Hard Thing #1: Getting Started
“And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.” ― Where the Wild Things Are
This is The Hard Thing - musings about some of the sh!t that needs to get done and how we might go about doing it.
“There should be a place where only the things you want to happen, happen” ― Where the Wild Things Are
A caveat before we get started: Ever since I flunked a 4th grade essay, all my worst grades in school involved writing... this might be painful... but, practice makes perfect?
In science and technology, we love the shiny objects: the drug approvals, the Nature papers, the new AI models... the big ideas that make headlines. But the real magic is in the grunt work—the long nights working through a bug, the thousand iterations before a hypothesis is proven, the small upgrades that stack up into something meaningful, being told no over and over again and still getting up to work the next day. The magic is in making a Hard Thing easy for the next person.
I can't count how many people I've advised to "write down their ideas". I daydream about writing anonymous (emphasis on anonymous) op-eds to say out loud the things I'm screaming inside. So last night I figured it's about time to follow my own advice and overcome my imposter syndrome1 and stick my own good name behind my bad writing... to walk into Where The Hard Things Are.
Lucky for me, one of my best friends is a world expert in imposter syndrome and says it’s not all bad!