Always Be Building

November 24, 2025

i have 47 ideas in my notes app right now. a social app where you scroll through music instead of photos. an ai persona that actually remembers and evolves over time. a style engine that tells you what clothes actually fit your proportions. some are good. most are probably not. i used to think i needed to figure out which ones were worth building before i started.

i was wrong.

the perfectionist trap

here's what i used to do: have an idea, get excited, then immediately start poking holes in it. is the market big enough? is someone already doing this? what's the moat? is this the best use of my time? wouldn't it be smarter to wait for a better idea?

i'd convince myself that the smart move was patience. don't waste time on a mediocre idea when a great one might be right around the corner. so i'd wait. and think. and wait some more.

you know what happened? nothing. the ideas sat there. some i forgot entirely. others i'd revisit months later and realize someone else had built it. the "better idea" never came because i wasn't doing the work that generates better ideas.

building is easy now

here's the thing that changed: ai made building almost trivially easy. i can go from idea to working prototype in a weekend. sometimes in an evening. the cost of trying something is so low that waiting for the perfect idea is actually the expensive choice.

when building took months, being selective made sense. you had to pick carefully because your time was the bottleneck. but when you can ship a functional version in days, the calculus flips. the bottleneck isn't building anymore. it's learning. and you learn by building.

the perfect idea doesn't exist. but the good-enough idea you actually build beats the perfect idea you never start.

the new system

so here's what i do now. every idea goes into my notes app. no filtering, no judgment. just capture it and move on. the note is usually a few sentences: "music social app where songs are the posts, not photos" or "ai that has one consistent personality and actually grows over time." that's it.

then i pick one and build it. not the best one. not the one with the biggest market. just one that sounds interesting this week. i give myself a weekend. if it's still interesting after a few hours of building, i keep going. if it's not, i stop. no guilt. the point was to learn, and i learned.

the rule is simple: always have a side project in progress. when one ends (shipped, abandoned, doesn't matter), start the next one. no gaps. no waiting for inspiration. just pick from the list and go.

what i've learned so far

most ideas die in the first few hours, and that's fine. you discover something that makes it not worth pursuing, or you just lose interest. but you discover this by doing, not by thinking. an hour of building teaches you more about an idea than a week of analysis.

some ideas combine. the ai persona project started bleeding into thoughts about emotional interfaces, which connected to the music app idea. you don't see these connections by staring at a list. you see them by building.

shipping something, anything, creates momentum. even a tiny project that nobody uses gives you a finished artifact. you made a thing. the next thing feels more possible because you just proved you can finish.

the real reason

honestly? i like building. that's it. not the planning, not the strategizing, not the market analysis. the actual building. opening an editor, making something exist that didn't exist before.

waiting for the perfect idea was a way of protecting myself from the possibility that something i built might not succeed. but success isn't the point. building is the point. if something takes off, great. if not, i had fun and i learned something. next idea.

47 ideas in my notes. i'll probably build five of them this year. most won't go anywhere. but i'll be building the whole time, which is all i really wanted anyway.