Squirrel!

Your ideas are holding you back.

Ideas themselves are not a bad thing. Some ideas are great; others are shit on a stick. That was an idea I had for a food truck. The concept was simple; everything served was on a stick and most was deep-fried.

I have spent a lot of time executing many of my ideas the past few years but never going big on a single one of them. I often get wrapped up in the idea of the idea — thinking this could be the one idea that does it.

I have chased startup money with pitch competitions. I have built a few SaaS products that I never launched. I have pursued so many ideas at this point I can't even catalog them.

I could blame this on my ADHD but, I have learned to manage my ADHD quite well. Unfortunately, there are so many distractions with social media that it is easy to get lost.

My biggest distraction is the people I deem not as smart as me, making a killing off what I would consider a crap product or service. The reason they are doing so well?

They picked one idea and went big.

I am learning that you do not have to be the smartest or the best to succeed. Instead, you need to go big on one thing.

Do not let distractions and ideas get in your way. It doesn't have to be your passion, but pick one thing and go big.

I wrote that three years ago. The advice still holds but the game around it shifted dramatically.

AI made the squirrel problem ten times worse. The cost of building something dropped to near zero. You can spin up a working product in a weekend with an AI coding agent. That sounds like a gift but it is actually a trap. When building is free, every idea feels worth chasing. The friction that used to kill bad ideas before they consumed your time is gone.

I have personally shipped more side projects in the last six months than in the previous three years combined. LivelyIcons, Claude Chrome user testing, SecretStash, and a few more I have not talked about yet. The difference between now and 2023 is that I am not building these to chase startup money. I am building them because the tools let me scratch an itch in a day instead of a month.

But the core lesson still applies. Shipping is not the hard part anymore. Distribution is. Marketing is. Sticking with something long enough to find your audience is. AI can build your product. It cannot build your patience.

So the updated version of this advice is simple. Build fast, ship often, but commit to one thing that gets your sustained attention. Let the side projects be side projects. Pick the one that matters and go big on it. That part has not changed at all.