Part 1: Paying the Wayfinding Premium

This is Part 1 of an ongoing series, sharing the story of exactly how I'm building Fluint.io , to give you a framework for building your own venture, or, to just enjoy the insider's look that you don't always hear from startups. Follow me to read on.

The Wayfinding Premium

The most important work I’m doing right now is thinking about the work I’ll do, and how I’ll do it. There are countless small decisions I'm making every week. Projects I need to keep moving forward.

But if I don’t step back and consider which work is the right work to be doing, I’m at risk of paying an even higher “Wayfinding Premium.” The Wayfinding Premium says:

Doing a job for the second time requires a fraction of the cost as the first time.

Stopping to figure out if you’re on track, doing research to get back on track. It's costly. But it’s part of the job. And it’s inherent to any type of creative work you do. You’ve got to feel your way through it and hit some dead ends along the way. If the path was clearcut, someone else would have walked it already.

Creating Whitespace

In January, 2021, I had zero margin in my week as the Chief Growth Officer at GAN. There simply wasn’t enough whitespace in my calendar to pay the premium:

I found myself canceling meetings here and there to make room for the ad-hoc tasks I needed to get done in the moment, to avoid being a blocker for our team. This to say, I had zero space for the creative, deep work that building requires, and I often ended my week with a tired, fuzzy head.

By October, we had hired and ramped up new staff, with the goal of investing 80% of my week into new product development. Here’s what my schedule looked like last fall:

Transitioning from an always-on, reactive work style to an open, white calendar is harder than it sounds. It took 10 months, in my case.

The Mental Transition

Giving myself the space and mental freedom to think deeply, take a walk, and let my mind wander was hard. Way harder than I would have thought. But I needed that time to discover patterns and make connections between conversations that were still marinating.

I often felt guilty. Like I wasn’t being “productive.” Like I was wasting the time I was lucky to have. Truth is, inspiration and creative direction don’t follow straight paths.

The relationship between time and output isn’t linear in creative work.

Creative exploration can’t be squeezed into 20-minute time slots between meetings while cramming down a Clif bar to stave off hunger. Creativity does follow a process, and I’ll dig into the structures and science I’ve used along my journey in future posts, but the biggest thing I needed was time.

So if you’re signing yourself up for wayfinding, remember to give yourself some grace. It may take you a little (or a whole lot) longer than you’d like. But if your path was obvious, it’d already have been done.

This is one of the hardest parts to the founding process, I think. Creating enough calendar and mental space in a culture of hyper-productivity to pay the Wayfinding Premium.