Outpacing the Spiral

Sometimes, especially if you spend a lot of time online, it can feel like everyone is moving faster than you. Folks post dozens of times a day about their main project, their side project and how they’ve automated their life and have more time than ever. Reading those stories it’s easy to feel like you’re not doing enough.

You can feel this way even when you are actively doing things. You have a side project but it feels like a slow burn next to everything else. You might be ticking along in your day job but worry about being left behind. You're not stopped but you don't feel like you're moving fast enough.

I’ve certainly felt this way. For a long time, especially when I was running a startup, I felt I was perpetually behind everyone else. These days there’s even more to keep up with and sometimes the feeling rears its head.

What I’ve found is that when you dig into it, most of these folks are doing a lot of things without really moving forward. The way I think about it is as if they’re moving in a spiral. Round and round very quickly but only slowly moving forward (or up, depending on how you imagine spirals).

I'm not trying to discount anyone’s output. Folks moving in spirals are genuinely doing a lot. The difference is, the actual progress towards impactful output (up or forward in the spiral) still happens at a much slower pace. Every step forward requires many steps around and around.

From the outside it can be hard to see the difference. They tell their stories from the driver’s seat where the outside world is racing past them. When you’re starting out you get pulled every which way trying to keep up with their movements.

What you need is perspective. You need to measure progress only in the direction you care about. Progress towards the goal. Once you do that you need to spend your time making sure most of your movement is solely in that direction.

So the first of these requirements is knowing which direction the goal is in. That comes from a mix of introspection and deliberately slowing down to find it. You need to look at what you’re aiming to do and pick out the essential aspects of that goal. Think about your version of “maximise shareholder value”. What’s the thing that will mark this as a success once all is said and done?

Mostly, you need to avoid doing all the other stuff that seems like progress but isn't.

To look at this through some of today’s trends, you might be building a new software product. Your goal should be to find and help customers by getting a working product in their hands in exchange for money. Your goal should not be building dark software factories or tools to run 1,000 AI agents in parallel. Those things might, and I say might with a lot of hesitation, help you get to the goal but they aren’t the goal. Spending time on those things is time spent spinning, not time spent moving forward.

What this means in practice is keeping your real goal clear in your mind. This is hard when there’s a flood of noise from others pointing in every direction. Most of the folks spending all day talking about their new tools or new process are either stuck or their goal is to sell you a tool or course. Neither of those is the same as your goal of shipping value to your users.

Once you have your goal, the difficulty becomes keeping your overall progress focused in that direction. It’s never clear cut or a direct straight line. You know broadly where your goal is but there’s not a definitive set of things you can do to get there.

You have to work to course correct continuously.

This can be draining and it is very easy to get distracted. You start questioning if maybe you do need whatever trendy new thing everyone else has. Sometimes you’ll take the bait and go off course. The trick then is to realise and hop back on the path.

Nobody is expecting perfection, you just need to spend less time spiralling around than everyone else and you’ll end up miles ahead.