To those working on ambitious projects and creative pursuits...
Remember: what you are trying to do is hard - really effing hard. When you come to a 'failure' or obstacle, don't give up or give in to urges for distractions. Take a breath, "do the math" and begin.
Last month, last year, last whatever… it just felt like this idea of yours, though grand and ambitious, was going to be a cakewalk. You had a solid roadmap to follow; a clear set of steps to go through. Success was just a matter of time plus a little sustained effort.
And yet, somewhere along the way, everything changed. Things began to sour. Your optimism and excitement waned. Your motivation levels tanked to zero, and with it, your self-discipline.
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Maybe you produced something that just wasn’t up to par—you simply know what “excellent” looks like and what you made just wasn’t “it”. Not even close.
Maybe you hit a step in the roadmap that was confusing, impossible or had missing parts.
Maybe you tried something. Maybe you thought it would work—you *knew* it would work—but then it failed.
Maybe everything went south. And now you're here, teetering on the edge, wondering if you should just be honest with yourself and call the whole thing an abysmal failure.
Maybe it’s time to quit.
...
I’ve been there. Many times. And not in my distant past, but like, last week.
This time around, it was the “I tried something… and it failed” punch to the gut. This little event once again brought me to that edge, to the precipice. It had me thinking.
Is it time? Did I finally collect enough evidence to know *this thing* wasn't going to work?
It's so easy for us, you and I, to go down a rabbit hole of ruminations. It starts with a bit of self-doubt—a normal and natural occurrence for anyone pursuing an ambitious project—but this serves as the nucleating particle that festers and grows into a storm-cloud of imposter syndrome, self-reprimand, and needlessly harsh self-criticism.
All of that is dark and painful. And what do we do when we feel something dark and painful? We seek an escape. We seek the relief of our vices. Which works fine, until it doesn’t. Until it makes everything 1000x worse. Until our momentum gets obliterated and we find ourselves unable to get back to doing the little things we know we need to be doing.
Until we begin toying with the idea of giving up.
...
But, well, I got lucky that day. I left the house to visit a relative living in an old-folks home and they happened to be playing the movie "The Martian" on the communal TV. I managed to catch the last scene—the one where Mark Watney, Matt Damon’s character, gives a little speech to his new class at NASA. He goes:
At some point, everything's gonna go south on you... everything's going to go south, and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin.
You do the math. You solve one problem... and you solve the next one... and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.
It hit me in that moment that I too just needed to do the math. My failure wasn’t a failure. It was a data point. An empirically derived piece of information about what doesn’t work.
Cool.
Now, I just needed to examine it and extract the lesson. I needed to find my mistake, my erroneous assumption, and do something different. It was a problem that I needed to solve and I had endless resources in front of me that could help with that.
The next morning, after my coffee and some calming breath work, I took Watney's advice and I got to work. I did the math. I eventually found a workable solution. I then I tried it and it worked.
…
I want to remind you that what you're trying to do is hard. It's *really freaking* hard.
We’re all told that with the advent of the "creator economy" the barriers to entry towards our dream life has been eviscerated. We no longer have to be privileged, connected, assertive, or whatever else to “make it”.
Every platform, from YouTube and TikTok, to the latest drag-and-drop app builder, is beckoning you to "do you": to be authentic and create and build and share exactly what you were born to create, build, and share. They insist that all you need is an idea and a decent internet connection.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. “Abundantly possible” does not equate to “easy and inevitable”.
And I’m not even talking about besting all competition, which of course can’t be ignored. It doesn’t even get to that. It’s the self-doubt and self-criticism that sabotages your efforts. It’s the little failures that sting—as they should—but that, untreated, lead to long festering infections and your eventual demise.
Combine this with the fact that our vices are ubiquitous and ever-flowing; the odds of any of us following through with our ambitions are ridiculously low.
So I urge you not to give up. I urge you—now in this low moment of your story where everything has "gone south" and it feels like there's just no way out—I urge you to acknowledge and accept that what you're doing is super hard, and all you can do is, well, "do the math".
Take a breath. Process where you’re at and how far you've come. Then let all the emotions run their course and fade. Allow the time it takes to create the mental calm and level-headedness needed to arrive at rational and strategic solutions to the problems you face.
Every problem has a solution. Every environment has the tools and resources you need. MacGyver knew this in the late 80s. Mark Watney in the 2010s. Now it's your turn to realize this. It’s your turn to get a little clever; to be "utterly screwed" for a minute before figuring a way out.
It’s your turn to do the math and just begin.
- Simon ㋛
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