Try to get confused

I’ve been seeing this convergence-divergence cycle as a founder as well. We are forced to be like an octopus doing full-court press in 8 different disciplines to build a bootstrapped startup. Your inner engineer always cursing at your inner creative, and occasionally getting disillusioned when your customers don’t respond well to some feature or tweak.

How to keep morale and quality and technical debt at bay? If you have the answers please share, here are some of my steps to combat the above:

1. Your brain plays some steps better than others at certain parts of the sleep cycle. Knowing when to do what so you do it well is half the battle. Example: no brainstorming or solving complex problems when sleep deprived, but yes to grinding through mundane easy but boring tasks when sleep deprived (your brain is too tired to care so it doesn’t hinder with distractions / ADHD ).

2. Step back from some tough tasks and go to a different environment then let your brain sleep on it or wander before looking at them fresh. Prioritize as if someone else is doing the work and validate everything with quick prototypes/calls to users instead of putting in large effort on assumptions.

3. Having kids has helped, ironically. If your break involves spending time with them and teaching them, breaking down the problems for them and talking through with them helps see things clearly as well.

I see similar duality in engineers between big corp and start-ups. In big corp, engineers tend to focus on a small part of the system, a small part of the software development cycle. In big corp, engineering could mean a frontend of a customer facing application, uptime of a backend, deployment throughput of something, etc. In start-up, you can be a mix of an idea guy, project manager, frontend, backend, ops, customer support, QA. On the journey to big-corp, start up starts to specialize, cost of communication increased, silos created, customer insight got lost, then the whole cycle repeats (in other start-up).

I too go through these cycles on my many projects; sometimes grudgingly finishing them with hate or passion.

To me, I didn't see it as a divergence cycle between impact and vision, although this makes a lot of sense and gives me a nice hack to get out of this vicious cycle.

To me, it felt purely hormonal. I go through phases were I can't stop committing code and the polar opposite: Netflix and chill, code allergy, creative rot.

The key is to know that it will turn around, because the interest and curiosity that got you there in the first place, is bound to come back.

Good ideas are like bad smells, they have a tendency to stick around...

Bro, I stay confused