I learned this lesson kind of by accident. I've told this story before but I think it's relevant.

When I dropped out of college the first time around in January 2012, I assumed that my career options were extremely limited. I knew I needed a job, so I applied to pretty much every wage-labor job I could find: McDonalds, Lowes, Starbucks, Aldi, Publix, etc. Almost as a joke to myself, I sent exactly one application to a software developer position on Craigslist for a Flash, Foxpro, and Coldfusion developer position.

The only company that called me back was the software job. I interviewed there, got the job, and thus my career as a software engineer was kicked off.

In hindsight I realized something: the less qualified you are for a job, the more likely a company might be to overlook a lack of qualifications. McDonalds and Aldi and Starbucks have lots of qualified people applying for these positions, meaning that they can be very picky with who they hire.

Now compare this to Flash/Coldfusion/Foxpro developers in 2012. I didn't know any of these at the time particularly well...but to my benefit neither did anyone else! As a result, they didn't get a ton of applications meaning their selection pool was tiny, meaning that they basically had to take whomever they could get.

I worked for a camera company that made [still makes] some of the best cameras ever.

Their Quality was astronomical (with, of course, the rare exception).

It was the kind of thing that I was repeatedly told, by my peers in other companies, was impossible.

But my bosses wouldn't accept that. They could be real pains.

We did make top-shelf gear, but you won't really get rich, doing that (unless you're a SpaceX person, I guess).

I think the people that make a lot of money, do that by finding a "sweet spot," in improving the Quality of everyday stuff.

It's a good philosophy, but I always cringe when I hear it. Only because I once worked with someone who would always proclaim they were going to tackle the hardest thing first. Real ego play, from him at least.

Idk, I often felt the opposite. I naturally tend towards working on hard problems but my feeling is that if I chose instead to focus on an easier "thing" I could execute really well and be overall more successful.

My hardest thing took about 7 years to build (with a child getting born and slowing things down a bit) but still. Good to hear that I’m not the only one :)

“Do the easy/hard thing first,” is the first of artist Tom Sachs’s Paradox Bullets

https://youtu.be/-Evrm03Y5hI?si=CvadZlyzR-PfwFh5

[Bonuses: narrated by Werner Hertzog and starring Ed Ruche]

Liked this post a lot, well done! Definitely appreciated that it was a site that actual has a unique design, and isn't just another Medium article...

A book on a similar subject that I don't see mentioned very often but which I quite enjoyed as "Tough Things First" by Ray Zinn [0]. Not the most popular one, but really down to earth and approachable ideas. Kind of like PG's "do things that don't scale," just applied on a broader timescale.

[0] https://toughthingsfirst.com/book/

In the current era of urge to make things faster/more, that article felt refreshing. Good things take effort and time to create, and it is not something bad, it's just the way the things become good.