“You either give it your all, or you don’t do it at all.”

My friend Gabriel told me this when I was just getting started on the project, and it completely changed the way I thought about building something of my own.

At first, my mindset was something like: “I’m going to give this a shot, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.”

It sounds reasonable. Even healthy. But I eventually realized there was something wrong with it.

I was already giving myself permission to fail before I had really started.

There’s a big difference between accepting that something might fail and approaching it as if failure doesn’t really matter.

Of course it might fail. Most things do. There are a million things outside of your control.

But the point is to make sure that, if it does fail, it’s not because you approached it halfway.

If you decide to build something, build it with the intention of making it work. Talk to people. Iterate. Fix what’s broken. Change direction when necessary. Do the uncomfortable things. Give the idea every possible chance to become something people genuinely want to use.

The mindset shouldn’t be:
“I’ll make it and see what happens.”
It should be:
“I’m going to do everything I can to make this work.”

Failure can still happen of course!

But there’s a huge difference between failing after giving something a real shot and failing because you never fully committed to it in the first place.