Tweeted "the higher the mountain the thinner the air. easier to move through, harder to breathe in."
Was thinking about how nothing is in my way right now. No manager, no roadmap, no review cycle, no calendar full of other people's problems. I can ship a thing on a Tuesday and nobody has to approve it. That's the easier-to-move-through part. It's genuinely great.
The thin air part snuck up on me. I used to complain about meetings. Now I miss some of them. Not the meetings themselves, the part where you walk out and somebody else also saw what just happened. There's nobody to roll my eyes at. Nobody to ask "did that make sense to you too" at the end of a call. The default state up here is alone with your own opinion.
It's not lonely exactly. It's quiet. Which is different. Lonely is wanting company. Quiet is realising you haven't checked anything against another person in three days and you can't tell if your last decision was clever or stupid.
The fix isn't going back. The fix is finding other people up here. Founders who are also one-person companies. People building different things at the same altitude. They're not peers in the usual sense, you can't compare notes on the same problem. But they breathe the same thin air.
Anyway. The tweet was four lines. This is the longer version.
- Simon