Keeping the Candle Lit

On my first day at a furniture store, my boss pointed to a warehouse full of boxes and said, "Unpack that one and build it." Simple enough. I found a large, heavy box, sliced it open, and laid out an array of wooden slats, metal screws, and chains. It was a love seat swing. Clearly a two or three person job. But I didn't know that. If my boss asked me to build it, I figured, it must be possible.

So I just started.

There is this feeling I often get when I have a brand new exciting idea. What follows goes something like this. You buy the domain. You sketch the idea. You draft the first chapter. The rush of beginning something new floods your system with dopamine and possibility. This initial excitement is a fantastic fuel. It gets you moving. The candle of motivation always burns fastest at the start.

But then you get past the first easy steps, and the flame sputters. The wax pool of complexity begins to form. Doubt seeps in. You start to realize the true scale of what you've undertaken. Suddenly, exhilaration starts to feel like exhaustion. Most projects die right here, in the soggy middle. If you are not careful, you might even start a new project just to feel that rush again.

The trick isn't to avoid this burnout. It's inevitable. The trick is learning how to reignite the flame, or better yet, to build a different kind of fire entirely.

The Power of Blissful Ignorance

Standing in that warehouse, I had an advantage I didn't recognize at the time. I had no idea how hard this was supposed to be.

If my boss had said, "This is a complex, multi-person assembly job that typically takes experienced workers two hours," I would have been paralyzed. I'd have looked for help. I'd have doubted my ability. I'd have found seventeen reasons to do something else first.

This is why every monumental piece of software, every world-changing company, every impossible creative work was started by someone who didn't fully grasp the mountain they were about to climb.

If Jeff Bezos had started by trying to solve for a global fleet of delivery vans, AWS cloud infrastructure, and same-day delivery logistics, he'd never have sold his first book. If the Wright Brothers had tried to understand all of aeronautical engineering before attempting flight, they'd still be on the ground.

Amazon's magic trick was to start selling books before you try to build the empire. Start with the bicycle shop before you revolutionize transportation. Start tightening one bolt before you build the swing.

The most dangerous thing you can do with a big project is understand it fully before you begin.

When the Flame Dies, Find the Rhythm

An hour into the swing assembly, my initial energy was completely gone. I was alone with this massive, complicated puzzle. My hands hurt. The instruction diagram might as well have been written in ancient Egyptian. The 'let's impress the boss!' fuel had evaporated, replaced by the reality of a hundred confusing parts and no clear path forward.

But I had to complete the job. So I stopped thinking of it as 'building a love seat swing' and started thinking of it as a series of small, repeatable tasks.

Find two pieces that fit. Align the holes. Insert bolt A into slot B. Tighten with wrench C. Repeat.

I wasn't building anything. I was just completing a pattern. Over and over.

This wasn't a creative problem, the instructions were written clearly on the paper. So I turned it into repetitive motion. When a task feels like it requires 100% pure creativity all the time, you will burn out. Creative energy is finite. Decision-making is exhausting. But rhythm? Rhythm is renewable.

I entered a flow state not through inspiration, but through repetition. The goal shifted from "finish the impossible thing" to "complete the next simple step."

This is how books get written. Not through sustained creative genius, but through showing up to the same chair at the same time and adding 500 words to yesterday's 500 words. This is how companies get built. Not through visionary breakthroughs every day, but through making the same sales calls, fixing the same bugs, having the same customer conversations until patterns emerge and systems develop.

The secret is to find the smallest unit of meaningful progress and make it so frictionless that it's easier to do it than to avoid it.

The 100 Times Rule

I've written about my trick to learning anything new before. I might as well start calling it the "100 Times Rule."

The rule is simple: You can't do the big impossible thing once. But you can do the tiny component action 100 times.

You can't write 100 novels. But you can write 200 words, 100 days in a row. You can't launch 100 companies, but you can have 100 conversations with potential customers. You can't master piano, but you can practice scales for 100 sessions. You can't "get in shape," but you can do 100 workouts.

The power isn't in the number 100 specifically, it's in the reframing of the problem into manageable bites. When you commit to doing something 100 times, three things happen:

1. It becomes a small repeatable task. One presentation? Easy. One workout? Done. One paragraph? Please. You're not trying to build a business, you're just making today's call.

2. You make room for being bad at it. Nobody expects call #3 to be perfect. You're learning. You're iterating. You have 97 more chances to figure it out.

3. You build the rhythm that replaces motivation. By the time you hit repetition #30 or #40, you're no longer running on inspiration. You're running on momentum, on identity, on the simple fact that this is what you do now.

The swing didn't get built because I had sustained enthusiasm for furniture assembly. It got built because I found a repeatable motion and executed it dozens of times until the thing was done.

---

A few hours later, my boss walked by, did a double-take, and stared at the fully assembled love seat swing, gently swaying in the warehouse.

"Wait. You built this? By yourself?" he asked. I just nodded, my hands raw, my shoulders aching, but my self-confidence boosted.

What I didn't tell him was that I succeeded not because I was an expert, not because I had some special talent for furniture assembly, not because I stayed motivated the entire time. I succeeded because I started before I knew the challenge, and I kept going by finding a rhythm within it.

The candle of motivation will burn out, that's guaranteed. But you're not building a swing. You're just tightening this one bolt. Then the next. And then the next.

Before you know it, you'll look up and find the impossible thing complete, gently swaying before you. Built not by inspiration but by the simple, persistent act of showing up and doing the smallest next thing.

---