Nicholas Rodrigues

i have this habit where i'll build something, finish it, and then just... not tell anyone. i'll close the laptop and go make rice and watch something stupid on youtube and the thing just sits there in a repo like it doesn't exist yet. not because i'm being strategic. i genuinely think some part of me believes that if the work is good enough, people will just find it. like code has a scent trail. like PRs emit a frequency that only competent people can hear.

this has worked more often than it should have. which is the worst thing that can happen to a bad strategy, because now i think it's a good one.

but here's what i keep noticing, and this goes beyond engineering, beyond tech, beyond any specific job. there is an almost perfect inverse correlation between how much someone talks about their work and how much work actually exists. i don't mean this in a "hustle in silence" motivational poster way. i mean it as an empirical observation that keeps being true no matter where i look.

the designer who spends three hours in a sync explaining their creative vision? open their figma file and it's four artboards and a color palette they found on dribbble. the founder who can monologue about market dynamics and competitive moats for forty minutes without taking a breath? their product has nine users and three of them are cofounders. the PM who turns every standup into a keynote? go check their roadmap. it hasn't moved since october.

meanwhile the people who are actually building stuff can barely describe what they're doing. you ask them and they say something like "yeah it's going fine, here's the PR" and change the subject. they're not being modest. they just have nothing to prove because the work is right there and you can go look at it.

every meeting is, on some level, an admission that someone isn't sure what's going on. sometimes that's legitimate. you actually need to sync. you actually need context that doesn't exist anywhere else. fine. but most of the time it's a group of people using each other's presence as a substitute for the discomfort of just deciding something and moving on. i've sat through meetings that could have been a slack message that could have been nothing. i've sat through meetings where six people spent an hour reaching a conclusion that one person had already reached in the first two minutes but didn't want to seem dismissive.

i realize there's something arrogant about a twenty-two-year-old saying this. i don't care. i'd rather be wrong and shipping than right and in my fourth alignment session about a feature nobody's started.

but.

the part i'm still working out, the part that keeps this from being a clean philosophy, is that sometimes the reason i don't want to talk about my work isn't because the work speaks for itself. sometimes it's because talking about it means showing the seams. the parts i'm not sure about. the decisions i made at 2am that felt right then and feel questionable now. and staying quiet about those parts isn't confidence. it's hiding.

"i don't need to explain my work" and "i don't want to explain my work" feel the same from the inside. they really, really aren't.

the wrong room

so there's this thing that happens that i haven't heard anyone describe, maybe because it contradicts the whole narrative we're all supposed to be running. the narrative is: if you're struggling, you need to improve. read more, work harder, get disciplined, wake up earlier, whatever. the entire self-improvement industry runs on the assumption that you are the broken variable.

and sometimes you are. sure. i've been lazy and i've been unfocused and i've been the problem plenty of times.

but sometimes, and this is the part nobody talks about, sometimes you're fine and the room is wrong.

i don't mean bad management or hostile culture or whatever. i mean something subtler. you're in a role, at a company, on a team, and everything is technically working. you're hitting your deadlines. people say good things about you in standups. your performance review is fine. and you go home every day with this feeling that's hard to describe because it's not unhappiness exactly. it's more like low resolution. like you're living at 720p and you know there's a 4k version of you somewhere but you can't access it from here.

i've felt that. i've also felt the opposite. the problem was way harder, the team was way smaller, nobody had any idea what we were doing, and i just locked in. not through willpower. it was more like something that was stuck finally unstuck. like i'd been driving with the parking brake on and didn't know until someone released it.

same me. same brain. same everything. the room changed, and a different person showed up.

the thing that took me way too long to figure out is that when you're in a wrong room, the first thing you do is blame yourself. i'm not focused. i'm not motivated. i need a system. maybe i should try pomodoro. maybe i should get into cold plunges. you start shopping for personal deficiencies because that's what you've been trained to do your whole life. every book, every podcast, every thread. it's all about fixing yourself. the trillion-dollar self-improvement industry has no business model if the answer is sometimes "you're fine, just leave."

and people don't leave. they stay in rooms that are making them duller because leaving feels like failure and staying feels like perseverance. we've made perseverance this unqualified virtue. never give up. push through. grit. nobody mentions that perseverance and stubbornness are the same behavior with different PR.

