I stopped promising deadlines, and I’ve never produced more in my life. Those look like two separate facts. They’re one. Most companies would still rather have the deadline.
I'm not going to review the writing anyway. It's good and you know it. Let me tell you what it did to me instead.
I read it like a diagnosis of myself. In places it read like someone had been watching me for a year and taking notes. Wikipedia at three in the morning: hello, I'm Karol.
A few things that stayed with me.
The lightning rods."You can't schedule the lightning, but you can decide where to put the rods" is the best line in the piece. We have a saying in Poland that a cat guarding one mouse hole would starve to death. Same idea, more whiskers. I recently built myself an arcade cabinet and wrote the game for it. Completely unjustifiable economically, you can buy one cheaper. And within three days I had of course extrapolated it into a business model with arcade games for trade show booths, because that's how this head works. I don't know yet whether anything comes of it. I do know the fan works.
What I missed: AI. Your wall-as-a-price model assumes the price list stays fixed. Mine got rewritten. I used to have twelve ideas a day and ship one. Now I ship the twelve, because the cost of execution collapsed. That isn't a gadget, it changes the economics of the whole system you're describing. I think there's a chapter missing there.
And one real question. You write about quiet days in the middle of the week, kept clear on purpose. That's not how it goes for me. My rest isn't designed, it's forced. I run into the wall, drop to zero, and have to lie there a while before I can come back. Buffer after the breakdown rather than in front of it. Do you actually have that planned, or does it just look that way from outside? Because if it's real I'd genuinely like to learn it. Those impacts hurt.
Guilt. You call it an expense. For me it's a screw driven in with a hammer: holds worse than if you'd turned it, hurts several times more. And it closes a loop. I put the thing off, then I'm ashamed that I've put it off, so I put it off further, until enough time has passed that nobody has chased me and I quietly archive it. Then it comes back later like a body in the wall.
One place I don't agree with you. You write that the honest conversation with your manager is close to free. I have never once met anyone who accepted my ADHD spikes. That deal is a luxury of ownership, or of landing an unusually aware boss. I'd say it louder, because otherwise someone takes this into a corporate job and gets hit in the face with it.
As a founder I do one thing differently from you. I don't only hire people like me, I deliberately mix them with people who are my complete opposite, so we cover each other's gaps. The most valuable sentence I hear is "Karol, are you out of your fucking mind?" from someone who formally reports to me. That's worth more than half my ideas.
And finally: I missed the prescription. Write part two.
Just make it shorter. There is something quietly hilarious about a piece this long addressed to people who famously cannot finish a piece this long. I got to the end, but my anxiety spent the last third pacing around behind me, trying to get me to go and look at something else. ;-)
Hi Jane,
I'm not going to review the writing anyway. It's good and you know it. Let me tell you what it did to me instead.
I read it like a diagnosis of myself. In places it read like someone had been watching me for a year and taking notes. Wikipedia at three in the morning: hello, I'm Karol.
A few things that stayed with me.
The lightning rods."You can't schedule the lightning, but you can decide where to put the rods" is the best line in the piece. We have a saying in Poland that a cat guarding one mouse hole would starve to death. Same idea, more whiskers. I recently built myself an arcade cabinet and wrote the game for it. Completely unjustifiable economically, you can buy one cheaper. And within three days I had of course extrapolated it into a business model with arcade games for trade show booths, because that's how this head works. I don't know yet whether anything comes of it. I do know the fan works.
What I missed: AI. Your wall-as-a-price model assumes the price list stays fixed. Mine got rewritten. I used to have twelve ideas a day and ship one. Now I ship the twelve, because the cost of execution collapsed. That isn't a gadget, it changes the economics of the whole system you're describing. I think there's a chapter missing there.
And one real question. You write about quiet days in the middle of the week, kept clear on purpose. That's not how it goes for me. My rest isn't designed, it's forced. I run into the wall, drop to zero, and have to lie there a while before I can come back. Buffer after the breakdown rather than in front of it. Do you actually have that planned, or does it just look that way from outside? Because if it's real I'd genuinely like to learn it. Those impacts hurt.
Guilt. You call it an expense. For me it's a screw driven in with a hammer: holds worse than if you'd turned it, hurts several times more. And it closes a loop. I put the thing off, then I'm ashamed that I've put it off, so I put it off further, until enough time has passed that nobody has chased me and I quietly archive it. Then it comes back later like a body in the wall.
One place I don't agree with you. You write that the honest conversation with your manager is close to free. I have never once met anyone who accepted my ADHD spikes. That deal is a luxury of ownership, or of landing an unusually aware boss. I'd say it louder, because otherwise someone takes this into a corporate job and gets hit in the face with it.
As a founder I do one thing differently from you. I don't only hire people like me, I deliberately mix them with people who are my complete opposite, so we cover each other's gaps. The most valuable sentence I hear is "Karol, are you out of your fucking mind?" from someone who formally reports to me. That's worth more than half my ideas.
And finally: I missed the prescription. Write part two.
Just make it shorter. There is something quietly hilarious about a piece this long addressed to people who famously cannot finish a piece this long. I got to the end, but my anxiety spent the last third pacing around behind me, trying to get me to go and look at something else. ;-)
Karol