I’ve noticed one trend.

My manager assigns me a task or project → I put in the work.

I put in the work.

Thinking. Organizing. Optimizing.

Making it clear enough that another person can open it and not immediately suffer.

After a week of sweat, I present it to him.

His usual response: “Good starting point… But…”

And I’m like: “O_o. Dude. This is a finished product. Ready for consumption. Enjoy your meal.”

But then he starts asking questions.

Poking the whole thing. Trying to find holes.

Not going to lie, this is not my favorite part of the experience.

My first reaction is usually very mature and professional:

How dare you question my beautiful creature?

But then something annoying happens.

He starts asking questions that actually make sense.

Even worse, they put me in his shoes.

Very presumptuous of me to claim, of course. But still.

I start seeing other angles.

Other risks. Other possible versions of the solution.

And then it takes another bunch of effort.

Next 1:1, same situation.

He says: “Good progress. What if…”

And I’m back to: “O_o.”

The challenge is simple.

We love our ideas because we created them.

We protect them from the hostile environment like tiny emotional houseplants.

But other people do not care.

They have no attachment to the thing we spent so much effort building.

To them, it is just one possible option.

Not one version, but version one.

Fair enough.

I mean, the world is not fair by any means. So maybe “fair enough” is too generous.

But still.

How do we survive this without losing sanity?

The answer is annoyingly simple.

Reframing.

Old attitude: “I love the solution I came up with.”

New approach: “I love the problem I am dealing with.”

That small shift changes everything.

Because a solution is a one-time thing.

Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. (Most likely, it doesn’t. That is not pessimism.
That is just probability being rude).

The value is not in this solution. The value is in being able to make the next one.

Now it is not checkers.

More like 3D chess.

From The Big Bang Theory. Remember?

No? Maybe you are too young to read this newsletter.

Anyway.

That is an entertaining way of saying: there are more angles than I want there to be.

And the rule of this game is boringly simple:

To create good ideas, you need to come up with a lot of bad ones.

And then you need to let the bad ones go.

There is an old parable about the “monkey trap.”

A narrow hole is made in a coconut. A banana is placed inside. The coconut is tied to a tree.

The monkey reaches in, grabs the prize, and can no longer pull its fist out.

In theory, it could free itself at any moment.

All it has to do is let the banana go.

But that is exactly what it does not do.

For those who are not subscribed yet, let me explain:

The banana is the allegory of bad ideas.

Sticking to bad ideas is also a bad idea.

Very advanced stuff here.

Write this down instead:

Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Or, to make it even more practical:

Let the banana go!

Till next time.

The Last Quiet Thing - 8 min read.

An essay about how modern devices create constant work: updates, charging, logins, subscriptions, alerts, and settings. It argues that the problem may not be screen addiction. It may be maintenance.

Emojis at Work: The Effects of Emoji Use on Perceptions of Competence and Appropriateness - 13 min read.

Are emojis at work harmless warmth, or tiny career-limiting hieroglyphs? This study gives a more useful answer than “it depends,” although, it does depend. If you write in Slack, Teams, or any workplace chat where tone goes to die, this is a practical read.

If we avoid sadness in life, why do we seek it in art? - 6 min read.

Humans are funny. If sad songs, tragic novels, or quietly ruinous movies somehow make you feel better instead of worse, this piece explains why.

The book is about using better mental frames to handle stress, motivation, happiness, and success. Scott Adams (yup, the one who created Dilbert) keeps it practical and starts from a useful assumption: people are not nearly as rational as they think.

Everyone gets nostalgic for the time when the sun was brighter, the grass was greener, and the trees were taller. My version is less romantic: floppy disks, tiny monochrome displays, and thinking 1.44 MB was plenty. Yeah, and the walls made of real bricks.

Five-Minute Start Rule: His procrastination trick is to work on the task for five minutes. Once he starts, he usually keeps going because starting is the hard part.

Smart Skimming: Systrom reads nonfiction with a goal in mind. He tries to find the useful ideas quickly instead of reading every page just to finish.

Fast Book Quitting: He has abandoned books after reading only a quarter of them if they were not useful. Kevin does not treat finishing a bad book as an achievement.

Learning by Outcome: When he wants to learn something, he frames it as “I want to be able to do X.” Then he looks for the book, person, or resource that gets him there fastest.

Simple Thing First: One of Instagram’s early working values was “do the simple thing first”. His view was that complexity often makes decisions look smarter while making the product worse.

Bottleneck Thinking: He applied the idea from The Goal that the slowest part of a system limits the whole system. At Instagram, the bottleneck was often executive decision-making, not engineering speed.

Decision Inventory: When he and Mike Krieger became bottlenecks, they created a document listing product decisions waiting on them. Then they held focused sessions where the only job was to decide.

Burbn Pruning: Instagram started as Burbn, an app with check-ins, plans, and photos. They cut almost everything and kept photos because that was the part people actually cared about.

Clear Product Story: Systrom wanted products people could explain in one sentence. If users cannot describe what it does, they also cannot spread it.

This clip shows how to record audio in Apple Notes and get a transcript automatically. Simple feature, surprisingly useful.

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