Hey all, real john here. I have a lot going on right now and sorry I missed last week. Was taking a real vacation, but I’m back in NYC. This week, I’m going to talk about my new book, a little about the contents, and doing things that matter. Oh, three of diamonds, if you know you know. I wonder if this week if I’m more than 20% human. Let’s get into it.
I released Refuse the Race this week, and that still feels a little weird to write. You spend months with something sitting on your laptop, reading the same paragraphs over and over, moving a sentence three lines down and then moving it back the next day. Then suddenly it is a book. People can buy it. A couple of people already have, which is pretty damn cool.
The whole point of the book is that we spend a lot of our lives running races without really deciding if we want to run them. Career stuff is the obvious one. Get promoted. Make more money. Get the bigger title. Build something impressive. Whatever.
But I caught myself doing a much smaller version of the exact same thing this week. I was trying to win the race to start.
I do this all the time. Give me a problem and my brain immediately starts working on it. Someone can be explaining something to me and I am already thinking, why did they build it that way? What is actually broken here? Could we just remove half of this? What would I build first?
That has been useful for me for a very long time. I have made a career out of it. But I am starting to notice the downside. Sometimes I start solving things before I have decided whether I should be solving them at all.
That sounds stupid when I write it out. Of course you should decide if something matters before you spend time on it. And yet I am really good at skipping that part. I think a lot of builders are.
We like movement. Starting something feels good. Open the laptop, create the repo, write the first page, make the prototype. Now we are doing something. Waiting feels like the opposite of progress, and I hate waiting.
But sometimes doing nothing for another day is the right move. Maybe the idea is not clear enough yet. Maybe the timing is wrong. Maybe there is something else that matters more. Maybe you are excited about the problem and that is literally the only reason you are touching it. I have absolutely done that one.
So I have been trying to ask myself a slightly different question lately. Not, “Can I do this?” That is usually not the interesting question.
The better question is, “Should I be doing this right now?”
There are a ridiculous number of things I can do, and that is part of the problem. I can build software. I can write. I can start a company. I can help somebody figure out a product. I can record a podcast. I can spend an afternoon learning a completely unnecessary card move because apparently I enjoy making my life difficult.
Capability is not the issue. Time is.
And this is where Refuse the Race kind of came back around and smacked me in the head. I wrote this whole book about not blindly chasing goals that were handed to you by somebody else, then realized I am perfectly capable of inventing my own races.
The race to answer quickly. The race to prove I know what I am doing. The race to help. The race to start.
That last one is sneaky because it looks like productivity, and I really like productivity.
I still believe strongly in action. I am not turning into the guy who wants six planning meetings before anybody is allowed to touch a keyboard. If I ever start saying things like “we need a steering committee,” somebody please check on me.
I still think shipping teaches you things planning never will. I still think imperfect things in the hands of real people are better than perfect things sitting in your head. But I am realizing there is a step before “move fast.”
It is deciding whether the thing deserves your time in the first place.
That is a different skill, and I am getting better at it. Slowly.
So this week, instead of asking what you should start, maybe ask something else: What are you already running toward that you never actually decided was important?
You may decide it still matters. Great. Keep going.
Make sure it is your race, now go build something amazing!
Refuse the Race came out this week. If any of this sounds uncomfortably familiar, that is pretty much why I wrote it.
If you are interested in building something with me, or have questions at what you are building, let me know.
I help founders and engineering leaders turn difficult technology problems into things that actually ship.
Side note on this: I ran this through the AI check on substack and it came back as 100% AI, which is funny. Does that mean I’m not real, or that the criteria it is using sucks? My 2 cents on AI detectors.