This week, you tried three different directions. You wrote up proposals, talked to a few people, ran a few small experiments. None of them worked out.
Reviewing it at night, the first line that pops into your head is — this week, it feels like I got nothing done. That sense of defeat is real, and familiar — almost every time you fall into this state, it’s the exact same script.
But it’s worth pausing to ask first — what standard are you actually using to evaluate this week? If the picture in your head is “I should have something presentable to show” — a finalized proposal, a deal closed, a model that actually worked — then what you’re actually doing is measuring this week with one particular ruler.
That ruler cares about outcomes, cares about the finished product you can finally set down on the table. It’s not a bad ruler — plenty of things genuinely should be measured with it. The problem is, it might not be the right one for what you’re actually doing.
First, think about what it feels like to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture.
You really are assembling it with your own hands, start to finish, no one doing it for you. But what you care about most is inevitably whether the finished cabinet is sturdy, whether it looks good. If you’re clumsy along the way, misread the instructions three times, spent an extra hour on it — you don’t go around telling everyone about that.
Because assembling a cabinet has always been measured by the finished product. The process is just a means to reach that product — and the means itself, even if skipped, optimized, or outsourced, loses nothing by being treated that way.
But trial and error in the early stages of a startup is, by nature, nothing like assembling an IKEA cabinet at all — it’s closer to an improvised basketball game.
There’s no instruction manual written in advance telling you what to do next. Every step you take is generated on the spot, in real time, and even you yourself only find out what the next step is by taking it.
Once this distinction is fully clear, you’ll find that this week’s real value was hiding inside those three attempts themselves.
This isn’t the comforting kind of line — “you didn’t succeed, but at least you tried.” It’s something more specific — through these three attempts, you figured out which path doesn’t work, sharpened your instincts to judge a little faster next time, or even just came to understand, a little better, exactly where the real complexity of this thing lies.
All of these gains belong to the process itself. They can’t be packaged into a presentable product, can’t even be clearly written into the “this week’s results” line of a weekly report.
This reminds me of something — what actually makes an experience worth remembering isn’t just “beating the level” as an outcome. Very often, it’s the specific missteps, the adjustments, the sudden moments of realization along the way to beating it.
The later Wittgenstein made a similar observation when discussing “understanding” — roughly, that some capacities can only grow, bit by bit, through the process of doing something; you can’t work out the answer first and then go execute it. Trial and error is, more or less, exactly this kind of thing.
Once you realize this, you’ll find that a large part of that sense of defeat was manufactured by you yourself.
It’s not that you truly accomplished nothing this week — it’s that you took a ruler that can only measure length and used it to measure something that is fundamentally a matter of weight. Of course it comes out to zero. That’s not a problem with the thing itself. It’s the wrong ruler.
The question truly worth asking was never “did I produce results this week.” It’s “did I genuinely go through that struggle this week, did something grow out of those three failures — even if that ‘something’ still can’t be named, still doesn’t have a shape to it yet.”
Of course, this distinction is much harder to actually use than it is to describe.
Because most of the time, when we evaluate ourselves, that “there should be results” ruler is the first one to surface, the most natural one — it’s the default standard we’ve been drilled into since childhood, while the judgment that “this thing never had an instruction manual to begin with, the process itself is the point” only surfaces once you stop and think one extra step further.
So next time you feel like a failure because “this week had no results,” it’s worth pausing like this first — asking yourself, does what I’m doing fundamentally have a pre-written standard answer at all.
If it doesn’t, then the struggle itself might be the one genuine result this week actually deserves to have recorded — it just doesn’t look much like a result. Or rather, it’s a result you need a different pair of eyes to even recognize.