Meaningful work

Your FYP is gaslighting you

Despite all the AI hype, company building is still hard. Building products is still hard, and selling is still hard.

Doing good work is still hard, because it always has been.

At every single company I've founded or been part of, there's always been a struggle to start, and a struggle to scale.

The struggle to start is writing the first cold email, staring at the blank LinkedIn post, and figuring out the plan for what to build. If you've done anything like this before, you know there are going to be rejections, posts that fall flat, graveyards of dead products. You see the mountain of failure ahead of the path to starting, so you procrastinate or choose not to all.

The struggle to scale is then doing the work every single day. It's injecting energy back into the system after an exhausting week of flights, getting up on Monday after you've worked on Sunday, and wondering when will this thing finally work on its own? When does it get easier?

One of my favorite artists, Daniel Arsham talks about what separates amateur artists from professional artists. Professional artists are disciplined. Like athletes, they don't wait around for inspiration, they show up every day and they just work.

There's a graveyard of dead projects in Arsham's studio -- things that never saw the light because they were bad, ugly. Arsham says that's part of it.

Each piece of work tells you something about the final piece, the one that makes you rich and famous. And after awhile, that piece will inform the next piece too.

Great artists are professionals, and professional artists are prolific.

If you're struggling with what to do today, here's a reminder to do the thing that feels like work.

Good work operates on its own time, give it enough time to find you.