Finding direction by making things

“I don't know what I'm doing” is the most honest sentence in building. Everyone building anything real has said it. The difference isn’t who feels it — it’s what they do while feeling it.

I find direction by making things. Not by thinking about making things. The thinking happens, but it’s downstream of the doing. You make the thing, the thing teaches you what it wants to be, and suddenly the next three steps are obvious in a way no amount of planning could have produced.

There’s a version of this that’s just thrashing — motion mistaken for progress. The difference between thrashing and exploring is whether you’re having fun. Fun is the compass. When the work is genuinely enjoyable, you’re usually pointed at something true. When every step feels like grinding obligation, that’s information too.

This isn’t an argument against strategy. I run on systems — constraints, useful output, the whole apparatus. But the systems are for executing once you know the direction. Finding the direction is a different motion. It’s looser. It looks like play from the outside.

The last few months have been the most productive of my building life, and the throughline isn’t discipline. It’s that I kept following the fun: the stage plot generator I built because I was tired of PowerPoint at 1am, the teardown tool that became a product, the songs with no metric attached. Each one taught me the next thing.

So if you’re stuck: make something small, make it for yourself, and pay attention to which parts feel like play. That’s the direction. It’s been there the whole time — you just have to make enough things to hear it.