people

related: i used to evaluate people like they were CPUs. clock speed, benchmark score, done. you're either fast or you're not. smart or you're not. this is how you think about people when you're eighteen and intelligence is the only axis you know how to measure.

it's also completely useless.

i've seen someone i would have put in the ninety-ninth percentile go dark for six months in the wrong role. not burned out. not checked out. just muted. like the room had a dampening effect on exactly the thing that made them good. and i've seen someone i would have written off entirely build something genuinely impressive, and when i looked closer the only thing that changed was the context. smaller team. different kind of problem. a manager who gave them space instead of process.

the ranking i've landed on, which i'll probably revise in six months because i revise everything in six months, goes something like: fit first, then care, then taste, then intelligence. fit means the conditions activate you instead of sedating you. care means you actually want this specific problem solved, not just any problem. taste means you can feel the difference between something that works and something that's right, which is a distinction that most people think is pretentious until they work with someone who has it. and intelligence is last. not because it doesn't matter. because past a certain baseline it stops being the differentiator. it's height in basketball. you need enough. more than enough doesn't help as much as you think.

that's a weird thing to believe when being smart is sort of your whole deal. but i keep watching it be true.

the question that's actually useful about people isn't "how smart are they." it's "what specific conditions would make this person the best in the room." the quiet one who seems too slow for your startup? put them on a problem that punishes speed and rewards depth and come back in three months. the scattered one who can't seem to finish anything? put them at day zero when there's nothing to finish yet, just things to try, and watch them light up.

nobody is good everywhere. nobody is bad everywhere. everyone is a function that produces different outputs depending on the inputs. and most people have spent their entire careers with the wrong inputs and think that's just who they are.

the part where i admit things

my instinct is to let the work talk. i've said this already. the honest extension of that sentence, the part i usually leave off, is: because talking about the work myself requires showing you how i think, and i'm not sure i want you to see that yet. or ever.

building stuff is clean. it's me and a problem and the problem doesn't have feelings about my approach. it doesn't need me to be persuasive. it doesn't require me to translate what's in my head into words that survive contact with someone else's head. you solve it or you don't. i like that. i like it probably more than is healthy.

but then the thing is built and someone asks me to explain it and i can feel this resistance. not shyness. something more like i don't trust the translation. the thing i built makes sense in my head in this very specific non-verbal way, and every time i try to put it into words something gets lost. and i'd rather you just look at it and get it than have me talk about it and have you get a worse version.

the people i admire most don't have this problem. or they solved it. they can take something complex and say it simply and the simplicity isn't a reduction, it's a compression. nothing is lost. it's just smaller. that's a skill i don't have yet and i'm not sure how to practice it because you can't grind communication the way you grind engineering. there's no leetcode for being clear.

the game

i thought the game was: be the best in the room. outwork everyone. out-think everyone. ship more, sleep less, know more. do that long enough and good things happen.

good things happened. but i've been sitting with the uncomfortable possibility that it wasn't the strategy. it was the rooms. i got lucky with which rooms i ended up in. they happened to reward exactly the things i was already doing. and when you're lucky early you build this whole narrative about how your approach works, and the narrative holds up right until you walk into a room where it doesn't, and then you have to decide if the narrative was wrong or the room is wrong, and that's a harder question than it sounds.

what i actually believe, right now, today, subject to change: the game isn't about being good. it's about knowing your own physics. knowing what activates you and what puts you to sleep while looking productive. knowing that when you're struggling, the room might be the problem, and when you're thriving, the room might be the reason. and choosing your rooms accordingly, even when the wrong room is comfortable and the right room is terrifying.

i need a problem that should probably be impossible. i need a team small enough that i can't hide behind process. i need someone nearby who i think might be better than me. not to compete with, just to keep me honest, because without that i coast, and i coast so smoothly that i don't notice i'm slowing down until months have gone by. and i can't drink caffeine because i'm already wired like someone left the accelerator on permanently. if i have coffee i don't sleep for days, which sounds like a flex but is actually just a design flaw.

there's a lot about how i operate that i haven't figured out yet. probably the important stuff. probably the stuff that'll be obvious later in that annoying way where past-you seems like a stranger who was missing something right in front of his face.

but i'm asking better questions than i was a year ago. i think that's the whole game, honestly. not having answers. just getting faster at noticing what you don't know.