No trickery, nothing new. Do not swerve to the right, nor to the left. Do the work that is laid before you to do, and accept the best move on the chess board. Your job is not to force a better move that doesn’t exist, or wish for a different chessboard. Your job is to be wise and take the best move, then let the chips fall where they may.
Every mistake I’ve ever made as developer, SEO, and in my general quest to build wealth through tech, has been related to deviating from something that I knew was already working. Because after a while, even something that is working becomes boring, and we seek dopamine elsewhere. We perceive that if something is boring that it’s no longer working, and that there must be some other angle or technological trickery that will work better and push the envelope or get us "over the hump”.
The truth is, the most boring things you have to do in a given day are very likely the most effective, because once you’ve taken the time to figure out what works in a given context, the only task is to double down and build in that direction.
And this can be true on both a macro and micro level.
> Every mistake I’ve ever made as developer, SEO, and in my general quest to build wealth through tech, has been related to deviating from something that I knew was already working.
On a macro level, you might change projects or even careers, entirely. On a micro level, you can deviate within a single project or lane. And while there can be situations where making a change is the right call, we tend to deviate from what is mundane - EVEN if it’s successful - to find something that will be more enticing and exciting, when a change isn’t necessary at all.
It's more fun to plan than it is to execute.
This is what I did over and over again, to varying degrees. I chased the dopamine of planning - the fun part of business and tech, while neglecting what I had already uncovered and simply had to be repeated.
It’s what Alex Hormozi call “uninformed optimism”.
This term denotes the early stages of an idea or path that seem really promising, perhaps even fun, yet the person knows very little about what the actual path is like. They start and put in some time, yet see little or no progress, then become frustrated at the lack of wins. This leads to “informed pessimism” where the would-be business tycoon now sees the downsides and difficulty of what they’ve set out to do.
And this is where most people deviate, or quit outright.
They want to chase the uninformed optimism because it FEELS good. It’s exciting and positive, and very effective at delivering dopamine.
But when you stop at informed pessimism, you start the cycle over, right before you get to the final stage: Informed optimism!
When you push through the pessimism, the boredom, the frustration - the parts that suck - you come out understanding that what you initially thought was possible is actually still possible. But now, you have a clearer, more accurate, and unglamorous view of what the process is like, how hard it is, and how long it will actually take.
You now know it will require a lot of patience, doing the boring work, and doubling down on the stuff that isn’t exciting but (for some unknown reason) is very effective.
Too often I tweaked and adjusted, when it got hard or boring.
Don’t do that. Just keep moving forward. Do what works and don’t swerve to the right or to the left.
Bobby is an SEO and developer who runs several projects, primarily Flipper File and Guitar Chalk.