日记和舞蹈

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title: "The diary and the dance" excerpt: "Creation, whether a startup or a blog post, is a continuous habit of revealing your inner world and tuning into what comes back. The MVP is a continuum. So is everything else." category: "essay" tags: ["creativity", "startups", "self-expression"] read_time: 8 published: true published_date: "2026-03-12" hero_image: "the-diary-and-the-dance-hero.png" hero_image_style: "keep-proportions"

I've been thinking about a habit I want to cultivate more deliberately. It has a philosophical basis, but it also connects to where I am right now, personally and professionally.

The habit is this: continually revealing my inner world to the external world. And then tuning into what the external world feeds back. Not waiting for validation. Just participating in the exchange.

There are two sides to this cultivation. One is the act of bringing out what's inside in the most authentic way possible. Not hiding any part. Not repressing any creative impulse or opinion because it might not land well. The other side is paying attention to what comes back once you've put something out there. Not as a verdict, but as material.

Writing a diary

I've been reading Rick Rubin's The Creative Act. His argument is that creative impulse is self-justified. You don't need anyone's permission or approval to create. The act of expressing your inner experience is reason enough. He puts it simply: you're writing a diary.

That framing changed something for me. I used to treat creative output as something that needed to earn its existence. A post had to be good enough. A product had to be ready enough. There was always a bar to clear before I'd put something into the world. Rubin's argument dissolves that bar. If you're honestly exposing your inner world, the output already has value. It doesn't need external validation to justify itself.

But I've realized I can't stop there. The diary metaphor handles the first half. The second half is the dance.

The dance

When you put something out, the world responds. Sometimes the response is large and explicit. Someone tells you it's great or it's terrible. But most of the time, the response is subtle. Little bits of information that give you a slightly different perspective on what you just shared. Not approval or disapproval, just a shift in how things look now that they're outside your head.

Even without anyone else reacting, the act of externalizing changes your own relationship to the work. What felt urgent and clear inside can look different once it's out there. That shift is data. It feeds back into your internal state and changes what you think next.

This feedback loop is a dance. You lead with expression. The world responds with texture. You absorb that texture and create again. The rhythm matters more than any single step.

There is no MVP

I used to subscribe to the standard lean startup model. Come up with a moderately sized idea, build a minimal viable product, ship it, and see whether the world accepts or rejects it. If it rejects it, pivot.

I wrote about the post-MVP fork in the road years ago: when that supposedly fixed MVP gets tepid interest, most startups iterate on the same core and hope it clicks. That's dangerous. But I've come to think the problem starts earlier. The whole framework assumes you can draw a line in the sand, call it your MVP, and wait for a binary judgment.

I don't think that's how it works anymore. There is no line in the sand. There is no static point you can call an MVP. The MVP is a continuum. Every version, however small, is an MVP. You're building and exposing on a micro-iterative basis. The idea that you can package something, present it to the world, and get a thumbs up or thumbs down is a fiction.

The feedback you get from the world isn't binary either. You can't ship something and say "give me the verdict." What you actually get are little qualitative details from users, from interviews, from conversations on the street with people who've never seen the product. Each piece is a subtle input that feeds back into your sense of what you're creating.

That gradual process is the whole game. The art of doing a startup is tuning into it at all moments. Getting away from the idea that you will ship something well-formed and receive a summary judgment on whether it's viable.

More art than science

I used to think building a startup was half science, half art. I've changed my mind. At the earliest stages, it's less science than I thought.

When you're scaling a company with large data sets, the work can become more scientific. You can test hypotheses about how variables interact. But when you're working at the stage of a startup I'm at now, you don't have the epistemological context for anything meaningfully scientific.

What you actually do is expose yourself to the outside world and feed the response back into your internal state. That process is personal and unscientific. It has to be. You're trusting your intuition as the central processor. Not intuition alone, but intuition fed by continuous exposure to external reality. You trust that processor to do a creative and productive job of deciding the next step.

Some of those next steps might seem tangential. They can still bring you closer to understanding whether you're on the right path. The question of whether a startup is viable often comes down to the judgment of the creator. And if we're honest, the creator usually knows.

I've felt this in my career. There are mornings when I wake up enthusiastic to try new things, to push forward, to improve what's there. I can feel there's still more potential in the material. And there are other mornings when I'm grasping at straws, trying to come up with reasons to justify the project. Nothing inside is driving me forward.

When the dance stops, when there's no longer interplay between your inner and outer world in that domain, that's when you know it's time to change direction. That's not a scientific moment. It's a subjective one. But it's real.

Letting go of market size

A related question is whether what you're building will appeal to many people or just a few. I think all you can do is develop a sense. You can't capture market size quantitatively with any reliability at the start.

I also wrote about success projection for startups years ago: building models that work backwards from valuation to give you a baseline. That helps when you have enough traction to measure. At the earliest stage, though, before that data exists, the models can't tell you much.

If you find that you have a particular problem well-served by a particular solution, and you find a few others on the margin who agree, that's a meaningful signal. Human needs and solutions tend to scale by their nature. If something resonates with you and with people around you, the chances are high you'll find more.

I think you need to let go of market size as a fixed target. Your creative efforts might serve billions of people or they might serve just you. That's fine. You'll find out along the way. And if you're tuned into the dance, your sense of the outcome will develop naturally. You don't have to tie yourself to a mast for ten years only to discover the market isn't there. But you can trust yourself for weeks, if not months, to figure it out.

Getting over-indexed on knowing the market size upfront is the same trap as needing validation before you create. It substitutes an external measurement for the internal signal that actually drives the work.

Writing is not an event

This whole framework also applies to self-expression. I've had the same pattern with writing that many people have with startups. I used to think I needed to sit down, chart out what's best to write about, pick something important, do it well, and have a sense of what the effect would be. I'd give the writing process a magnitude and a formality before I even started.

That produces writer's block. It produces hesitation and, honestly, fear. You're trying to make creation into something separate from daily experience. You give it a special place, a special gravity, and then it becomes hard to approach.

The fix is the same as with a startup: make it continuous instead of discrete. Embed self-expression into daily living. Develop a metacognition about your own thoughts and experiences, and when something strikes you, produce an outward expression right away.

Have a coffee with a friend. Notice which parts of the conversation made you think about things differently. Jot some notes. Pull something together. Publish it. Don't wait for the right moment. The right moment is this one.

Once you get the hang of it, expressing yourself becomes part of the daily texture. It's natural and easy. And you realize you don't actually need anything from the expression. You don't need likes or views or people reaching out with work opportunities. Those become nice-to-haves on top of the actual act. The expression itself, the honest exposure of your inner world, is already the thing.