The Math of Taking Off
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Something I’ve been thinking a lot about now that I’m self-employed is the pressure of finding “the thing.” When you leave the structure of a 9-to-5, there is a recurring panic that you need to know exactly what you’re building on day one. For the last handful of months, I’ve largely been throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, imagining that at some point, I’ll magically converge on the one perfect opportunity.
What I’m slowly realizing is that discovering “the thing” isn’t a stroke of genius—it’s a byproduct of a specific environment. Finding that one project that scales is the result of two factors:
Having enough runway.
Exploring enough opportunities.
Most people fail because they reverse the priority. They spend all their mental energy trying to predict which opportunity will work (Step 2) before they have secured the time to actually test it (Step 1). They treat discovery as an intellectual exercise rather than a statistical one. But you cannot find the signal if you run out of time while still wading through the noise.
This re-framing has fundamentally changed how I spend my days. The highest priority isn’t having the “right” answer today; it’s laying down additional runway. Runway is the catalyst for exploration. The more time I buy myself, the more experiments I can run. And the more experiments I run, the more likely I am to stumble into the opportunity that eventually takes off.
This realization has helped me shed the pressure of needing to have all the answers right now. Being self-employed is often less about being a visionary and more about being a survivalist. If you can keep the lights on long enough to take twenty swings at the plate, you are almost guaranteed to find a hit. If you only have the runway for two swings, you’re just gambling.
I’ve stopped worrying about the “perfect” direction and started focusing on the length of the track. If I am able to lay down enough runway, the plane will eventually take off. The answers aren’t found through thinking, they are found through the luxury of having the time to keep trying.
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