The problem of addiction to the signals of progress is that the signals are not the same as progress itself.
When the founders are obsessed with the incorrect, they forget to do the work that really matters.
A student approached me after class to apologize for having spent the whole class looking at his phone. To be honest, it’s not so weird that students look at their phones during class, so I really didn’t realize. Even so, she was visibly ashamed.
“I’m sorry”said. «I didn’t want to be rude. It’s just that … my video is going viral on Tiktok and I couldn’t stop looking at statistics.
He turned his phone so that I could see it: the “I like” increased, the times they were shared up and the comments multiplied.
I smiled because I knew exactly how it felt.
In fact, I remember one of the first times that a video of mine went viral and did basically the same. It was a few years ago, and I was in a Duke basketball game with a friend. If you know anything about Duke’s basketball, you will know that tickets for Cameron Indoor Stadium, the small stadium where the team plays, are practically gold. It is one of the best environments of all sports. But while my friend watched the game, I didn’t.
I was watching my phone, updating the application again and again, seeing how my number of visits went up to millions.
My friend was upset, and he was not right. I was wasting a unique experience. But at that time, the small dose of dopamine that gave me how the numbers rose was too tempting to resist. Which, of course, is precisely the problem of entrepreneurs. It is the addiction that nobody speaks of: the addiction we all have to the signs of progress.
Entrepreneurs are some of the most working people on the planet (and, if they know me, they know that I include social networks creators in that group). But they are also some of the most impatient.
They create something, they throw it into the world and, then, begin to seek the validation that it is working. They want to see sales or user records. They want new meetings on the calendar. Or, at least, an increase in traffic of your website.
And what do they do? They constantly update. Analysis panels. Email input trays. CRM reports. They update, update and update, with the hope that, when looking, the numbers change for magic.
But what they seem to forget is that the numbers do not change because you look at them. The numbers change because you do the job.
The same goes for viral videos. You can spend all night looking at Tiktok’s statistics, but that will not give you more “like.” It will only create it more content.
Even so, temptation is strong because seeing how the numbers change, even just a bit, looks like progress. Without a doubt, it satisfies the same need as real progress. And so we continue to update, although nothing happens.
That’s why I call it addiction. It is a behavior that makes us feel good at the time, but that eventually harms us silently.
The problem of being addicted to the signs of progress is that the signals are not the same as progress itself.
A viral video does not make you a successful creator. It just means that the algorithm smiled once. The only thing that really builds a sustainable creative career is to constantly publish, to improve your trade and learn what resonates in your audience over the years.
A great meeting with investors does not make your company successful. A week of rising sales does not show that you have built something lasting. An article in Techcrunch does not mean that you have “triumphed.”
Real progress in a company is slower, quieter and much less glamorous. It is the accumulation of small improvements that anyone notices at the time. It is writing a better code. It is to adjust the incorporation flows. It is having uncomfortable calls with customers in which you discover what does not work. It is the weeks and months in which you feel that you are stagnant, when in reality you are laying the foundations for something that accumulates.
But since those things do not give us the same small dose of dopamine, we underestimate them. We prefer to update the page rather than face the boredom of incremental work.
And there is the real danger. Addictions always move us away from the difficult and boring things that really matter.
Remember that the signals are fine. They are certainly motivating because they give us positive feedback. But they are not the important thing. The important thing is the important thing.
And the important thing, real progress, takes longer than you would like. It takes longer than you think should carry. In fact, it has been so long that the only way to survive is to stop updating your metrics and start falling in love with boring work.
If you do not, you will build a company that will seem good for a moment, but that will collapse as soon as the signs disappear. You will pursue dopamine and burn yourself. You will confuse the appearance of the impulse with reality, and finally the gap between them will swallow you.
But if you manage to break the addiction, you force yourself to stop updating and, instead, you return to the slow work of improving things step by step, something magical happens: the signals begin to appear alone.
When they do, you will not only see how a number goes up for a few hours, but you will build something that will accumulate for years.
