The night I almost deleted everything
I hit a wall last year. The product was not growing, the list was long, and I was tired in a way that sleep was not fixing.
I remember sitting there with my cursor over the delete button, not because I would actually do it, but because I wanted the feeling of an exit.
I did not delete it. I closed the laptop and went to bed.
The next morning I still did not want to do it. But I could see the shape of the problem more clearly, and it looked smaller than it had at midnight.
I think a lot of decisions get made in that specific tiredness and mistaken for clarity. The urge to burn something down is real, and it feels decisive, and it is almost always a symptom of needing rest rather than needing to quit.
Have you ever nearly walked away from something and been glad you slept first? What kept you?
Replies
Thank you for writing this honestly. My closest version was not tiredness but a breakage: my earlier app was built on an unofficial API, and when that API died the app stopped working overnight. Letting it go would have been the easy exit. What kept me was seeing that the idea had not failed, only the foundation had. So the new app is a rebuild on official engines, with the old app's store page and its users carried over. I agree with you that the midnight view mixes those two up. The morning question that helps me is: is it the thing that is broken, or only the way I built it?
@gbasovv Damn true! Thanks for adding your thoughts. That’s a great way to look at it. Sometimes the hardest part isn’t starting over, but realizing that the idea is still worth fighting for even when the original approach fails. Knowing what to rebuild instead of what to abandon makes all the difference.
@ian_powell2 Exactly, and the useful part of losing the foundation was that it left a clear list: what users came for stayed, how it was built went. Thanks for starting such an honest thread, Ian.