My old boss used to tell me all the time that “you have to earn the right to do cool shit”.
There are other, less cool, ways of saying the same thing - including:
- Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals.
- Practice your scales, arpeggios, and etudes.
- Focus on the core parts of your business.
- Quantity has a quality of its own.
This certainly isn’t a blanket statement, and it’s worth thinking about the nuances.
Have you heard of 4X games? It’s a category of strategy games that fit into four stages: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. Ignore the violent semantics for a second, and appreciate how good of a framework it is.
“Earning the right to do cool shit” doesn’t matter if you’re in the first stage (explore). The point of this stage is to figure out what is out there - by default, everything you do in this stage is cool and shiny.
The later three stages is really where having a solid foundation matters. When you start expanding, you’ve probably identified something worth building for the medium/long term. Then, doing all the boring, tedious work becomes essential for bankrolling your cool R&D activities.
Improving observability throughout your systems, optimizing your core business to address problems smoother and capture opportunities faster, setting up automated scripts and testing, crafting data pipelines - these are all boring things that give you the chance to expand, exploit, exterminate, and work on cool shit.
Thankfully, the boring stuff isn’t all boring - there are definitely pockets inside the boring that are incredibly dope. For example, Amazon S3 is such a “unimpressive” service. But 11 fucking 9s availability is bonkers and reaching that level of reliability is absolutely brain-melting.
When you catch yourself getting bogged down with tedious, but important work; remind yourself that you have to earn the right to work on cool stuff. Maybe you’ll find some spiffy tidbits along the way.
But until then - stay alive and keep plugging away.