The Groundwork
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how hard everything feels.
As I await my work permit in the US, I finally have time to rebuild my fitness routines and work on projects that have always felt out of reach: filmmaking, app building, and writing. These pursuits are hard. Not just because they require deep, sustained focus (which tends to run short when you’re nomadic), but simply because they're in the realm of creation.
Creating something out of nothing.
Nada.
Nil.
Every project demands a distinct flavor of self-doubt — analysis paralysis, impostor syndrome, perfectionism. There’s that draft I started but never finished, the draft I finished but never published, and the idea I abandoned because I was either too disorganized, too tired, or too scared to do the painstaking work of starting when there’s no guaranteed return.
By some miracle however, I broke through. In the last few months I shipped 6 docu-style short stories and 6 AI applications. My fitness routines have firmed up too following a year of constant travel. And writing - well that seems to be my final frontier. Perhaps this is my attempt to cross it off the list.
Perhaps this is my groundwork.
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Groundwork
In construction, groundwork is the hardest and dirtiest part of a build. It's physically intensive: digging, leveling the earth, and extracting debris to make way for a solid foundation. Even with meticulous planning, unexpected obstacles can arise—unsteady soil, buried obstructions, or relentless weather conditions.
For creatives, product builders, and entrepreneurs, the groundwork takes a more ambiguous form. It’s the countless hours spent planning without knowing where you'll land. It's repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results (the definition of insanity) in an attempt to catch which variable is changing. It's the annoying art of heuristic learning - the trial and error, though sometimes more errors than trials.
It's energy draining, emotionally taxing, confidence-crushing and it is. just. so. frustrating.
Groundwork → Systems →Delegation/Automation
Needless to say, something magical happens when you persist. You do the hard work long enough, it gets familiar. You're still in an uphill swim but the river is less intimidating. It's more predictable, less murky. You're now more acquainted with your own creative process. You know which parts trigger your spiral and are able to plan ahead of them. The chaos begins to organize itself into systems:
In filmmaking, I discovered that story is everything. With a solid story, radio edits become straightforward and video edits flow naturally. Characters, composition, cinematography - they’re only secondary.
In fitness, showing up matters more than the workout itself. The routine creates the foundation for progress. If you show up consistently, the work out takes care of itself.
In coding with AI, tackling the most complex pieces first prevents cascading problems later. Starting with the hardest technical challenges helps avoid the pitfall of AI-generated code conflicts.
As systems emerge, resistance diminishes. You develop a cadence, a rhythm. Tasks that once required intense effort are now met with less friction. Eventually, your process takes shape and it becomes clear which parts can be delegated or automated. The dust finally settles.
Dealing with Failure
But here's what I learned about ground work: the critical factor isn't your willingness to experiment - it's your ability to live with the “collateral of failure.”
You must accept that you'll invest significant time, energy, and resources in possibilities that may not materialize. That you can drive yourself to the ground and still get nothing in return.
The question becomes: Can you make peace with that uncertainty? Can you live with the sunk cost? Can you kill your darling?
This newsletter itself is part of my ground work in writing. Whether it survives beyond these first few months remains to be seen. But that's exactly the point - the willingness to begin despite the uncertainty is what makes any creation possible.
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