Day 44: On competition and fear

Motion has been getting a lot of attention lately, and someone in my residency mentioned it to me today after seeing it on Hacker News. It’s a strange feeling seeing other people’s solutions. On one hand, I love that this issue is getting more attention and that there are people working on it. For the last several years, it seems like there’s more and more discussion around the influence that technology has on us and what we should do about the negative consequences.

At the same time, there’s the discomfort from feeling like my work matters less because of other people’s work. Especially when their work is so similar to what I’ve been working on! I started working on Intention in the beginning of October, got it a place where I had friends beta test it and provide feedback, and then put it on hold to work on Hide Feed.

Perhaps a lesson here is that I should be quicker to launch and truly build in the open — even though I’ve been journaling and talking about my product development process, I haven’t been as good about actually sharing the actual product. My bar for when something is worth “launching” might still be too high, and I’d like to experiment with sharing things at earlier stages.

Sometimes I slip into the delusion of seeing other people’s work as “competition”, but when I see clearly, I know that it’s much more helpful to drop that notion and recognize that thinking in that manner is unhelpful and based purely on fear. Even with the uncomfortable feelings, I truly wish Harry, Ethan, and Omid over at Motion the best of luck. It’s great that they’re working on helping people spend their time better.

When I built Hide Likes, someone asked how I’d feel if the entire tech industry did a 180, removed all vanity metrics, and rendered my extension obsolete. I said that’d be the absolute best-case scenario. It’s weird to think that my projects becoming useless would be a good thing, but having a massive improvement at the societal level is much more significant than how well my personal endeavors go. I’m hoping I can keep that perspective with all the things that I work on. Becoming obsolete because the problem no longer exists should be something to celebrate, not fear. Otherwise, would I be any different than companies like Intuit who lobby to make it harder for people to file their taxes just so they can make more money? The betterment of society is more important than my personal gain.