One of my favorite books ever is The Dip by Seth Godin. It’s a tiny book with the simple message that everything worth doing has a “Dip” (or multiple dips) along the way, and to succeed, you have to overcome and power through the dip.

Setting up my website reminded me of the good times when I was building shengji.io this time last year. I felt the same mental strain of reading though Github Pages documentation, debating among different ways of hosting a website, copying and pasting error messages into Google, and the like.

However, the process was much shorter this time, and I realized that similar to the idea of the Dip, every project or undertaking has a ballpark range of how long it takes before you start to see light at the end of the tunnel.

Life before this point is pretty grim, and you’re not sure if things will work out. After the inflection point, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but success feels inevitable and it’s only a matter of time before you get there. For lack of a better word, I’ll call it “time-to-belief.” Awful, but hopefully it gets the point across.

This got me thinking, what are some examples I’ve come across so far?

  • Setting up this website - 2-3 hours
  • Building shengji.io - ~1 month. Building the entire game took more than 2 months, and I was fixing bugs for another few weeks after that, but 1 month was how long it took for me to develop conviction that I would make it to the finish line.
  • Starting a comapny - I haven’t done this, so I’m only speculating here. I’d guess this is multiple orders of magnitude longer, and there are many dips. In fact, perhaps it’s a non-ending stream of dips that vary in severity and nature. Sure, you can derisk yourself along the way – for example, chances of dying are much lower for startups that make it to series A – but you’re never really out of the woods. It’s a sobering thought.