I need to forget and just do

There are many ways I could start this blog post, but the first needs to be a message to myself. It is ok if you do not post this anywhere. It is ok if people do not read it. It is ok if people do and don’t care. It is ok for people to not care about you.

I keep thinking about the last year since I wrote my previous blog. There is so much I have done. I refreshed on my physics in Waipi’o Valley, integrated with the local community there, learned the spirit of Aloha, interned as a mechatronics engineer for a year, visited Chinese factories, started dating the most wonderful woman in the world, learned about drones, and ran a 6 week process to understand how I might create a bio device that continuously tracks my blood.

I feel like I have done so much yet so little at the same time. So much external movement for the sake of external validation. So many side quests that fit neatly into a fundraising deck. I can see it already. I have had the following vision play out in my head multiple times:

Room full of investors looking at me presenting on a screen.

“The reason you should invest in me as a founder is not because of my previous success. We all know how often founders fail a second time. The market is a great equalizer.”

VCs nod their heads in agreement, some holding a constant, ruminating gaze.

I click to a slide of a photo of a tent in a factory.

“The reason you should invest in me as a founder is because, despite all my success, I lived in a literal tent in a factory and learned physics, mechanical, and electrical engineering.”

Click to a slide of me soldering a PCB.

Click to a slide of me machining steel.

Click to a slide of some revenue metric exploding.

“The reason you should invest in my company is because I never give up.”

VCs nod their heads more vigorously.

“Oh. And I did also start a company that sold for a billion dollars.”

Monopoly rich man laughs fill the room.

As funny and cringe as this vision is, it is emblematic of a lot of things I have gotten wrong. I think I need to forget about Loom altogether and build once again for the love of the game. I think I need to forget about how some future raise will look publicly. I think I need to forget about how what I do may sound on my yet-to-be-written Wikipedia page.

I think I need to forget and just do.

Doing things for the love of the game

A couple years ago, a 16 year-old kid named Adam DM’d me on X. He was depressed and didn’t know what to do with his life. Going to college didn’t seem like a fit, and he wasn’t sure whether learning PCB design was a good idea given the explosion of AI. He asked me what I would do. I told him to pick a path and trust things would work out. A couple years later he was designing his own drone flight controllers from scratch at 18 years of age.

I give advice to many people who reach out to me on a weekly basis. Adam is in the top 1% when it comes to agency.

A few months ago, we hopped on a call and I gave him the rundown of a project I was working on for fun. I wanted to get a drone to water my indoor house plants. I told him I would be happy to fly him out and put him up in my guest room in exchange for him working on the hardware components while I worked on the autonomy stack.

We did not ultimately complete the project. In fact, we were far from completion. We learned a lot, but one thing I couldn’t help but notice was that Adam was having a lot more fun than me. On multiple occasions we had a conversation where he said “look man I’m just doing this for the love of the game”. To him, he was getting to do what he loved with someone he looked up to. For me, although coding and soldering boards was fun, I couldn’t help but continue to cycle on how what I was doing would look to a room full of investors or a random stranger on the internet watching some podcast I was on. I saw how much more ambitious Adam was even with this small project compared to my own ambition to start some big company. I was genuinely happy for him. I knew exactly what he was feeling. And I wanted that energy back.

I often think about a walk I took with the CEO of the startup I worked at before starting Loom. He had started companies before and worked high up in marketing at Apple during Jobs’ reign. I asked him for advice, and he told me “Your greatest strength is not having done this before. You do not need to unlearn anything. Take advantage of that and go fast”.

I think about that walk a lot these days. I think I am at a point where I need to unlearn the attachments I have created that have linked my sense of self worth to the reception of the things I create. And just go.

Caring about what others think has exhausted my creative being

When I take account of how I am feeling overall, I am happy and grateful. When I take account of how my creative being feels, he is extremely tired. It is a strange emotional place to be.

I am tired of jokingly saying “I am unemployed” when people ask what I do because I have impossible standards when it comes to my own project exploration. I am tired of the process of figuring out something grand to build instead of just building something that seems useful and fun.

And I am tired because of what’s going on in my head. I am scared of ending up a one-hit wonder. I am scared I will not figure things out before having kids and then never figuring things out from there because I have less energy and time. I am scared of finally launching something and people shitting on it because they have high expectations. “See?! This guy isn’t shit. It was all luck.”

I am tired of how sensitive I have become. Whenever someone ghosts me, it’s never “shit happens, people are busy”. Whenever someone disrespects my time, it’s never “some people act selfishly or are forgetful”. It’s “How dare they? They must not believe in me. I’ll show them”.

I am able to quickly recognize how ridiculous and ungraceful these thought patterns are. However, I am tired of constantly thinking about all of this shit. And generally how doubtful and sensitive these thoughts have made me.

These thoughts are not new. They were playing in my head before. They are just very loud now because my success validated the demons, and, since the demons have been validated, when they speak, they scream.

I need to become humble and honest again

It took me a year to write this because I wanted to have a lot to show for myself. I wanted to be able to say “look at all this cool stuff I did”. However, despite doing a bunch of cool stuff, I realized I was still energetically blocked. I wanted to seem like I had everything together and I knew exactly what I was going to do, but I simply could not bring myself to write anything that seemed worth putting out there because everything I wanted to write was not true.

Ultimately, I think the purpose of this current chapter is for me to to become humbled until I am so honest there is nothing left to hide. There are no hidden agendas. There are no layers between me and reality. From there, I can create for the sake of creating again.