For Modern Leaders

good morning,

i would like to share a philosophy for building which i have internalized over the last few months working on @qrcoindotfun.

it's counterintuitive but i believe it is true and useful.

here it goes:

basically, i think the times to push and work the hardest are when things are going really well, when you have a lot of positive momentum. if there's a time to take your foot off the gas a bit, it's when things have settled down in the times between those times of great momentum.

most people might think the opposite, and they might be right, but this is what i believe. i'll explain why.

first, to clarify, i believe building something from scratch requires a ton of hard work, and also smart work. so when i talk about easing up a bit, i'm moreso talking about going from zone 5 to zone 4, according to the framework which i believe @jessepollak developed over at @base. i don't remember exactly what his definitions are but, for the version that sticks in my head, zone 5 is "all-out" whereas zone 4 allows for a bit more balance, enough to get 7 hours of sleep most nights and maybe take a full day off combined over the course of a weekend, maybe even work out a bit. (you'll notice bezos and zuck didn't get jacked until decades after starting amazon and facebook)

in the beginning of a project, i think it's extremely hard to work smart enough not to have to extremely work hard. i believe this is more feasible later on, once you've got something that is default alive. in the beginning, whatever you are working on is default dead. i think about it like a fire that you need to keep feeding. it might seem like a strong fire, but if you stop feeding it, it's not enough to self-sustain. there is some threshold beyond which the fire will stay lit and keep spreading on its own, even if you don't feed it for a while, but i think inevitably it takes a while to get there.

take @clanker for example. i learned something very concrete from their origin story. they only spent a few days building the original clanker, and it was an immediate success. that showed me that the time spent pre-launch does not correlate with the success of a launch. still, clanker would have died by default had the team not continued to push hard on it for the initial weeks and now several months since launch.

having a successful launch is the first challenge but not dying soon after that is the second. more specifically, regaining a second period of momentum greater than a great launch might be even harder than achieving a great launch in the first place. at the very least, it certainly seems that way because it's hard to fathom the number of launches which are not great because you don't see the vast majority of them, by definition. the great launches which never exceed the greatness of their launch seem much more common because you see them every day, and then you never see them again.

Tesla is another illustrative example. here you're talking about literally a trillion dollar company that is more than 20 years old and still you could argue it might be default dead if Elon were to take his eye off the ball for too long. i would argue that no fire can continue to spread forever without being fed, but a forest fire in the early stages does not need to be fed for a while at least.

Elon also may be the best example of how you can eventually get to a place where you can work smart and not necessarily work that hard. of course, it seems that he does work extremely hard overall, and has been for decades, but the fact that he has several billion to trillion dollar projects under his belt means that he cannot be working THAT hard on any given one of them all of the time because time is finite and he needs to split his across several projects. so, ironically, one of the hardest workers in the world offers some of the best evidence that you don't need to work that hard forever.

anyway, i sort of got sidetracked but the main point i was going to make is that the times to work the hardest, in the beginning, are when things are going really well, and the times to take your foot off the gas are when things have settled down. the reason i believe this is true is because i don't think incremental work has as much potential impact when you are out of momentum as when you are in it. the difference between regaining momentum in 1 week vs. 2 weeks does not matter as much as the ability to extend momentum further while you have it. 

it's analogous to pushing a really big rock. if you can get it moving, you should push as hard as you can for as long as you can because your efforts will never be more rewarded than they will be while the rock is already rolling. but when the rock is standing still, the difference between pushing really hard and not pushing at all might be negligible to the outside observer. the rock won't move either way.

so the times when the rock is not moving are the times to rest, recover, and reload. it might be hard to know exactly how you can get the rock moving again. straying from the analogy a bit, it is not as simple as just pushing really hard again. you might have used a lever the last time to get it going but let's say for the sake of sticking with the analogy that the rock is now bigger than it was the last time you got it moving. maybe it's more like a snowball. that's probably a better analogy, actually.

during your last big push, the snowball got a lot bigger, and eventually it got so big that momentum slowed and it came to a stop. now you need to figure out how to get it going again and the lever you used last time is not going to do the trick this time. you might be able to build a bigger version of the lever you used last time, but you might need to build a different tool altogether, and you might need to use that in combination with the larger lever to get it to start moving again.

at @qrcoindotfun, the size of the snowball can be measured by the amount of attention we are driving to our daily winners, the winning bid amounts on our auctions, and the market cap of our token, $QR coin.

you could very clearly see it growing for consecutive weeks starting about a month ago, and part of the reason for that, i believe, is because we pushed harder and harder once we realized quickly that it was rolling.

the snowball is now much bigger than it was a month ago, by all metrics. we are driving several thousand uniques to the winning links from our daily auctions, where we were previously driving several hundred. the market cap has been fluctuating around a few million dollars instead of a few hundred thousand dollars. and our auctions are going for several hundred dollars at a minimum instead of $42 just 40 days ago.

for the last week, we've been fixing things we ignored for the prior few weeks for the sake of continuing to push the ball forward as much as possible for as long as possible. it's been more zone 4 than zone 5. but we're ready to re-enter zone 5 when momentum calls. moreover, the tools we need to get this bigger ball moving and growing faster again are not a mystery to me. next time they might be, but this time i believe i know what we need to do. it's more like making a bigger version of the lever that we used last time than finding a different tool altogether, so we've been working on that, and some other fun stuff that might not move the needle but that i want to do nonetheless. there's no time for the nice-to-haves during the max push of momentum, but we can afford to do them now in the time between. one of these nice-to-haves might move the needle in ways that are hard to foresee, so i believe the things you want to do can be worth doing, even if you can't as easily calculate the expected positive impact.

also, fortunately, we've been here before. it's only been 103 days since we ran our first auction, but this past period of momentum was distinctly our third including the launch. there was a second period of momentum in between launch and this last one, with a couple of weeks on either side. if you do the math on that, so far, we've been fortunate to spend multiples more time in momentum than out of it, pushing the snowball rather than figuring out how to get it moving. by definition, that means we've been going all-out for the majority of these 103 days. that has not been easy, but it's been fulfilling and fun.

if you zooming out enough, this entire project just looks like a snowball with momentum whereas other seasons of my life have been spent figuring out how to move a snowball, or more accurately, finding something to roll that would actually grow. these snowballs look like rocks until you find one that grows when you roll it. i don't believe there's a very good way to know in advance. the other analogy i use here is to view projects like seeds. you've just got to plant a bunch, water them how you may, and pay attention to what grows.

anyway, i think that's enough writing for one morning. if you've read this far, thanks for reading. that was a long one. in retrospect, i would title this post, THE SNOWBALL.

Phenomenal insights on momentum. 

The Big Mo is one of the most underrated aspects of product- and company- building and @jake does a really good job of diving into it here.

leader • reader • taco eater • fly eagles fly • /whiskey • /nativefun • previously addepar, linkedin • https://nf.td/derek

thanks for reading and appreciate the kind words glad it resonates

Thanks for taking the time to write it!

The big rock/snowball analogy drives it home.