Every piece of negative feedback, however small, just completely destroys me.

The most gut-wrenching feeling is posting online and people not caring at all. Like, zero feedback. Being ignored completely. It’s hard.

And it happens all the time, to a lot of people. There’s this very strange 80/20 rule. Of all the people creating stuff, most get completely ignored. A few “lucky ones” get all the attention.

It’s weird to see it in action. I made a game recently. It’s pretty fun to play. If I post, basically no-one cares. But if Pieter Levels posts his game, then it gets retweeted by Elon. And he makes like $50k from it in a few days. It’s insane. Of course he has a big audience and he also started from zero. And his game is multiplayer and 3D. Ok.

But my point is, progress compounds. And early on if you’re in the trenches it doesn’t look like that. It just looks completely flat. It’s a big slog and it looks like you’ll have to fight very hard for every follower. There’s big gaps where nothing happens. Sometimes weeks or months. Where it seems like you lose more than you gain.

But every follower after becomes easier. Every dollar after becomes easier. That’s what most people don’t realise. And that’s why they quit too early.

Outsized outcomes come from consistency, and consistency comes from belief. It’s not enough to just “do the work”. You will quit if you don’t believe. The reward comes ultimately from the belief.

At some point something will happen. There’s this zero to one moment. But you need to be wary of your expectations. Your expectations should be non linear. The value of the first follower you get is extremely high, but that value only gets realised later on. Everything compounds.

So don’t get bogged down in tunnel vision. In how it “should” be. Yes in an ideal world you get a linear stream of followers or revenue. Growing every day. But the thing is then it would be easy. Then no-one would fucking quit. Then there is literally no point in doing anything. Just trust the process. Enjoy writing, building, selling, whatever it is you’re doing. But keep going without expectations, at least at first.

Same with investing. The value lies in being right when others are wrong. Being early looks exactly the same as being wrong. And that’s the hard part because you feel like you’re wrong. Long term vision. Don’t get shaken out by silly things like irrational markets or temporary bad numbers. Ride the wave, keep momentum. Keep believing.

The typical advice in startup land is to fail fast and kill your metaphorical babies.

I would argue that every single one of my biggest mistakes was giving up too early. Even the projects I worked on for multiple years. Most of the value is at the finish line.