I have spent every day for the last year working on an app. All my time and energy in building the most complicated thing I have ever built and I still don’t know if it is any good. I have put so much into this app and know I have so much more to put into it. While this iteration of the app is a year old, I have rebuilt it in different forms many times. It has turned into the culmination of what I have been doing for over a decade.
I started going down the path of personal development over a decode ago. I think I was just trying to understand the world and how I fit into it. I tried every experiment you could imagine and read every book that was recommended. Most of this was in private as I tried to hone my craft. Every once in a while I would make content in hopes of creating something that I could benefit from while also helping anyone else who could use it. I never promoted the content, I just let it live in the corner of the internet where no one paid attention to. There was something about getting in front of everyone and saying pay attention to me that never felt right to me. I worried that I would lose flexibility if I worked on everything in public. That any proclamation I would make would force me into a corner. I mean how could anyone truly discover new things when everyone is watching them. It seems so easy to get confused between what is creation and what is performance.
Things seem different now. A foundation I spent so much time trying to build appears to be stable enough. More than that, I have spent so much time discovering by myself that I have lacked any type of feedback. There is a certain type of freedom that comes from building in private. You seem to have unlimited time and in that freedom you experiment more. The drawback is you lack any type of feedback to refine your work. Building in isolation allows you to truly forge your own path, but in the end you realize that all you want to do is to share that path with others. Whether they have good or bad things to say about what you’re building, it is still a collaboration in building something better.
The hope that I started with more than a decade ago was to find someway to make sense of the world we live in. I have learned and forgotten so much since then. All of it has been done in isolation, but now with the release of my app begins a new phase that focuses on collaboration. To get to this point was the hardest thing I have ever done.
