#14 | Retrospective
Hey readers,
Hope you had a nice Memorial Day weekend, and thanks for making it all the way to the last post of Keyur’s Creative Projects! This has been an awesome four-month experiment; what better way to end it than with a closing retrospective? It’s organized as follows:
What I Did
How it Went / What I Gained
What Comes Next?
What I Did
This newsletter started as a hardly-planned challenge to take action on several latent interests: creativity, entrepreneurship, coding, writing, and self-improvement. I was tired of spinning my wheels and my only rule was “just ship”—I settled into the routine of building one project or major feature a week and then writing a technical and mental recap on Sundays. After starting, I didn’t deviate much from the format in fear of losing that routine and violating the one rule.
Those projects were:
Week 1: Old Tweets Downloader
Week 2: Motivational Firefox Homepage
Weeks 3-4: Choose-Your-Own Guided Meditation App
Week 5: Fantasy Hockey Daily Lineup Setter Script
Week 6: GitHub Static Landing Page
Weeks 7-13: Over-the-Counter Drug Information Site
(the posts are all archived at keyurscreativeprojects.substack.com)
How it Went / What I Gained
Technical Skills & Project Work
As I flipped back through the projects, the highlights that stuck out were the breadth and consistency. Given my goal of “just ship”, I can call these four months a success for “just shipping” 13 releases- missing only a few weeks, and only one of those unplanned. I also got to work with a nice variety of codebases: browser extensions, backend Python scripts, Android apps, and modern frontend frameworks. I got to learn new software patterns, and tools like React that I will definitely use again in the future.
The obvious lowlights are the technical complexity and usefulness of the projects. I can just as easily call this project a failure because my big vision has been to build a real software business, and I haven’t done that yet. None of the projects were impressive by my standards—at most, they were neat toys or proofs-of-concept, and none really “went anywhere” (yet) beyond my GitHub graveyard. Given the tight one-week timeframe, I was fully in a prototyping mindset. I’m sure it’ll take a lot more learning to go from prototype to polished, usable (and used) products. I’m actually quite excited by the lack of quality of the drafts though! After constantly getting overly positive reviews at work despite believing I’m not that great an engineer, now I finally have some data that confirms it, and more importantly I see why I should care.
So in retrospect, this four-month-long endeavor can best be thought of as an experimental/“playground” block that created many open threads for more focused work blocks in the future. I found it extremely rewarding and will keep fighting outside forces to create more opportunities like this in the future, no matter how busy or successful I get.
Intra- and Interpersonal Skills
I struggled to write this section because I felt pulled between two poles: internally, I feel like I have changed a lot and made huge improvements to the process, but given that the projects haven’t gone anywhere, I don’t have a lot of external evidence to show for it. Time and outside observers will tell whether the growth I feel is real or not. With that caveat, here’s my own (fallible) self-assessment:
I gained real reps ideating, prototyping, validating, and iterating. I now have a better grasp of bootstrapping a project than most of my friends, increasing my “charismatic pull” due to my greater self-belief. I am well-positioned to find entrepreneurial friends at Cornell.
I got some rookie mistakes out of the way when the stakes were low. Among them: working alone, perfectionism, not planning for the beginning, and not planning for the end. I will not repeat these.
I found ways to stick with projects that I wouldn’t have in the past.
Most rewardingly, I went from being afraid of entrepreneurship to being excited by it. I will be back.
The Startup Mindset
This insight gets its own section because it’s by far the most important thing I learned:
THE STARTUP MINDSET
Launch Bad and Iterate Quickly
Compare this to my previous Safe Mindset, which says “work until you’re good enough to launch, then launch big”. The Startup Mindset can be applied to anything that seems difficult. I’ve started to realize how it can benefit me in all areas of my life outside of side projects—work, social life, physical health, etc. All of us have been held back from doing something important by social fear, perfectionism, decision paralysis, self-doubt, mental fatigue, etc. These problems are all related to the assumption that failure carries serious downside, which defines the Safe Mindset. I had a mini-breakthrough when I heard the story of Elon Musk and the Four Rockets and I’d like to pass it forward:
As you may know, Elon Musk used much of his own money to finance his rocket company SpaceX. A rocket would cost ~$50M and more than a year to build, so he had no margin for error. Of course, to prevent this his scientists and engineers spent months of exhaustive simulation and testing of every last component to assure that nothing would go wrong.
As you may know, his first launch, which took years to prepare, for a guy who works 16 hours every single day, blew up on the launchpad. It was a financial and PR disaster of everything he had worked for and bet his reputation on. Now close your eyes for thirty seconds and really imagine how you’d feel in that moment.
But he was undeterred and so came the next year-plus, the next huge chunk of his money, the next round of promises that this one would be the one. Another failure.
The third launch! This time, he realized his money was running out and this would be his last chance. So the team took every extra precaution possible, and it paid off! The third rocket got off the ground, gradually rose to become a blip in the sky, and then in an instant was a puff of orange smoke.
NOW, close your eyes for thirty seconds and become Elon in that moment. Seriously, it’s worth doing.
He just lost it all—his money, his reputation, and years of his time—in a fiery orange cloud. Of course, SpaceX is still around because Elon rallied the troops, called in all his favors, gathered enough investor funding for one last, all-or-nothing assault on his dream, and with the fourth and final launch, rocketed his way into history when it finally succeeded.
If Elon Musk could keep charging after failures like that then we can damn well take a bit more risk in our careers.
If the one outcome of these four months is that I can truly make the Startup Mindset a habit, then it’ll have been a wild success. Thank you to the friends who kicked me in the ass at first and made not trying more painful than failure, compelling me to get started.
What Comes Next
Writing a flowery retrospective is a great way for me to massage my own ego, and also totally useless unless it improves my behavior going forward. These are the big prompts I’ll be thinking about over the next couple months until Cornell:
How can I keep the habits of entrepreneurship (observing, prototyping, sharing, recruiting friends) alive going forward?
How can I learn the technical and management skills that were missing this time to be successful next time?
How will I find the right people at Cornell to work with in the future? And what does the right teammate even look like?
Chat with me in a few months and I might be able to share some life changes I’ve made in response to these questions!
Lastly, I would love to hear your thoughts about any of these topics or my previous work. And if you thought this was a cool idea and you’re considering doing something similar in the future, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We’d have a lot to talk about :-)
To everyone who was a part of this personal journey in any way, big or small: