The cruelest gift: being able to start anything
On five running terminal windows, fast feedback, and what happens when the “if only I had the resources” era disappears.
Right now, I have five hobby projects running on my machine. I know this because I counted the active tabs in my terminal before writing this. One is about education, one is about beauty, and two of them are health & fitness. The fifth one I can’t even remember starting.
There’s this thing I used to say to myself constantly:
“If only I had the resources.”
“If only I could code everything by myself. If only I had a designer. If only I had more time.”
It was sometimes delusional thinking, sure, but it was also a natural filter. I just didn’t know it.
The gap between idea and execution was wide enough that mostly the real ones survived the wait. You’d sit with something for months, maybe years, and by the time you could build it, either you no longer cared about it or the market had already responded.
That gap is almost gone now. And I’ve been trying to figure out whether to mourn it or thank it.
I think I want to do both. It totally depends on what you do with the speed.
For a product person with ADHD, cheap and quick execution can be both a blessing and a curse. It’s also a hyperfixation hell. The dopamine hit of spinning up a new project is identical whether the idea is good or not. And now you can follow through on all of them. 5am before the gym, 6pm to 1am forgetting about dinner, without even telling anyone.
The old “if only” era made people stay delusional for years. The idea lived in your head, protected, never tested. You never had to find out if anyone cared. I’m not even talking about a long time ago. I’m talking about the near past, where you couldn’t even build an MVP or a fake gate for test users without at least some engineering and design work. You never had to find out if you still cared once the thing actually existed. The dream was safe because it was unreachable, or at least hard to reach.
Now you build on Sunday and might even get the answer on Monday. That’s brutal, but it’s honest.
You finally stop blaming yourself for not following through on an idea when sometimes the answer was simply that the idea wasn’t strong enough to survive contact with reality.
For ADHD brains specifically, brains that struggle not with starting but with tolerating the long uncertain middle, fast feedback might actually be the ideal environment. The loop is short enough to hold your attention through it. You find out quickly whether the excitement was real or just novelty. Whether anyone wants it. Whether you still want it once the dopamine of building has faded.
Five open terminal windows isn’t necessarily a sign that I’m productive. It’s a sign that I’ve been asking questions and using projects to answer them.
What I’m actually trying now
I try to use the speed to test, not just to get carried away building and polishing. Launch the thing to a few people before I open another tab. Stay in the loop long enough to hear back.
The friction that used to live between idea and execution now has to live between execution and feedback.
That’s where I’m doing my best to put the pause.