GoKawiilSome Things Just Take Time
Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old gardens, houses sheltered by decades of canopy: if you want to start fresh on an empty plot, you will not be able to get that.
Because some things just take time.
We know this intuitively. We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties precisely because of the time embedded in them. Either because of the time it took to build them or because of their age. We require age minimums for driving, voting, and drinking because we believe maturity only comes through lived experience.
Yet right now we also live in a time of instant gratification, and it’s entering how we build software and companies. As much as we can speed up code generation, the real defining element of a successful company or an Open Source project will continue to be tenacity. The ability of leadership or the maintainers to stick to a problem for years, to build relationships, to work through challenges fundamentally defined by human lifetimes.
Friction Is Good
The current generation of startup founders and programmers is obsessed with speed. Fast iteration, rapid deployment, doing everything as quickly as possible. For many things, that’s fine. You can go fast, leave some quality on the table, and learn something along the way.
But there are things where speed is actively harmful, where the friction exists for a reason. Compliance is one of those cases. There’s a strong desire to eliminate everything that processes like SOC2 require, and an entire industry of turnkey solutions has sprung up to help — Delve just being one example, there are more.
There’s a feeling that all the things that create friction in your life should be automated away. That human involvement should be replaced by AI-based decision-making. Because it is the friction of the process that is the problem. When in fact many times the friction, or that things just take time, is precisely the point.
There’s a reason we have cooling-off periods for some important decisions in one’s life. We recognize that people need time to think about what they’re doing, and that doing something right once doesn’t mean much because you need to be able to do it over a longer period of time.
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