For how easy it is to be prolific here on my own computer, I’ve been surprisingly bad at being prolific out in the world.
I show up at my desk every day and work on my own projects. If you looked over my shoulder, you wouldn’t see much stagnation. You’d see steady, tangible progress.
And yet, embarrassingly few of the things I’ve come up with over the last decade or two have ever reached the outer world.
The work evolves, but somehow stays here.
The inner and outer worlds
I’ve spent my career making software, and I feel very much in control when I’m focused on the inner world of the work.
I can make it great, cohesive, well-architected, minimal, robust. I can add thoughtful touches that surprise and delight. Things feel especially healthy when some part of the work pushes the state of the art.
Time spent there produces something tangible. At the end of the day, the thing is better than it was that morning.
The outer world is different… Who is this really for? What do they care about? What else are they doing instead? What is changing around them? Why would this matter now?
I can spend a day digging into questions like those and have nothing concrete to point to when I’m done. There’s nothing to watch improve. No test turns green. I may finish the day less certain than I started it.
Unfortunately, the outer world is also where the work either matters or doesn’t. And there’s no editor I can open the damn thing in.
I feel such command over the inner world, and so much less over the outer one, that I naturally spend my time where I feel useful.
For years I’ve acted as though sufficiently good work might transcend my avoidance of everything else: if the thing is thoughtful enough, original enough, complete enough, maybe it can force its way into significance on merit alone.
That’s a comforting belief when making things is the part you are best at.
Vision
Vision is supposed to connect the two worlds: some understanding of what is happening in the world, held with enough confidence to form a belief about what ought to exist in it.
I thrive when building out a well-defined vision. I’m less drawn to the work of continually earning one.
At the beginning of a project, I might spend days or weeks exploring possibilities. Eventually something sticks. I develop a point of view, decide what I want to make, and feel a kind of relief: Great. Now I can build.
I’m realizing how much I’ve treated forming the vision as a phase that happens before making the thing. But the vision rests on beliefs about a world that does not stop changing when I start coding. At today’s pace of change, an entire product category can be invalidated between the time I start working on something and when I launch it. My own understanding changes too.
Vision can’t be something I establish once and then spend the next six months down a rabbit hole implementing.
Form eclipses vision
As a project takes form, it gets easier to do each next thing. There’s always something obvious to improve, extend, or reshape, and the present form of the work will so readily produce an answer to “what’s next” that I’ve trained myself to look there first.
At first, form is an expression of vision.
Somewhere along the way, vision becomes an extrusion of form.
My idea of what the project can become starts coming mostly from what it has already become. Nothing about this makes the work suddenly bad. Usually the opposite happens: it becomes more complete, more coherent, more recognizably itself.
It feels like progress, meanwhile more and more of the future is becoming an extrapolation of the present.
I saw the cost of that with my latest project. I built for months and felt like I was making steady progress, then finally put it in front of people.
Nobody was especially enthusiastic. Some people signed up, but few even got far enough to experience the parts I had spent all that time making.
What surprised me was how total that feedback felt. It didn’t feel like just one expression of the idea had failed, but that the whole idea had.
By then, I hadn’t been thinking much about the project independently of daily ins and outs. Most of my attention had gone toward making this version better. So when this version wasn’t compelling, there wasn’t some richer idea of the project waiting behind it.
The form had quietly acquired the authority to tell me what the idea itself was worth.
Continue or break
That’s usually where a project stops feeling malleable to me. Its present shape starts to feel like the entire thing, so becoming unhappy with the whole thing implicates everything: what it is now, the pieces that make it up, everything it might become.
Incremental changes feel useless because the broken identity would be left intact. So in many older projects, I would eventually tear everything down.
My thinking had changed, and returning to an intangible idea felt like the fastest way to recover the freedom I had at the beginning. For a long time I thought this meant I was appropriately irreverent toward the form of my work, in the interest of being able to adapt to changes in the vision or better ideas that came along.
Now I think it meant the opposite: I had given the present form so much authority that rejecting it felt inseparable from rejecting the project.
Eventually I got tired of this cycle. I could see that my bias toward rewrites, major pivots, and starting over was preventing anything from accumulating, so with this project I deliberately inverted it: respect what exists, build on yesterday’s work, keep the thing moving.
That worked in the narrow sense that the project kept accumulating. But I now think the two approaches make the same mistake.
Destroy yesterday’s work or defer to it — either way, yesterday’s work still gets too much say over what happens tomorrow.
World > Vision > Form
The fix isn’t some other balance between sticking with the current thing and starting over. Both make the present form the main object of attention.
What needs to change is what informs what.
The world should inform the vision, and the vision should inform the form.
That means staying in contact with the world while I build, rather than disappearing into the project until I have something to show. I need to keep testing my assumptions, interacting with people, and looking outward: What is changing? What is stuck? What barriers are likely to break? What is becoming newly possible? What do people misunderstand today that they may understand differently a year from now?
Those observations are where a vision comes from. If I keep developing that vision while I build, the thing in front of me can remain just one expression of it.
The form can still teach me things. Building something can expose a possibility I hadn’t seen or prove that an assumption was wrong. Sometimes the only way to think clearly is to make something concrete.
But the work on my screen cannot become my best source of truth about what the work ought to be.
I’m not worried about losing my bias toward craft. I’ll keep caring about the details, the architecture, the interaction, the coherence of the thing. That part is automatic.
Craft matters enormously if it is applied to something that matters in the first place.
For most of my career, somebody else supplied enough of the outside understanding and direction that I was free to disappear into the work. On my own projects, I kept disappearing anyway, as if somebody else would take care of the rest.
Understanding what’s changing, developing beliefs about it, putting those beliefs into the world, seeing what comes back, and changing my mind when necessary – all of these things* are* the work; not just prerequisites.
The practical signal for me is simple: when I’ve been staring at a project long enough that every possible next move seems to come from the project itself, I probably don’t need to stare at it harder. I need to step away from the work and look outward again.
The outer world isn’t somewhere I should emerge into once the thing is ready. It’s somewhere I should be making the thing all along.
So that’s where I’m going to spend more of my time.
Craft matters no less. It was just never the scarce part for me.
I’ve spent a very long time showing up at the desk.
It’s time to start showing up in the world.