Let Go and Haul: the “Crazy Wall” phase
Week 37, 2018 – Brooklyn
Journey: where we’re at
It feels like all the pieces are starting to come together! It’s exciting. As you probably know by now, I strongly subscribe to the method of doing the riskiest things first to pay down uncertainty. This usually aligns with trying lots of smaller concepts and experiments to learn what feels good and people react well to before picking a direction and sticking it all together.
If you’ve been reading for a minute, you probably also know I love crime fiction. My metaphor for the phase we’re in now is the “Crazy Wall” phase – you know, that wall that every crime drama has to have, (like this one from Fargo).
(One day I will have a whiteboard all to myself for this purpose that I don't need to erase, #goals).
Startups are by definition, immense risk, so reducing risk where you can is a key to staying alive. This is one of the ways you can greatly reduce risk, be more careful about how you spend and hire. I look at each week as trying to drive up our certainty. I want to be more sure about something than I was last Sunday. In reality, it looks a lot more like this, where this bird is every time we put something in front of users, but eventually the puzzle takes shape.
Speaking of hiring, some good things are happening there too! More news on that soon. Though, if any of you know a dev ops, systems engineer. SRE type human with a good network we might be able to tap, we would love intros.
Journal: what I learned
The thing I finally put words this week is wow, it is really hard to do any kind of quality making when I feel anxious about certain types of stressors. Generally speaking, I have a very high threshold for stress, I’m also pretty good at compartmentalizing (I gotta be). Any kind of stressor that can be solved with creativity, like a hard problem or a deadline or public speaking for example, doesn’t put a damper on making – that’s sort of all one of the same to me. But stressors that are logistical or operational that usually can’t be solved with creativity, wow, those ones I struggle with. Thinking about this over the weekend, it reminded me of a conversation I had with a close friend many years ago when he was a struggling artist (now he is a very well paid famous artist, yay) and how at the time, money problems would invade his thoughts to the point it was hard to work. Money is a great example of this kind of logistical stress. Thankfully, that is not a stress we have right now but it’s one of the number one stresses for most founders. This past week I’ve been dealing with some personal stress that’s made it really difficult to do creative work, but luckily it will soon pass. This GIF is a good approximation:
Interestingly, I find when I’m dealing with logistical/operational stress, doing logistical or operational work is usually still fine. Super organized spreadsheet? Tidy finances? You got it! It’s just the more intuitive, gut feel kind of work that is really impacted.
Naturally, I was curious about why anxiety is a creative blocker, so naturally, I start typing it into Google and woah, interesting! These sentences are basically all the things you need to make cool shit!
This article on anxiety suppressing intuition – which is what we rely on not just for making, but nearly everything in a startup (since intuition is, after all, the ability to make decisions without complete information), is really interesting. I’m not exactly sure what to do about all this, but it seemed worth sharing because I’m guessing I’m not the only one who feels this.
Jams: what I’m into
This Gaika album came out a while ago and I forgot to mention it, but I’ve had that on repeat a lot this week (also the typography on the album cover yessss)