Let It Be Easy

A few months ago, I started a new hobby: padel.?

It’s a racquet sport with elements of tennis, pickleball, and squash.?

When I decided to learn it, I hired a coach. I promised myself to play every day for 30 days. I entered a tournament for newbies.?

Then one day, I found myself dreading picking up that racket. Somehow, padel had become another obligation, another thing I had to try hard and get better at.?

I’ll say here that I am a person who tends toward rigid discipline. I like the structure of a program or a class. I like training at Orange Theory because the metrics tell me exactly where I stand. When I run on the treadmill, I’m always tracking my progress — going faster, harder, longer.?

Being whatever type of person this is certainly has its benefits, but it’s not uncommon to hit this kind of wall. Sometimes I wonder why I can’t just enjoy a thing.

My padel coach, Aitana Comas , took a trip back to Spain, where she’s from, and I took a two-week break from padel. When she returned, we met up and just played a friendly match. I wasn’t worried about my form. We made mistakes and didn’t care. We didn’t even keep score.

What’s the point of playing a sport, if not to play??

// Be fierce in the mission and flexible in the details //?

So much of life is about picking your battles. Sometimes, I think we too closely correlate the difficulty of a path with its rightness and worthiness.?

In the days of WLCM’s infancy, I faced a choice of pursuing WLCM or another business idea I’d been passionate about: corporate wellness consulting. At the time, I wanted to get out of tech altogether. That’s how harrowing my own experience had been in getting a product built. But my husband pointed out that nobody was calling me asking for corporate wellness consulting, yet people were blowing me up to help them build products.?

15 years down the WLCM path, I know this was the right idea to pursue. It was perhaps the easier path. At least, it had more momentum at the time. I chose to move toward the energy that I felt moving toward me.?

Trying hard has its place. At times, it can feel like the only way to move your business or your life forward is through a sheer force of white-knuckled will. But it shouldn’t feel like that all the time or even a majority of the time. Trying hard has its place. Trying easy has its place, too. Easy can be just as rewarding.?

By “easy” I don’t mean shortcuts, dishonesty, or gaming the system. I mean being flexible, holding ideas lightly and loosely.

In building a product, the plan you start with always evolves. You’ll have to do it differently than you thought you would. User feedback will steer its direction in a way you didn’t expect. I urge you to be open to that evolution. Be receptive to new possibilities.?

You’ll go farther that way.

There's having a plan. Then there's planning to plan. Then there's planning too far out. Sometimes I see entrepreneurs commit to the plan when they should be committing to the idea.

Sure, make a plan... but also let the path reveal itself, and follow the energy.

Everyone has ideas. Someone has probably had yours. To know if you're looking down the right path, or if you're The One to build a particular idea, these questions will help.

In what ways could I have an unfair advantage?

Maybe you have some insider knowledge of the problem, connections within the industry, or prior experience. You have more than a notion of the idea. You are uniquely positioned to bring it into reality.

What are the signals telling me?

As you dig into product positioning, pricing, rough sketches of your business model, talk to people about your idea. However, be selective about who you talk to, and know in your own mind what exactly you need from them. Take their advice for what it's actually worth and don't assume immediately that their advice is wiser than your own inner voice.

Is this an idea or a knowing?

External signals can certainly be wrong. As Glennon Doyle says, you must know that other people can't give you directions to a place they've never been. So take stock internally of whether this idea is values-aligned, if it will enable the life you want, if it will help you grow in a direction you want to go in.

Things will never go as planned. They might go even better, if you're open to it.

• For Forbes, I wrote about a terse exchange on LinkedIn and how the lofty values tech companies claim are little more than branding exercises.?
• Also for Forbes, I contributed to an article about how AR and VR technologies could transform various industries.
• I had a wonderful chat with Melanie Barr on the She Built It podcast . We talked about my journey into software and how I built WLCM to prioritize execution and trust.
• If you’re working to develop a product but aren’t sure how, my ebook, How to Get Software Built , was written to help give you a firm footing on your project.?
• WLCM received another designation from Clutch as a top software development agency for the Spring of 2024. Whoo!

Renée DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, is doing some amazing work around online manipulation and disinformation. I've just ordered her new book, Invisible Rulers .

After 20 years of social media, so many people are asking, "What has happened to us?" As another election looms, it's so critical to understand how our predatory social media landscape has influence over what we consume and believe. Renée's work brings such clarity. It articulates things I think we all feel, but just haven't been able to put into words.

Check her out on this episode of Hard Fork, and if you read the book, let's talk about it!

Over at WLCM, we're getting neck-deep in as many AI technologies as we can. We're playing with the possibilities, pushing them to see what they do well. I'm playing with image generation, which is fairly easy and of an exceptional quality, so I'm thinking about the implications of that for artists.

It's interesting, AI produces images that feel perfect. The texture of these illustrations are so smooth, so vivid and elaborate. Getting AI to produce something simple, like a stick figure, has been difficult. I wonder what that means or says about the whole endeavor.

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About WLCM App Studio

WLCM (pronounced “Welcome”) is a tight-knit, long-standing team of 25 veteran specialists – designers, project managers, QA specialists, and engineers – who have launched over 150 apps together for clients across industries, many award-winning and nationally recognized.