The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

One of the greatest lessons I took from formerly subscribing to a high demand religion was exactly this. "By small and simple things are great things brought to pass."

The trick is to aggressively dive headfirst into a project, such that it becomes unconscionable for you to give up :)

The related alternative that has worked wonders for me is to commit to getting something done every day, that is all the way to completion. This may be a well defined partial bit of work like defining a data structure or implementing one part of the CRUD code that will be needed. Targeting some level of completion doesn't always work out but has an effect on goal setting and chunk size of work parceled out which improves the hit rate for every short working session.

Adding a little bit of extra productivity to every day is great advice. The challenge can be finding the time, which means you need to subtract time from some other activities.

Trading sleep for extra productivity is a losing game in the long run. It’s much better to swap out some time waster activities like watching TV or, yes, browsing HN. It can be tough to reduce time spent on vices, but after the habit is established it’s much more satisfying to do something productive with that time.

I found it helps to streamline other parts of my life to recoup free time. Simple things like meal planning, using flex schedules to commute during low-traffic hours, working out at home instead of the gym, and doing grocery shopping in bulk only once per week have been great ways for me to recapture 30-60 minutes every day.

This type of sentiment generally makes me feel that literally nobody understands why business work or don't.

I remember pitching the idea of a fantasy financial league to a friend who is a teacher, as a way of teaching kids about the stock market and finance. His reply instantly gelled with me and let me know they actually understood much more than I about both teaching and finance: He said it will teach exactly the wrong lesson. Even if you do it for an entire school year, there can be really only one type of winner: the investor that stuck all their money into a stock that happened to blow up, the opposite of a solid investment strategy.

I bring up this example to point out that feedback can be a poisoned apple. Start-ups are basically this exact scenario. The only optimum strategy is to go "all in". Either in the short term by quitting your job and warming up your pitch deck, or in the long term by have some multi-year side project draining all available free time.

So that's the bar, the vast majority of start-up likely had founders that went all in, it's table stakes. So what's the secret sauce? It is the equivalent to the fantasy financial league of picking an overperforming stock, it's not going all in.