 18 months, I’ve followed the same routine, employed or not:
4:30am - wake, make coffee, listen to my wife’s TikToks and Facebook Shorts videos as she watches them
5:00am - take our dogs for a walk
5:30am - start working on personal goals
8:30am - shower
9:00am - 5:00pm - work my job, or while unemployed, try to find work and build my business.
~7:30pm - fall asleep on the couch, then move to bed after waking up some unspecified time later
Waking up crazy early isn’t the point, nor is working for over 12 hours every day. The consistency is the point. The day after I was laid off, I was still up at 5:30am, outlining the first post of this whole series. Every day since I’ve been laid off, I’ve still been up at 5:30am putting in work. So far it’s been fun, but I also know that won’t last. It’s going to get hard, it’s going to get frustrating and I’m going to get stuck.
It’s only by relying on my learned and developed discipline and my perseverance, or what I refer to as grit, that I’ve stuck through this - especially as someone who has ADD. When I first started building this seriously in 2024, I was building an app for collectable trading card games. Through changes in the economy, technological changes, changes in my own interests and confidence in myself, I’ve evolved what I’ve been working on into this project. But I’ve always been working.
So how can you intentionally build grit in yourself?
If you refer back to the linked Wikipedia article, there’s some debate as to whether that’s possible. If you subscribe to the concept at all, there’s a belief that it might be inherent. Kind of a nature vs. nurture thing. I do not believe this, based on nothing but the self experience of being a very timid, risk adverse child and young adult and… not being that now.
So, a tough childhood and 5 years and $32,500 in therapy3?
Probably, to be honest. I also did a lot of reading on psychology, philosophy, and “self-help”-y books of varying levels of quality. Between the therapy (you’re on your own for that, though I have touched on it) and this reading, I think I developed a strong resilience and ability to cope with discomfort that forms the backbone of my own grit.
Given I can’t provide therapy nor a tough childhood, the next best thing I can do is share some of the reading materials I found particularly insightful, in no real order or grouping:
“Living with a SEAL” - Jesse Itzler
“Can’t Hurt Me” - David Goggins
“The Unbeatable Mind” - Mark Devine
I know it sounds weird, a squishy software engineer reading about Navy SEALs. These three books are mostly about psychology and mental fortitude.
“Mindfulness in Plain English” - Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” - Robert Pirsig
“A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy” - William B. Irvine
“The Last Lecture” - Randy Pausch
Meditation, zen and stoicism are all philosophical tools that speak to me. If “The Last Lecture” doesn’t help you figure out what’s important to you, I don’t know what will. I still don’t understand “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” but I know it affected me and is worth a read anyway.
Lastly, because I can’t help myself, a few “therapy-in-a-book” books that my therapist recommended for me personally that resonated with my specific situation:
“Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder” - Edward M. Hallowell M.D., John J. Ratey M.D.
“Your Brain on Love: The Neurobiology of Healthy Relationships” - Stan Tatkin PsyD
“The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are” - Brené Brown
“Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself” - Kristin Neff
Empathy, self-connection, kindness, and understanding healthy interpersonal relationships is the way forward to having the confidence (or delusion) to attempt these kinds of large works.
Which relates back to motion laws and physics, which is one of those neat symmetries that make life fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(physics)
As it turns out, some business lingo makes sense. But not much.
My therapist is very affordable!