Tips & Thoughts

We wait for motivation before tackling hard problems. That’s the trap.

Motivation is unreliable. It comes and goes with mood, energy, the quality of your morning coffee. Building a habit on it is like running a critical service on a host that reboots at random.

The alternative is to stop chasing the feeling and trust a system instead.

Your calendar can be that system. Decide once what matters and schedule it. When the time arrives, you don’t consult your feelings. You consult the clock.

The discipline isn’t forcing yourself to do the work. It’s honoring the decision you made when you were thinking clearly. The work follows.

For years, I believed I could handle every engineering challenge on my own. I was wrong.

What I was actually doing was turning myself into a single-person dependency. Teams don’t grow around that. Nothing durable gets built that way. And burnout arrives on a schedule.

The work of leading isn’t the work I used to do. It’s building the infrastructure that lets the team do the work without me in the middle of it. Documented processes. Clear ownership. A forum for decisions that doesn’t need my approval every time.

The goal is a department that runs when I’m not in the room. That’s the only way results stay consistent across more than one quarter.

I’ve seen two kinds of teams.

The first has a perfect process. Every ritual runs on schedule. Every ticket moves through the board clean. Then they ship a product nobody uses.

The second has a messy process. They adapt on the fly. They skip ceremonies when the work demands it. They ship something customers actually want.

Process exists to produce outcomes. When it starts producing neater boards instead, it’s failed - even when it looks its best.

A good process isn’t a goal. It’s a tool for reaching one.

The moon landing wasn’t just a technological achievement. It was an organizational one. Hundreds of scientists, engineers and astronauts had to coordinate around a goal none of them could carry alone. Same with the early internet - researchers on different continents quietly rewriting their local plans to fit a shared one.

That’s the part that gets lost when we call these ideas “audacious”. The motivation is a side effect. The real function of a big goal is coordination - it forces people to talk to each other because they can’t ship it on their own.

A small, easy goal doesn’t require that. And teams built around small, easy goals quietly stop talking to each other.

A challenging, significant goal is easier to move a team through than an easy, unimportant one.

Moving fast means more contact with reality, which means faster learning. You don’t get to spend time on things that don’t matter - there isn’t time to spend.

But fast isn’t a universal setting. Some work benefits from slow, deliberate steps - research, strategy, calls that are hard to reverse. There, speed is a liability.

The trick is knowing which mode you’re in and matching the pace to the work. A hare against a deadline. A tortoise against a decision.