@marco - I don’t know many other people that work on building something every single day including weekends etc. How did you and Lucas arrive at that schedule? Why have you stuck with it?
@internetvin - I think a generally misunderstood thing about a ‘daily cadence’ or ‘doing something every day’ is that in a lot of ways it’s easier than the alternative of doing things intermittently. There’s a lot of reasons for this and my take on it has come out of experiences after to 3-4 years of daily output.
Neurological:
I’m not a neuroscientist but as far as I understand this stuff; on a neurological level, when you repeat ‘something’ often your ‘brain’s wiring’ to perform that ‘something’ improves through the production of Myelin. I think the neurological expression is, “What fires together, wires together”. This Myelin is like an insulation that wraps around the ‘wires’ you need to do something and it allows your brain to send more electrical data through those wires. So repeating things often creates more Myelin and this does not cause a little improvement, but a massive one in creative performance. With ‘better wiring’ your brain can make new connections and trigger flow states faster. The book ‘Talent Code’ by Daniel Coyle expands on this subject.
Identity:
I find repeating things also changes how you perceive yourself and how others perceive you. When I decided to code for 365 consecutive days, it really felt like people thought I was smarter or something (lol). And as I got better I started to wonder, “well if I can do this, what else can I do?”. There would also be interesting things like people would say,
Person: “oh I heard you’re programming now? That’s way over my head man!”
Me: “yeah I am. And I’m sure you could do it! I mean I know ya could. Have you ever written any code?”
Person: “nah. Trust me it’s way over my head man”
I had a lot of experiences like this where people had not written a single line of code yet had a really clear understanding of what they could or could not achieve in the medium. I think repeating things and not thinking expands your sense of what you think is possible.
Environment:
Another kind of interesting thing is how repeating things starts to adjust and evolve your surrounding environment on every dimension. When I stated making music every day, most people had no idea what I was doing or why. I didn’t even really know why. It was this kind of nuisance initially. I would have to excuse myself after dinner to go make a song or like show up at a party late because I needed to make music. After hundreds of days my environment started to really adjust around it. We would be out and my wife would say something like, “hey we better run, you still gotta make your track and stuff too”. The next year when I started writing code, some of my family and friends started running their own experiments with daily cadence so it wasn’t just this lonely thing I was doing and now there were people to talk to. Now it’s a big part of my life, family and home. How things are organized, the design of our spaces, where our family wants to live, the kinds of discussions I have with friends and family, every thing is becoming more aligned with this daily cadence over time. It’s been interesting to observe.
The alternative of working on things intermittently creates a lot of stop and go. I find it makes things difficult if you need to keep ramping up every few days. I do not believe Futureland would be in its current state and have steady forward moving momentum (especially as a bootstrapped project) if it was not for this daily cadence.
So by working on Futureland at a daily cadence (and at any degree of quality), our minds, identities and environments are better suited for the task of serving the people who use our tools. And that ultimately makes things easier instead of harder. :)