Same Hustle. New Game.

Hello again my friend,

I’ve been thinking about the early days at beehiiv. The company on the cusp a major turning point. We have so much coming down the pipe, that I can’t help but stop and reminisce.

We were ten people. $20k a month in revenue. Everyone had a hundred things on their desk and the days bled into the nights.

I remember one night working through support and triaging bugs until 11pm, messaging my boss at the time, Tyler, that I was on a roll and asking if I could start at 1pm the next day if I kept going. I didn’t stop until 3am, when we hit inbox zero.

It was intense. It was difficult. It was, honestly, borderline psychotic. And I loved it. So much that I catch myself telling stories about it now. But there’s a problem (not just that I’m crazy).

The problem now is that’s where cope starts.

Cope is the story you tell yourself to avoid changing. It’s not laziness. It’s not stupidity. It’s a quiet narrative that protects you from the discomfort of what you actually need to do. It’s when people tell themselves AI isn’t changing things. When people act like they’re too good to sell courses (when they’re jealous of the money courses can make).

My version is nostalgia.

I tell myself there was glory in the chaos. That everyone was instrumental. That winning on speed and hustle was the whole game. And some of that is true. But that’s not why I keep reaching for it. Really, it’s just comfortable.

The world has changed. The company has changed. I can’t help but wonder if I’m dragging my feet. Or where the line between the “right” and “wrong,” of it all is.

Let’s lock in.

Most days I feel pulled in two directions.

One pull is backward. Cope. Everything I just described about the the nostalgia. When I knew exactly what to do because everything needed doing (hard to get that wrong).

The other pull is actually sideways.

I watch Linear ship their AI agent. I watch Ramp ship Glass. I see companies I look up to building things that feel like the future, and I let myself get frustrated that what I’m doing isn’t on that level.

Like people in my orbit are building transformative things and I’m somewhere behind, still doing the old job in a new costume. Both pulls keep me from the actual work.

One says the past was better. The other says someone else’s present is better. Neither one says get on with it.

I’ve written before about the quiet pressure a lot of us are feeling right now. Jobs, AI, etc, etc,. You’ve heard it from me before. The hard part is moving before the change makes the decision for you.

That’s why I’m writing this. Not because I’ve figured it out. Because I know how easy it is to be the person who sees the shift and still doesn’t make the move. Or worse, moves in the wrong ways because of the pulls that distract them.

If you’ve been feeling that quiet hum, that something needs to change but you don’t know what, you’re not alone in it.

I’m in it too. This is me trying to think through what to actually do about it.

For someone like me, who thrives in the zero-to-one chaos, hustling, switching priorities, winning on speed, what I’m about to describe is hell.

AI absorbs a lot of the surface area that used to make me feel useful. The fast switching, the hundred small tasks, the grunt work that looked like contribution because it was necessary. Eventually the company grows. The tools get better. The old bottlenecks disappear.

And the question becomes uncomfortable:

What’s left?

Doing “less,” but better, with better tools. The ones that absorb all those small tasks are now the new recipient of all those efforts.

That’s the operating principle. It’s extremely annoying.

The popular answer is: become an orchestrator. Sit back. Direct the AI. Let the system do the work.

I don’t buy it.

At least not in the lazy way people talk about it. I think “orchestrator” can become cope in a different skin. A polished way of saying you’re standing farther away from the work while pretending that distance is strategy.

Everyone has access to the tools now. Everyone can open the same apps, write the same prompts, and spin up the same basic workflows.

Access is no longer the advantage.

Judgment is. Taste is. Context is. Persistence is. The ability to know what’s worth building, what isn’t, and how good the output actually needs to be.

Sitting back and calling yourself an orchestrator while the system does your job isn’t a strategy. It’s cope. The system doing your job is not the same thing as you doing your job better. The system is now the job. And there’s no sitting back.

Here’s the part I’m embarrassed to admit.

I’ll spend two hours figuring out what to get the AI to do instead of just getting it to do the thing. I’ll over-engineer the setup for a task that takes ten minutes by hand. Worse, I put together an entire app to do a task I could’ve automated in 10min some other way. I just got caught up in thinking small.

That’s not building systems. That’s procrastination and admittedly not very good judgement.

The version that’s actually worth building is the one I almost didn’t reach for.

An app that handles the review, fixes the bug, writes the ticket, and creates everything an engineer needs to review, end to end. Not sitting back because it can “write the email.”

That’s the scale the tools are operating at now. And the job is time to make small, incremental improvements to a system that eventually replaces 90% of the job. It’s borderline twisted, isn’t it?

But that’s the game. The tools get better. The systems grow. My role is no longer reading, triaging, and assigning 100 bugs. It’s making 100 small improvements to the system that does.

Same hustle. New game.

I’m more useful when I take the early-beehiiv intensity, the 3am, inbox-zero, hundred-things-on-the-desk, borderline-psychotic energy, and point it somewhere new.

Not at the tasks. At the systems that do the tasks. Build them like they’re a small company you’re trying to make work.

Feed them. Iterate on them. Improve them. Give them better inputs. Watch where they break. Fix the weak spots. Treat them with the same seriousness you’d treat a real teammate.

That’s harder than it sounds.

It means not rushing to do the thing yourself. It means sitting with the discomfort of building infrastructure that pays off later instead of grinding out a win today.

It means accepting that the visible work may not be the valuable work anymore.

For someone wired like me, that’s the actual challenge. It feels very vulnerable saying it.

I like the rush of getting things done. I like clearing the queue. I like being useful in a way you can see immediately.

But the next version of usefulness might not look like that. It might look like building the thing that clears the queue every day without me.

And there is a bright side. After a couple weeks of sleepless nights, it started coming together.

I literally built an app that saves me an hour a day. Not a hypothetical. A real thing, that I use, that gives me back time I used to spend on tasks I now barely think about. And I can keep building on top of it.

One day 1, it did one thing. On day 2, another. Now, on day 3 of really building it, it’s about to do more. Every new piece of functionality saves more time. Time that compounds to build another system that gives me more time.

Side-note, what happens when the marginal “cost” of work is the cost of the electricity? Worth thinking about.

As for what I’m building. Is it on the level of what I look up to? No. But it’s getting there. And the gap between getting there and not starting is the whole game.

I don’t care how overused the quote is, I still love it. Every day I sit down and learn something I didn’t know yesterday. Every day there’s some new capability, new pattern, new mistake, new fix. And the time it takes to actually act on it is minutes, which constantly hits my brain with the dopamine I talked about last week.

Growth used to feel like steps. Then leaps.

Now the distance between “I don’t know how to do this” and “I built a working version” is collapsing.

And if I keep treating the work like the old steps were better, I’m going to miss it.

Growth not cope.

The companies we admire are figuring this out in public. We can do the same.

And while it might feel like everyone else is already ahead, the truth is we’re all still early. All still figuring it out. All still deciding what to keep from the old way and what to leave behind.

For me, it’s keeping the intensity and to stop thinking the past was better before I become a bitter old man saying “back in my day.”

My career’s always been about moving fast, caring too much, and running towards the mess when no one else wants it (and making gold of it).

I don’t want to lose that.

Same hustle. New game.

Thanks, as always, for reading.