Mathematical progression

When he was 11 years old, Kobe Bryant played a full 25-game basketball season without scoring a single point.

“I was terrible,” he said. “Awful.”

Following that season, Kobe said he took a simple mathematical approach to becoming one of the great basketball players of all time:

“I had to take a long-term view…And I said, ‘Ok, this year, I’m going to get better at dribbling. Next year, shooting. The year after that, creating my own shot.’ So forth and so on.’”

“And patiently, I got better. When I came back the next season, I was a little bit better. The season after that, I was a little bit better.”

“Patiently,” he repeats. “It was piece by piece. It was the consistency of the work. The consistency of the work: Monday, get better. Tuesday, get better. Wednesday, get better.

Do that over a period of time—three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years—you get to where you want to go.”

“It’s simple,” he said. “It’s simple math.”

– @bpoppenheimer

This was inspiring to read. It’s strange where sources of inspiration can come from, even from fields so far from yours, like basketball is to indie hacking.

Because maybe I am ‘kid’ right now along on my indie hacking journey, that terrible.

And all I need to do is to get mathematical.

‘Dribbling’ this year. ‘Shooting’ next.

If I were start over now, how would I do it year by year?

• Get familiar with PHP. Just ship more projects, like how I used to do it with Vue.js when starting out with coding! Build small things that I can do in 1-2 days.
• Backend. Get comfortable with running my own VPS, starting a server, setting up a database, containers, security.
• Shipping a full stack app. Ship this many times until I can ship a full stack MVP in a day.
• Get good at storytelling. Build in public, for real. Just share whatever I’m building, and I mean whatever. No filter, no tweet limits, no hesitation (I actually hold back a lot). Learn how those who do it well.
• Get good at SEO. Learn how to distribute without an audience. Buy Ahrefs, build a few small SEO projects based on a few high search volume but low keyword difficulty keywords.

What else?