w speed
move so fast that doubt can't catch up
happy monday! for today’s newsletter, i want to talk about speed.
i watched an edit a couple days ago with clips of patrick bet-david, andrew tate, and andy frisella talking about how speed/moving fast matters more than anything else.
i’ve rewatched it multiple times since.
it hit on exactly what i was going through, so now i’m writing about it.
a lot of successful founders i personally know have one thing in common: they move fast. that’s how they win. the early bird gets the worm.
moving fast to win seems like such an intuitive idea, almost as if it is too obvious to write a whole newsletter about.
but after reflecting for a while, i realized that moving fast is somehow counterculture now.
there’s probably a whole bunch of reasons to explain why, like how the fable of the hare and the tortoise that is told to every child to teach them that ‘the slow and steady wins the race’ was a massive psyop; or the fact that talking to customers and getting feedback requires stepping out of your comfort zone, while building incrementally doesn’t, but i’m not going into that.
watch that video and think about how many people you know who fit the description of the people being called out. specifically, people who spend months “planning” and “researching” instead of building and shipping.
then ask yourself: am i moving as fast as i can?
i’m not afraid to admit that i wasn’t, and that’s why i’ve been struggling so much.
i’ve recently started building a new product. i’ll be using this newsletter to share more of that journey, but right now, i face doubt constantly and it pisses me off.
after watching that video, i recalled an interaction i had with a really successful founder in SF last month who referenced ben horowitz’s “the struggle” essay. i read the hard thing about hard things years ago but i didn’t understand the struggle until now.
ben horowitz writes about the loneliness of building something. the struggle is the moments where you question everything, the weight when things aren’t working and you don’t know if they ever will.
i feel it now. i find myself striking the table or pulling my hair out while writing code for our software.
here’s the thing though: i have no right to experience “the struggle” yet.
i’m building an MVP. i’m pre-revenue. i haven’t earned the privilege of real struggle that the founder in SF was talking to me about: the kind where people’s livelihoods depend on your decisions, where you’ve burned through runway and need to make payroll.
and yet:
when things break, i lash out. when a feature doesn’t work the way i imagined, when i hit a wall i didn’t see coming, or when i’m running behind a deadline i set for us, i spiral out.
i just started this a couple months ago and in the early days there’s nothing to hide behind.
we don’t have any product-market fit yet that i can point to. there’s no revenue to validate our assumptions. nothing to tell us that we’re on the right track except my conviction.
but even with the strongest of conviction doubt has all the room in the world to run wild, especially when you have no evidence.
“is this idea even viable?” or “am i the right person to build this?” or “what if i burn out before anything works?”
i keep having these thoughts.
that’s why the video i linked above resonated so much with me.
“move so fast that doubt can’t catch you.”
horowitz identified and eloquently described the struggle, the isolation, the crushing uncertainty of building something from nothing.
i used to think that the struggle is always going to be there and that it has no solution except for acceptance and action.
but after watching that video, i have a better idea: speed.
execution speed compresses the gap between action and validation. the gap where doubt lives. it’s exactly what the guy in the video talked about (paraphrased): “the definition of power is the gap between thoughts becoming reality. if someone is omnipotent, i.e. if they have unlimited power, they can think things into reality.”
when you scale that down, that means you think and execute immediately after to turn that into reality. the faster you move the more power you have.
i know we can’t eliminate doubt, that’s impossible. but we can outrun it long enough to build evidence.
you get feedback before you’ve convinced yourself no one wants what you’re making.
speed is the answer to the struggle. speed shrinks the window where the struggle can destroy you.
i’m still figuring this out.
but i’m trying to move faster now and not even think about the struggle. if i have doubts, that means i’ll need to accelerate.
maybe that’s all any of us can do in the early days.
w speed.
