Abdulrasheed Mutiat

There is no cute way to chase your dreams. This is one of those things everyone knows in theory but forgets in practice. We picture the people who made it as if they were always cool. We imagine they had a plan, and that the plan worked, and that they looked confident while it was working. It is almost never like that. If you actually watch someone trying to do something ambitious, it looks embarrassing. They are sending cold emails that don't get answered. They are building a version of the thing that barely works. They are explaining the idea to people who don't get it, or who get it and don't care. They are working on it in their spare time, after work, when they are tired, when it would be easier to do nothing. The reason it looks uncool is that coolness is mostly about not trying too hard. And chasing a dream is, by definition, trying too hard. You care more than is reasonable. You keep going after the point where a sensible person would stop. Founders understand this. The first version of almost every successful startup was embarrassing. Not just imperfect, but actually embarrassing to show to people. The founders knew it was bad, and showed it anyway, because the alternative was to show nothing. The same is true for writers, artists, researchers, anyone. The early work is ugly because you don't yet know what you're doing. You only learn what you're doing by doing the ugly version first. People wait for a cool way to start because they think embarrassment is a signal that they're doing it wrong. In fact it's usually a signal that they're doing it at all. If you're not embarrassed by your first attempt, you probably started too late. There is a temptation to hide until you are ready. To work in secret, polish in private, and then appear, fully formed, as if you never struggled. But that is just a way of protecting your reputation at the cost of your progress. The people who make it tend to be the ones who were willing to look foolish in public for longer than everyone else. It doesn't get cool later, either. It just gets less visible. Once someone succeeds, we edit out the embarrassing part. We tell the story backwards, from the success to the start, and it sounds inevitable. We forget the years when it looked like nothing was going to work. So if what you are doing feels ugly and difficult and embarrassing, that does not mean you are on the wrong track. It is what the right track feels like at the beginning.

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