It sounds ridiculous, but I think many builders start their project to build X and end up actually building Y.

While this isn’t inherently bad — sometimes Y is better than X! — it’s worth paying attention to because, in the worst case, building Y

• Distracts from the end goal
• Consumes a lot of time
• Drains your resources
• Kills the project

Here are a few examples:

• You want to build a corpus of longform writing. You build a blogging website.
• You want to build a business. You build infrastructure and a tech stack.
• You want to build a customer base. You build a landing page.

At face value, there’s nothing wrong. You make a blogging website so you can post your writing somewhere. You set up infrastructure so you can be ready to scale the business. You create a landing page so you have something to show customers. In other words, all the Y’s appear to be pre-requisites of X, so building Y is a natural extension of building X.

But consider this. Instead of writing code, you can simply start writing. Instead of building infrastructure, you can pitch an idea and start validating. Instead of marketing, you can start outbound sales. We could go back and forth about how these are Y’s in their own right, but I’d argue they are, at least, much closer to building X than the previous.

Said another way: when you want to do something, there is no substitute for actually doing the thing. Be diligent and truthful with yourself about what doing the thing means. Sometimes, what seems attractive and fun and even necessary, is not at all what should be done.

And on the flipside, if you often find yourself building Y instead, take some time to pause and reflect. Why are you so drawn to Y? Maybe it’s worth rethinking your X.