Stop Long Term Planning

It’s for your own good.

When I first started my company with Soumith, I was severely optimistic. We had no idea what we were getting into and how hard it would be to execute.

I’ll never forget one of the first times I’ve ever met Soumith (online, we have yet to meet in person). I was presenting a deck of our company roadmap and where I wanted us to be in the near future.

In the deck, I estimated that we were going to have a minimum viable product done by February, obtain the total available market of Nashville, and, by the summer, we would raise seed capital “across the United States”.

Yes, embarassingly I wrote that.

So how many of those things have we actually accomplished?

None.

While we have an app on the App Store, it is barely a minimum viable product and most certainly hasn’t reached market dominance in Nashville. Let alone a petite suburb.

So what went wrong between Soumith and me?

Nothing, other than our predictions.

One of the best lessons we’ve learned from entrepreneurship is that long term planning is largely based on bullshit. Neither of us had that much business or engineering experience before starting our venture, so you could say that our predictions came straight out of our asses.

But even if we were experienced in those things, we’re definitely not the only offenders of miscalculating projections. Steve Blank, one of the pioneers of the famous Lean Startup movement, penned that “business plans rarely survive first contact with customers”.

The truth about long term planning is this: you get excited for something that may or may not happen. And if it doesn’t happen, you become disappointed or frustrated that it did not work. Finally you dig yourself in a rabbit hole of should’ve/could’ve/would’ve and, ultimately, give up on your project.

The key here is to recognize that it’s giving up — not achieving unrealistic expectations — that truly defines failure.

This goes back to why I called myself “severely optimistic” in the intro. The optimism was severe because not making projections can discourage me from continuing.

But the fact is that the greatest innovators, artists, and entrepreneurs in world history did what they did because they loved the journey more than the destination. If you are trying to be a blogger but hate blogging then it’s not for you. If you are trying to be a software engineer but hate coding then it’s not for you.

Soumith and I eventually became better at what we do because we stopped long term planning. In fact, I reckon that it’s what saved our morale.

And that’s the beauty of it all: we’re building what we’re building out of passion for the process, not the output.

A message to you, fellow reader: stop long term planning and start doing.