Speech #376

Prompt: Hey everyone, and welcome back to the show. I want you to do something for me. Just for a second, I want you to think about a project you poured your heart into. I’m talking about that web app, that side hustle, that big idea that was going to change everything. You spent late nights coding, you agonized over the design, you sketched out marketing plans on napkins. You lived and breathed this thing. And then… it just didn't work. The launch was quiet. The users didn't come. The whole thing just sort of fizzled out and now it sits in a private repository on your GitHub, a digital ghost. How many of those ghosts do you have? One? Three? More than you care to admit?If you're anything like me, the number is probably a little higher than you'd like. It’s a quiet source of shame, isn't it? These projects aren't just lines of code; they're bookmarks in our lives. They represent hope, ambition, and a version of our future that never came to be. And when they fail, it feels deeply personal. It's not just that the project failed; it feels like we failed. We weren't smart enough, we weren't dedicated enough, we didn't have the 'it' factor. The silence after a launch can be deafening, and it echoes with all of our worst insecurities.I have a whole folder on my hard drive I used to call 'The Graveyard'. Morbid, I know. It's filled with these projects. And for years, I couldn't even bring myself to open it. Clicking on it felt like walking through a cemetery of my own making, with each subfolder a headstone for a different dream. And right at the front, the biggest, most elaborate headstone belonged to a project I called 'Groovebase'.This was going to be my masterpiece. This was about five or six years ago. I'm a huge vinyl collector, and I was frustrated with the existing tools for cataloging my collection. They were clunky, ugly, and missing key features. So, I decided I would build the ultimate platform for vinyl lovers. Groovebase was going to have it all: a beautiful interface for showing off your collection, a smart system to identify pressings based on the matrix numbers etched into the vinyl, and a marketplace for trading and selling that wouldn't gouge you on fees. I was obsessed. For an entire year, every spare moment I had went into Groovebase. I learned a new front-end framework for it. I built a complex backend to handle the massive amounts of data. I spent weeks designing a logo and a color palette that I thought felt 'warm' and 'analog'. I told all my friends about it. I was convinced this was it. This was the one.I launched it. I posted on Reddit, on a few forums, I sent it to a couple of music bloggers. And then I waited. And waited. A few people signed up. Maybe a hundred in the first week. They added a few records to their collection and then… nothing. The activity flatlined. The marketplace was a ghost town. The feedback I got was mostly 'this is cool, but I already use another app and it's too much work to switch'. My masterpiece, my year of late nights and sacrificed weekends, was met with a collective shrug. And it crushed me. I felt like a fraud. I shut the server down after three months to stop paying the hosting bill, archived the code on GitHub, and threw it into 'The Graveyard'. I didn't want to think about it or talk about it ever again. The ghost of Groovebase was big, and it haunted me for a long, long time.I think we all have a Groovebase. A project that represents not just a failed idea, but a time in our life when we were full of a specific kind of hope that has since been bruised. We see these repositories as evidence of our failure. But what if we're looking at them all wrong? What if that folder on my hard drive isn't a graveyard at all? What if it's a library?Think about it. A graveyard is where things go to be forgotten. It’s a place of finality, of endings. But a library… a library is where knowledge is stored. It's a place of beginnings, of resources, of learning. Each book on a shelf represents a massive amount of effort and knowledge, condensed into a single object that you can pull down and learn from at any time. What if each of our failed projects is just a book we wrote? A very, very specific, hands-on book. Groovebase wasn't a failure. It was the book I wrote on 'Advanced Database Design for Niche Communities'. It was the book on 'Why User Onboarding is More Important Than You Think'. It was my personal, unpublished manuscript titled 'A Deep Dive into the Vue.js Framework'.When you start to see your past work this way, everything changes. The shame starts to fade, and it's replaced by a sense of… well, a sense of wealth. You're not haunted by ghosts; you're the curator of your own private library of priceless, hard-won knowledge. The cost of admission to this library was your time and your ego, but the value of what's inside is immeasurable. So how do we actually check out a book from this library? How do we make this more than just a nice metaphor?First, you perform a technical audit. I want you to go back to one of those old projects. Pick one. Open up the code. I know, it might be painful. You'll probably see things and think 'oh my god, what was I thinking?'. That’s a good sign. That means you've grown as a developer. But look for the good stuff. Is there a clever algorithm you wrote? A component you designed that's really reusable? A set of configuration scripts that you spent days perfecting? Pull them out. Create a personal 'snippets' library or a starter template. That code doesn't have to die with the project. It's a valuable asset. When I finally got the courage to open up Groovebase again, I found the entire user authentication system I built was rock solid. I've since reused variations of that code in three different successful freelance projects. It wasn't a failure; it was a well-funded research and development phase.Second, you do a process audit. Think about how you worked on that project. Be honest. Did you burn yourself out? Did you spend 80 percent of your time on a feature that only 1 percent of users would ever need? Did you talk to potential users before you started building, or did you just assume you knew what they wanted, like I did? These are the real lessons. Your failed project is a perfect case study of your own habits, strengths, and weaknesses. Write it down. Make a list of 'Things I Will Never Do Again' and 'Things I Should Always Do'. This is more valuable than any project management book you could ever buy, because the protagonist of the story is you. For me, Groovebase taught me that I absolutely have to validate an idea with real, paying customers before I write a single line of code. That lesson alone has saved me thousands of hours since.Third, and this is the most important one, you conduct a market and vision audit. Why did the project really fail to connect? It's almost never because your code wasn't good enough. It's usually a flaw in the core idea. You solved a problem that people didn't actually have, or you solved it in a way that was more trouble than it was worth. This is pure gold. You just got a masterclass in market research for the price of your own time. You discovered a truth about a specific market niche. You have data. Groovebase didn't fail because the app was bad. It failed because the pain point of cataloging vinyl wasn't painful enough for most people to abandon their simple spreadsheets or existing apps. The switching cost was too high. Knowing that is a superpower. It stops you from making the same assumption in the future.By reframing these projects from failures to lessons, you reclaim your own story. You weren't wasting your time. You were learning. You were in the lab, experimenting. Some experiments explode, and that's okay. In fact, that's how science works. No scientist considers a failed experiment a personal failing. It's just data. It's one more path that you now know leads nowhere, which makes it easier to find the path that leads somewhere.And this process does something even more profound on an emotional level. It allows you to forgive yourself. You can look back at the person who started that project, the one filled with all that hope and ambition, and you don't have to see them as naive or foolish. You can see them as brave. It takes incredible courage to start something new, to pour your heart into a blank text editor, and to put your creation out into the world, knowing it might be ignored or rejected. That act, in and of itself, is a success. The outcome is secondary.So I want you to go open your own graveyard. But this time, don't walk in with a feeling of dread. Walk in like it's the grand opening of your personal library. Walk through the aisles. Pull a project off the shelf. Dust it off. Don't look at it as a ghost of what could have been. Look at it as the blueprint for what you will do next. Honor the effort. Appreciate the craft, even if it's clumsy. Read the lessons that are written in every line of code and every design decision. The person who built that is the reason you are who you are today. They did the hard work so that you could be smarter, wiser, and stronger for the next big idea. And trust me, there will always be a next big idea.Those digital ghosts aren't haunting you. They're your council of advisors. They're the foundation you're building everything else on. And the more ghosts you have, the stronger your foundation is. So go and thank them. They've earned it. And so have you.That's all for this week. Thanks for listening. Go make something great, or at least, something you can learn from. I'll talk to you in the next one.