tl;dr When working alone on a big project, deciding what stories you tell yourself makes all the difference.
I wrote previous articles in this series about getting stuck, recovering gracefully from failure, and learning how to take breaks.
One of the biggest hazards of working alone is the risk of narratives creeping in, ballooning out and occasionally subverting all progress. I believe this is a silent reason why people often prefer to work with partners and collaborators.
Everyone experiences physical breakdowns (tired, sick) and psychological lulls (burnout, lost motivation). Team projects can typically move forward regardless of one person’s current state. Working alone, progress stalls until the hurdle is overcome.
Solo projects are “single-threaded,” not only in effort and motivation but also in narrative. Compared with a team looking out for each other, there’s less ability to notice narratives changing out from underneath us over time.
Narratives
I think of a “narrative” as a positive or negative take on reality. A story about what’s happening. It’s how someone presents the facts. The angle they take. The frame around the facts.
Humans need stories. We need reasons to do things. We feel compelled to communicate them to others to validate and evolve our understandings. It is how we attribute past successes and failures, justify current actions and communicate our future aspirations.
But narratives are more than a passive frame. The narrative itself can provide the fuel and confidence for action to be taken.
Narratives in groups
When there’s solid group buy-in, a good narrative can propel everyone forward with confidence.
Startups love to push the exceptionalist hero narrative: “We’re changing the world! We’re doing the most important work of our lifetime!”
We are changing the world! becomes a reason to take action. It can keep you working long and hard, often to the exclusion of other (implicitly less meaningful) goals in your life. It can enable tunnel vision and chronic workaholism.
This kind of narrative seems to fill a void that religion used to help fill. We certainly haven’t evolved away from the need to feel special, to be a part of something meaningful. We all crave some certainty that our life has purpose.
Syrupy narratives also provide distance from the harsher realities of the world. Believe in Our Big Mission and in return you can minimize the pesky mundane “real world” issues in your environment. Someone else will cook your food, deliver it to you, do your laundry, manage your calendar, drive you around — don’t worry, their role is important too (they’re helping you change the world).
Of course, the anti-narrative to this exists as well. “Techbro” describes a person who embodies this startup narrative in a unidimensional, self-unaware manner.
Narratives can obscure where true meaning resides
As the only dev on a 5 year project, my narratives are not always rosy and optimistic (surprise!). They certainly aren’t very grandiose. I’m just one person (with some part-time help from loyal friends that I’m quite thankful for).
Sometimes I feel some FOMO around this. I can dream about working on something… meaningful with a team of talented like-minded people… building something substantial that will really impact people’s lives. I relate strongly to those stories. I think most people do, especially those who are self-motivated.
But when thinking clearly, I remember that the things I actually value in life are usually constructed from very small but consistent actions. I value the care and dedication someone takes, the insights a person stops to share, the attention to detail in the things that people make for each other.
In fact, maybe “Big Meaning” is an illusion. Maybe it only exists in narratives we create about other people (and in groups like startups). Maybe it can’t be chased after, adopted or manufactured in one shot. Instead, it’s built over time by people making small choices over and over again, in line with their values.
Keeping Narratives pedestrian
Here’s my main narrative right now. It’s very rooted in my day to day reality:
I’m building a software synthesizer for myself and for professional and hobbyist electronic musicians.
My synth has a good amount of innovation, both in tech and product. The quantity and quality of innovation is limited by the number of hours it requires to build it into something usable and understandable by other humans.
In other words, the scope of innovation must be large enough so it’s visible and can be appreciated, but small enough where the work can be actually be completed by one person on a budget (me).
There’s no concept of “impact.” Nothing about disruption or dominance. There’s no contextualizing of the larger field of musical tooling, of music itself, or “the world” at large. I’ve experimented with including those things. Each time, I came to the conclusion that it’s not only unnecessary, but actively harmful.
For me, indulging in narratives that focus on impact creates a rollercoaster that oscillates between ego-driven high expectations and depressive lulls (where I’m anxious I’m not “doing enough.”) Neither of those extremes are useful in my life or help me to achieve things I care about. I need narratives that respect what I actually believe, that serve my goals in my day-to-day.
