Today I saw a social media post aimed at founders. The poster was saying that your general framing of your daily activities should be that everything is urgent. As if you’re running out of money.

You do need to be driven. You do need to be focused on making progress every week, and preferably every day.

But thinking and acting as if this is your last chance is a recipe for burnout. Good decisions are not made in this mindset.

I’d rather look at it as the need for discipline.

You have an idea, a target customer and a strategy for making sales to them.

From there it is basically an incremental series of experiments following a method.

Experiments

1. How does the customer do things now?
2. How much is a better mousetrap worth to them?
3. How do I build the first feature in two weeks?
4. etc

Method

You have a question.

You determine a method to find the answer.

You analyse the result.

Repeat.

While you absolutely shouldn’t waste one day on your journey, I think the journey is best thought of as a steady progression towards your ideal destination.

If you’re breaking it up into lots of small destinations you’re more likely to enjoy the trip, and you can change course whenever you need to.