Recipe for success

I love this little snippet from James Clear in his most recent newletter:

“Enough courage to get started + enough sense to focus on something you’re naturally suited for + enough persistence to stay in the game long enough to catch a few lucky breaks + a lot of hard work. There’s your recipe.” – James Clear

Is it really that simple? Maybe the nuance, details and time needed in between will vary greatly from indie hacker to indie hacker, but it does makes lots of sense as a general observable pattern that you need some some combo of these four factors to succeed on your indie hacking journey:

1. Enough courage to get started
2. Enough sense to focus on something you’re naturally suited for
3. Enough persistence to stay in the game long enough to catch a few lucky breaks
4. A lot of hard work

Enough courage to get started is talking about how many indie hackers—especially technically inclined builders—tend to want to polish things to perfection before launching. Fear of embarrassment or failure perhaps. Or perhaps it’s imposter syndrome holding us back from just putting things out there.

The second point feels starkly poignant because I relate most to it. TBH this whol indie hacking thing isn’t something I’m naturally talented at. I’m not already some senior developer in a tech company who can code a MVP in a weekend. I’m a little too shy to be good at marketing, and had to really learn to grow thick skin to promote myself without feeling dirty. I’m a service designer for a decade, but not the kind who’s talented with color and pixels, so that didn’t help much either. Three of the most important skills in an indie hacker, I am not. I had to literally start from zero. All I had starting out was that hunger to create things, and the naive dream of location, time and financial freedom. Those were the only things that’s pushed me along till now. So according to James Clear, I’m definitely not naturally suited for this. And it becoming clearer to myself that my taking so many years is really to develop the skill levels needed for development, design and marketing.

Having enough persistence to stay in the game and doing the hard work are things I recognise I am good at. I mean, what else can I do right? When you’re not naturally gifted, the only tool you have is to work harder than others, and outlast, outsurvive your situation. And indeed it’s really apparent after spending time on Twitter interacting with other indies. Many burst on to the scene showing so much promise, growing like crazy in terms of following and revenue, but few truly last. Many folks I chat with earlier this year had disappeared from my timeline, and Twitter. They’ve either worked themselves to burnout, or lost interest when their products didn’t do well, or tweets didn’t go viral. Having the endurance for a decades or a few decades of work, seems rare.

What do you think of this recipe? Makes sense?