True Optimism and Narratives
My daily routine consists of the relatively mundane work of iterating on things. Trying stuff out. Reluctantly saying no to ideas. Zooming in on details to make something a bit nicer.
Software, like music, doesn’t have a binary state. It’s never incomplete or complete. It’s a living garden that requires regular tending until it’s abandoned. The clearest feedback I get is when the garden is in bloom — or dying, strangled by weeds.
So here’s another optimistic narrative I hold:
If I tend to 1000 tiny things, over time they will add up and feel like one amazing thing. When actually building, it will rarely feel like one amazing thing. It will mostly feels like a loose collection of half-built things, held together by faith.
And then there’s other people’s feedback. Some of it is guaranteed to pull me away from some other helpful narratives like:
I know what I want to build. I trust myself. I know what’s worth spending time on.
In theory, I want those very confident narratives to be occasionally disrupted. Because I don’t know everything. I’m learning and exploring. I need input and feedback. But the cost can be large. I’m not made out of pure confidence. I’m not filled with overflowing amounts of optimism. I don’t have endless time to second-guess my choices.
For me, engaging too earnestly and too honestly with the world is both important and risky. It’s helpful for growth, but is also a one-way ticket to the slippery narrative that I need more complexity, more features, more attention to detail, more more more.
Narrative and Identity
When building my synth over the years, my identities have been learner, explorer and tinkerer.
Being new to signal processing, C++, and audio product development, I invested a lot over the last 5 years. I’m finally fluent enough with the tooling to feel confidently productive.
On top of that, I’ve overcome most of the “hard” work around technical innovation. I’ve built libraries of tooling I can rely on, much of it open-sourced. I have a product mostly finished.
In theory, my identity should now morph into a business owner. Apparently, I should be maximizing my potential. Working on marketing. Addressing a need or desire in the market. Giving people what they want.
But that’s a very different mission, requiring additional narratives. Figuring out how the new terrain intersects with my existing values and ideals can be rocky.
Oscillation of Narrative Optimism
Any given day, that narrative can go from being optimistic (daydreaming about amazing musical tools that have the potential to change how people make music) to realistic (running a scrappy business selling fun tools) to pessimistic (grind hard to sell toys to people who won’t really use them, unlikely to make a real impact/living).
Overall, I feel slightly pessimistic about this business role! I’ve spoken with a lot of other people in audio development and have crunched the numbers. This is not a lucrative niche. This is a passion niche. It’s about creativity and play and enabling musicians to make cool things — profit is almost never a driving goal (despite private equity barreling onto the scene trying to milk the innovations of yesteryear).
I’m also slightly pessimistic about turning my personal journey of self-fulfillment into something I’m squeezing for monetary value. Turning all of my effort into something transactional — a product the world consumes — feels like I’m suddenly asking to be judged from angles that I didn’t initially sign up for.
The numbers will roll in and let me know: Did I do good enough? Did I contribute anything? Did I have any impact? Should I keep going? Should I give up?
I’ve started multiple businesses and this is a always tough pill to swallow as a solo entrepreneur. There’s no team, so responsibility and blame can’t be diffused. It’s concentrated, if anything. It’s hard to sort out which reality you live in, to pick which narrative to buy in to.
Finding a positive narrative again
Regardless, it’s useful to face my fears of starting another business. To stare directly at the mountain of remaining work and decide what makes the cut. To be honest about what it will take to wrap it up. To chip away at it and finding happiness doing so. Communicating outwards instead of hiding from the world.
It’s also another path of personal learning. I’ll learn even more about how to manage anxieties around being judged. When I should be stubborn. When I should listen to others.
But I’m choosing my narratives carefully, being careful to plant them sustainably. I’ve settled on this for the business:
My goal is to craft a unique sonic world, and share it with others. It doesn’t have to do everything. It won’t be the perfect world for everybody. But it’s going to be special, and with luck it will connect with others who are like me.
In other words, it’s important to me that I don’t try and make my synth appeal to everyone, stuffing in every feature it “should have”.
It would be great to have this project fuel future explorations of other worlds — making a living would be nice. But all I really can do is tend this garden, take small but consistent steps, trusting that each one contains a little bit of meaning.
Leave a Reply