Look for truth when you build stuff.

Suppose you are passionately building a product, it is not unrealistic to expect that you would have started to do it because of some reason. Here I am trying to expound that part. The Why you want to build such and such product. That question is not a simple one to answer. Especially if you want to get as close as possible to the truth.

I am not talking about products that fit a need you have observed. For example, you found that you can build a light weight crane to lift objects when you find that people around you are lifting objects all the time by various methods. Your invention and the product may make it easier and cheaper to do it. Here the question of Why you created a product like that is as clear as daylight.

But suppose you only had a vague idea of the end goal or the product based on a vague idea of the need that propelled you to begin doing it, the question of ‘Why you want to do it’ becomes extremely important to answer.

Say you feel the existing horde of tools for communication adds a lot of pain and this should be fixed. This is the one line in your head. You go on working on prototypes and learn many things on how a new tool can reduce the pain of communication. This may be a long route as you do not know what you are solving exactly for a long time and whom you are solving it for.

It may appear that everyone will love what you are doing when you let the Cat out of the bag. But because of such a vague pursuit, the time gone in arriving at a clarity of what you are trying to do can make you foray into things that could have pulled you far away from the problem you wanted to solve when you began.

For a few lucky, this free form exploration can lead to unthinkable rewards. They may land into some new unexplored areas and this may end up justifying their ‘Why I wanted to do it’. For such people the answer is to solve something great, something fantabulous and they also miraculously ended up with such a thing. But for a lot more who strayed and could not reach the shore, the question of ‘Why I want to do it’ is the constant guide leading them to the right place or helping them to leave those that don’t yield fruits early on.

It is possible that the effort to answer such a question may show that

‘I really am not keen to fix this’ or ‘This is not a problem worthy of solving’ or ‘I wanted to do it because I wanted to become rich and famous like a Larry Page or a Zuck’ or ‘I did it because I wanted to show the world that I am a Tech super star’ or ‘I just thought it was good, but it didn’t turn out to be’.

The point here is, the more you ask such a question as you go along in your build, the more you become clear on the exact nature of the problem you want to solve.

These are like those magical, enticing, long pursuit, exploratory ideas that takes an enormous amount of your time and energy. You may not be able to answer the question of Why when you begin. You may not have a convincing answer for why you are building it even as you are half way or sometimes even close to the finish line.

But this kind of constant questioning makes you end up in the true reason for your venturing out. You may find that you are just interested in building such a thing and not bothered so much as to make it into a Company or a Business. Or you may find that you truly want to give the best answer in the market for such a question and make it into a sustained business that takes it forward.

Whatever it be, the closer you get to truth about your journey, the more aligned you will be to your true goals.