In startups, roles are fluid. Everyone wears many hats: what’s important isn’t one’s job description but the problems which need to be solved. ​ If you’re going to have a team with continuously negotiated roles, you need a context for that continuous negotiation. These demos unified the “tests” with the real work. Eventually, I came to understand that they put themselves into these terrible situations as a way to force themselves to innovate, that the desperation was productive, not destructive. It was desperation, but by design. ​ We worked from deep desperation, but as Vaughn describes, it was absolutely one of the most exhilarating and dynamic periods of my life. But these big-picture problem statements shatter fractally into a hundred sub-problems, and most of the progress in my work comes from identifying and improving articulations these sub-problems.

In the middle of my sketching hours, I don’t want to be worrying about whether I’ll be ready for my classroom prototype next month. Within a given day, action-oriented “butt-in-chair”-style advice does help; meta-thought is just distracting. But go too long without error correction, and you’ll misspend hours in the chair. ​ The rest of the day’s work becomes roughly deontological. I give myself permission to be satisfied with the day if I spent three focused hours sketching like I’d planned. ​ From time to time, I flip back into execution mode. It feels like an old friend. We say hello, dance for a while, and part ways smiling, just as it always was. Open-ended mode is more enigmatic, reserved—yet occasionally it sparks some moment so singular it lights up the whole year. Those moments don’t happen without the days spent together between those moments. I’m slowly learning to make the most of our quiet strolls.