Move with messiness
"I’ll start doing more sales and marketing once the company stabilizes," I told myself some time ago. That day has not come.
Every morning, I rush to get ready and reach the office before our common call. I close the door of my room, to hide the mess I am leaving behind. Clothes on the chair, a towel on the bed, and the bed-sheet half off.
"Why can’t I keep my room in order?", I sigh.
In the kitchen, I pack my lunch while noticing more undone tasks. The fruits are going stale, the fridge doesn’t have grocery for tomorrow. If only I woke up an hour earlier, I could do it all. That shouldn’t be hard, right? Except I went to bed late, because I had to finish work.
"I’ll start sleeping on time, once the company stabilizes", another conditional.
I used to be a perfectionist, which is equivalent of saying, I’ve always had more time than things to do. I could afford to be a perfectionist, until I started my own company, where everything is great but everything is imperfect at the same time.
Actually, "imperfect" is too gentle a word. Everything is falling apart. Experiments sitting in the backlog for quarters. A year ago, I couldn’t understand founder who used to say, "Yes it’s broken, but we will fix it next quarter". Next quarter? Something is broken and you are not going to fix it now? Isn’t that too slow? Now I get it.
They knew they had time before that issue became critical, so they chose to live with it, which meant they were already dealing with things even more urgent.
It’s frustrating to sit in an environment where you see inefficiencies but don’t have the time to fix them.
Startups force you to move forward with messiness. To deliver half-baked. To ship incomplete, unformatted, unpolished work. To deliver something you’re not proud of, because even Sartre would agree — Existence precedes pride. If the shop shuts down, the memory of your glorious food doesn’t satiate your hunger today.
So what would the ideal state look like? A company with no follow-ups, no delays, no client complaints, no conflict, no hard conversations. A place devoid of stress, joy, thrill, pressure and adrenaline. Everything in equilibrium. That’s not a company, it’s a factory. A state of no tension is what biologists would call non-existence.
So accept a level of messiness in your life. Imagine your ideal day, 5 years from now, and it would still be 30% messy. Clothes still unfolded, messages yet to reply to, the list of books on your to-read still growing. The company will still be receiving complaints, deadlines will still be missed, and there will still be new clients to pursue. Your partner will still get upset with you, and you will still hold resentment toward your parents.
Accept that and move.
Like Sisyphus, you will keep pushing the rock uphill, trying to get closer to the ideal. Some days you’ll give up and sleep. Some days rain will undo your progress. Some days a breeze will make it lighter. But the rock will roll down again. And you’ll rest, so you can push it again tomorrow.