The road(map) is never straight
Some things can only be understood while moving through them.
There’s a reason people love 1000-step thinking when defining strategy.
It’s legible.
You can turn it into a roadmap, a vision slide, a neat narrative about where you’re headed. It feels safe because it looks like a complete picture.
But real life doesn’t move like that.
A first date is not a marriage in miniature. You don’t meet someone and immediately know who they’ll become to you after grief, success, boredom, distance, or change. The relationship reveals itself through contact with reality. Through time. Through surprise.
Products are no different.
We stand at step 0 and act as if we already know where we’ll be at step 1000.
As if the road ahead is straight.
As if users won’t reshape the product.
As if the market itself won’t change while we’re building it.
Ten-step thinking feels less impressive because it’s messier. It looks like iteration. It looks like uncertainty.
Sometimes it looks like changing your mind. But changing your mind because real experience taught you something isn’t a failure of your vision. It’s the work you were supposed to do.
The map was never supposed to become the territory. It was only supposed to help you walk far enough to discover the terrain for yourself.
Maybe that’s why successful products and most meaningful things don’t need perfection or certainty to begin with.
They need curiosity strong enough to take the next few steps honestly.
No one falls in love by successfully predicting year ten. You get there, if you get there at all, by paying attention to what changes once it becomes real.
And if you don’t, no roadmap could have replaced what experience needed to teach you.