How I Keep Going

Recently, someone hit me up on Twitter, and we started talking on the lines of working hard. The conversation was beautiful. Which gave me the inspiration to collect my thoughts about working hard and how to keep going with it. Over the time, I’ve come to accept that working hard involves a lot of execution, like a lot. A constantly overthinking, over-optimizing and anxious mind can execute only so much. They don’t even know their limits. When you are in pure execution, all other thoughts wither away. That is what pleasure feels like. Hard work takes away all your unnecessary and painful thoughts.

So hard work requires a lot of execution. But it is important to look for the hidden force behind working hard. You either should have a strong reason or a strong impulse. Most people have very predictable motivation pertaining to the material world. They work hard to survive the winter of the uncertain future. Others work hard to become masters of their craft. But it isn’t the reason for me. For me, it’s my hate towards getting stuck. I’ve started and ended so many projects so many times that I’ve developed a very strong revulsion towards being stuck. I hate to be stuck in this dance of starting and dropping projects.

Nothing is worth it if there’s no proof of work and creativity. This is what keeps me going.

The failures were not all in vain, though. They at the very least taught me how not to approach projects. To not be ideal, instead be pragmatic about it. Start with something you have absolute confidence to finish. Different skill levels and work experiences pertain to different levels of complexity and scope of projects. So, you have to choose wisely. Otherwise, things will never get done, and you’ll give up. This requires humility about your own tentative abilities. Remember, the objective early on is to develop this stamina of finishing what you have started. Leaving things in perpetual limbo actually degrades your confidence.

Take things from start to finish, no matter what. Being committed to something is one of the highest virtues. Even if you have to become a robot to do it for a while. Your brain has to believe that you can lead. That’s the only way to move on to bigger, more ambitious projects. You are in service of your confidence. At the end of it, you’ll realize that it’s not the idea that matters. It is the newfound insight that you can just do things. Congrats! You just acquired a new skill. It’s going to be with you until death comes for you. It took me years to realize this. You have no idea how many cigarettes I’ve smoked to get by the pain of failure. I hope you don’t have either.

You need to remove friction. You need to become good at context switching. When you think, think hard. When you execute, your brain must be smooth, free of worldly worries. It should only be you and the problem at hand. When you are in pure execution mode, you start to despise the part of your brain that overthinks, as it wastes crucial time and energy. At the end of the day, what you produce is what matters, both to yourself and the world. Yes, the journey is equally important and fun, but if there’s nothing to show, the journey becomes a grim reminder of a failing past.

Henry Miller once said, “Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.” If you are honest, if you really care, you just can’t turn your head away from the extremely hard things people are creating around you. You should not be thinking things like what is your purpose, what you are good at, ad infinitum. Big life questions are proxies for adult procrastination. Deep down inside, you are afraid of the pain that comes from working hard. To keep going is to keep looking for things worth working hard on. Not looking is not an option. You might be at your lowest of the low but even in that moment, you have to be vigilant. Luck comes to those who are ready.

One of the best ways to remain stuck is by being selfish about your creations. Rather than doing it for the heck of it, you get too attached. But you don’t get better by getting too attached early on. Instead, you should be fine with throwing away your early projects. Remember, when you are starting, your goal should not be the what of whatever you are creating. Your goal should be having a vision and taking it to completion. Your product is the muscle to creating what you want to see in the world. Only this muscle will help you reach the point where the questions of “what to create and how to create” stop bothering you. At that point, your problem becomes carving out the time and avoiding the resistance.

Everyone has some life force within them to drive execution. Mine is that I hate to be dragged down by circumstances, be it my past, my predicaments, my emotions, or my current abilities and limitations. The possibility of not realizing my potential haunts me. It comes from principle. I come from a place of scarcity. But the world today is the garden of infinite abundance. All the resources are at your fingertips. I have no valid excuses.

But all the resources are just fossil fuel when there’s no urgency to act. If you wait for the right time to do something, it will never get done. No one is coming to do it for you. You need to be swift in the face of uncertainty. Speed and focus are non-negotiables. Urgency is also the marker that you care. It’s extremely important for you to care about your projects. Even if you have to be delusional about it, so be it. As Mr. Robot says, at the fundamental level, all decisions are binary. You either care or you don’t. You either do or you don’t. 0 or 1.

The reason I’m grinding harder than ever is because I know the 0 and 1 of my life now. I sort of gave up on finding fulfillment by working on B2B SAAS and other such fluff. The stuff that I work outside of work for myself is the only thing that keeps me creatively fulfilled. And I can work any number of hours on it. I realized that I’m meant to achieve mastery, not work on solutions looking for problems looking for solutions. We have heard of bullshit jobs. But no one talks about bullshit software. I don’t want to be part of this fake self-fulfilling prophecy. I shall not stop until I have some semblance of mastery.

And I’ll fail a lot. But failing is also proof of execution. In the end, the muscle is still getting stronger. I can’t let subjectivities decide my fate.

To quote @sohom, what do you want to be? A museum of failures, or a gallery of trying.