Do the Hardest Thing First

It’s tempting to stay within the confines of the known, do things that are familiar, and then work on the hard things after. But you should actually work on the hard things first.

I spent a few weeks working on the hard work of my first VR app for the Quest 3. It’s like layers of stupid mistakes I made on top of each other, like an onion made out of idiocy. I’m not crying, I’m cutting a dummy onion.

I’m working on some easy stuff right now and reflecting.

Mobile App Prototype Example

You could say: I know web development, so the prototype of my mobile app should be a web page.

I’ve found a lot of fallacy with this way of thinking.

By staying far away from my goal (making a mobile app), I give myself too much leeway to quit.

Learning mobile development and launching an iOS and Android app is hard the first time, but what’s actually difficult is to not do what’s comfortable.

The easiest path is to do what you’re familiar with. You can already write good web code and your app code will be absolute shit.

By doing the hard thing first, you allow yourself to fail and solve all of the difficult cases first. Then the implementation is just scaffolding within the confines of the difficult groundwork you’ve laid out.

By avoid something hard, you’re staying in your comfort zone. You’re trying to gain control of the unknown. I mean, what if I can’t figure out how to make an app? Then I’ll fail.

Also, you might learn differently from a launched web app than a mobile app. For one, a mobile app could be 10x stickier, so you might drop a project that could have had amazing growth. So you should prototype as close as possible to the end product that you want.

Outro

The other reason why I do hard things first is the easy stuff kind of doesn’t matter.

Easy stuff are the things that will get done regardless. It’s the thing that anyone can do.

You can infinitely iterate on the easy things, making a UI more complex and add features and so forth, so why not solve the hard problems which, when solved will be permanently solved, and make you feel like a real developer :).