I heard a quote from the great John Carmack that resonated with me the other day.

Focused hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren’t sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.

— John Carmack

When building my first SaaS company I had a very binary approach to getting things done. I made big pushes. I acted like everything was on fire all the time. I would pull all-nighters and work 16 hour days.

I had notions that “if I can just fix/write X then the company will live”. Sure I might get more done for a day or two, but by Wednesday I was useless already recovering from Monday and Tuesday and by Friday I was frustrated I wasn’t getting anything done and then I felt guilty for not working.

I was either sprinting or completely exhausted.

It was crushing to put in those sorts of hours only to find out that something you built wasn’t going to work.

The cycling analogy

As a competitive cyclist, I know this approach doesn’t work. In cycling, we have a base phase where you build aerobic capacity through consistent, moderate effort over months. You can’t skip it and jump straight to race intensity. If you try to ride hard every day, you’ll either burn out or get injured.

The base phase isn’t sexy. It’s not maximal effort. But it builds the foundation that makes those maximal efforts possible when they matter — in a race, on a climb, in a breakaway.

Ambitious, goal-oriented people often fall into the trap of constant sprinting. There’s no recovery, and there’s no base to build upon. You need both. The sustained effort builds capacity, and the occasional maximal push drives breakthrough progress.

But there’s another layer to this. You need to know when to be goal-oriented and when to be process-oriented. Goals work when you know the subject matter — you can see the finish line and push toward it. But R&D is time-based. Learning is time-based. You can’t sprint your way through understanding a new domain or exploring solutions to a problem you’ve never solved before. That requires putting in the time, being okay with not knowing how long it will take.

There’s an added benefit to acknowledging when you’re in R&D land. Your brain is allowed to play and be curious rather than produce. You can follow tangents, try things that might not work, explore without the pressure of a ticking clock. This unshackles your creativity and paradoxically improves your ability to focus, because you’re not fighting against the nature of the work.

I don’t regret my early sprint-everything approach. It shaped who I am. But if I could do it differently now, I would recognize when I’m in known territory (ship this feature, hit this deadline) versus unknown territory (figure out how this works, explore these options). The former rewards goal orientation. The latter rewards putting in consistent time.

Putting in the right effort at the right time, consistently, allows you to enjoy the learning and build strength, resiliency, and momentum over time. That’s your base phase. And when you need to sprint, you’ll have something to draw from.

P.S. I can’t recommend Masters of Doom enough. It’s a phenomenal book by David Kushner telling the story of the John Carmack and John Romero creating Id software and building the first 3d games for PC. I’m especially fond of the audio version which is done by my favorite narrator, Wil Wheaton.