You need a white chocolate mocha.

FYI this post is in regards to startups/projects-in-general.

I’ve never started a successful company so take my startup advice with a grain of salt. However, I have tried a few different things over the years and gained some invaluable experience. My goal is to share what I’ve learned in hopes that it will cause you to take a step back and go, snap son, I’m dealing with the same thing! We’re all different people though and we work in different ways, so I don’t know, what doesn’t work for me, might really work for you.

If you’re like me, you get a little excited about certain startup/project ideas and it starts infinite looping in your mind to the extent that you have to tell every single person you meet your great idea. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad to be passionate about something. On the contrary, the ambition drives you to work hard and execute your plan. The problem stems from the fact that as the days go by, a routine is formed and set into place. Because its difficult to not take the path of least resistance, the routine goes on. By that, I mean that it’s more comfortable to do what you know will work.

You go to Starbucks and you think to yourself, hmm, well I always get a cup of coffee with half&half and two packets of sugar-in-the-raw because thats what I’ve always done. Maybe I should try this White Chocolate Mocha thing. I dunno though, it sounds kinda of whack, but then you buy it, take a sip and it’s like a kick-in-the-teeth good! You step out of your comfort zone, take a risk and discover something amazing.

Analogously, you go into work everyday and you sit in your cubicle or you go to your favorite coffee shop and bust out your Macbook Pro and begin to hack away at your idea. This goes on for quite sometime, maybe week after week, month after month and you get a boat load of stuff done. But just like how a frog doesn’t feel its being boiled as the water is slowly being turned up, so it is with you. You’re blind to the drop in your productivity and the stifling of your creativity. What you need is a White Chocolate Mocha my friend. You need to take a deep breath of fresh air. You need a slap in the face. I dare you to not work on your project, but rather just go and take a really long walk somewhere you’ve never been before. Go take some pictures and put them up on flickr. Get an Arduino and make it play Mary had a little lamb. As you start to do these things, watch how your brain starts to subconsciously think about your projects in all these crazy new ways. And guess what. That day or two days that you took off to just do whatever have payed off five fold because you were able to look at your problems in a new light, from a different perspective, and solve them in two days rather than ten days.