You're spending 40 hours a week writing code that AI could do in 10.

While you're grinding through pull requests, 200k+ engineers at OpenAI, Google & Meta are using AI to ship faster.

How?

The Code newsletter teaches them exactly which AI tools to use and how to use them.

Here's what you get:

Sign up and get access to the Ultimate Claude code guide to ship 5X faster.

Join 200K+ engineers

Saturdays are for honesty. No frameworks, no five-step processes, no neatly packaged insights delivered at arm's length. Just the unfiltered version of whatever occupied real estate in my head this week. I don't always have all the answers to these. Sometimes I'm still right in the middle of working through them. That's kind of the point. Here are the three things I keep coming back to.

THING ONE

This one has been living rent-free in my head all week and I cannot shake it no matter how many other things I try to think about.

I have been watching people work incredibly hard. Long days, obsessive output, constant motion, always available, always grinding. And some of them are building something real and meaningful. But a lot of them are running from something. And there is a difference, a significant one, between someone who works hard because they genuinely believe in what they are building and someone who works hard to avoid confronting whether they believe in themselves at all.

I spent years in the second category. Staying busy was a remarkably effective way to not have to ask the hard question: do I actually believe I am the kind of person who builds what I say I want to build? As long as my calendar was full and my output was high, I could point to the activity and call it progress. But activity and progress are not the same thing. I knew that intellectually. I just wasn't willing to sit still long enough to feel the difference.

The uncomfortable truth is that you cannot hustle your way past an identity that doesn't match your ambitions. You can delay the reckoning for a while. A significant while, actually. You can build impressive things that collapse because the foundation was never solid. You can hit revenue milestones and still feel like a fraud. You can build a team and still make every decision yourself because some part of you doesn't trust that you are the kind of person other people can rely on to lead them well.

Eventually the gap between who you are and who your goals require you to be shows up. It shows up in the systems you abandon. In the clients you attract and the ones you repel. In the numbers that plateau no matter what new tactic you try. In the quiet moments when nobody is watching and you wonder why you feel stuck even though you are technically moving forward.

I have been doing identity work this week. Writing down the specific version of myself I am becoming. Not just the goals or the outcomes, but the character of the person operating at that level. What does he believe? How does he make decisions? What does he do when things go sideways? It is uncomfortable to write. It is also the most clarifying thing I have done in months.

The question worth sitting with today: who does your current behavior say you believe you are? Not who you say you are. Who does your behavior confirm you are? And does that match who you want to be? The gap between those two answers is the actual work.

Not discipline work. Not tactics work. The identity work that most people skip because it is slower and less satisfying than buying a new course or redesigning their morning routine. Do the slower thing. It compounds.

THING TWO

I spent some time this week with the Ed Mylett and John Maxwell conversation that is in this week's Friday Roundup, and one idea from that conversation has genuinely not left me.

Maxwell talks about the concept of a return on failure. Not just bouncing back from failure or recovering from it, but actually getting a positive return on it. Treating failure as an asset in your portfolio rather than a liability to write off and move past as quickly as possible. The question he poses is worth repeating here because it hit me hard: what would you attempt if you knew you would get a positive return on any failure you encountered?

Think about how much that reframe changes the risk calculus. Most people avoid attempting things because they are afraid of what failure will cost them, in reputation, in money, in time, in the judgment of people they respect. But if you knew you were going to learn something valuable from every miss, if you knew the failure itself would make you sharper and better equipped for the next attempt, the fear changes shape entirely.

Maxwell also introduces the distinction between a good miss and a bad miss that I mentioned in the Friday Roundup. On a good miss, you make adjustments based on what you learned. On a bad miss, you make excuses and move on without extracting the lesson. The failure in both cases might look identical from the outside. What separates them is entirely internal. It is the response to the failure, not the failure itself.

The part that challenged me most personally: success and failure are meant to work together. When things are going well, failure keeps you from getting arrogant and sloppy. When you're in a hard stretch, past success gives you the evidence you need to keep going. When you try to have one without the other, you lose what both of them are providing. Pure success with no failure creates blind spots. Pure failure with no success creates paralysis.

I have been thinking about how this applies to my content. The posts that consistently perform best are rarely the polished, optimistic ones where everything worked out and I have a tidy lesson to share. They are the ones where I admitted something did not go the way I expected, or described the version of myself I am not proud of, or shared the thing I wish I had done differently three years ago. People do not connect to your wins in the way you think they do. Your wins are aspirational. Your honest misses are where people actually see themselves.

This is also why I believe in the Grace Over Guilt framing so strongly. Guilt over failure is a bad mistake. Extracting the lesson and moving forward with grace is a good miss. You don't earn the lesson by suffering through failure. You earn it by being honest enough to look at it clearly.

THING THREE

I have been auditing my own workflow this week and finding something I did not expect. Most of the places where things get stuck or dropped or delayed are not actually workflow problems. They are clarity problems. The task is sitting there in the system, correctly prioritized and correctly scheduled, and it still is not moving. Why? Because nobody, including me, has fully defined what done looks like.

This shows up in two distinct ways that I think are worth naming separately because they require different solutions.

The first version is personal. When I sit down to work on something and it just will not move, when I keep coming back to the same task day after day without making meaningful progress, nine times out of ten the problem is not that I do not have the energy or the capacity or the right conditions. The problem is that I have not defined the specific output clearly enough to actually start. Start what, exactly? A document? A decision? A conversation? When I take two minutes to write out specifically what the finished version of this task looks like before I begin, the work almost always moves faster and cleaner than I expected.

Spring doesn’t have to mean a packed schedule and another drink you regret tomorrow.

This season, I’m reaching for something different: Vesper by Pique.

Pique is known for blending ancient botanicals with modern science to create elevated wellness essentials. Vesper might be my favorite yet. It’s a non-alcoholic, adaptogenic aperitif that delivers the relaxed, social glow of a cocktail. Without alcohol or the next-day fog.

It’s what I pour when I want something special in my glass on a bright spring evening. Each sip feels celebratory and uplifting. Relaxed body. Clear mind. No haze. No sleep disruption.

Crafted with L-theanine, lemon balm, gentian root, damiana, and elderflower, Vesper is sparkling, tart, and beautifully herbaceous.

If you’re ready for a new kind of happy hour, try Vesper here. 🌿✨

Get 10% off for life

The second version shows up when building systems for other people or for a team. You can construct the most elegant workflow in Make.com, with every trigger and every action perfectly mapped, and the system will still break if the inputs and expected outputs are not crystal clear to every person touching it. The tool is never the actual problem. The clarity is the problem. And the breakdown always happens at the human layer, not the automation layer.

Side note: if you are not using Make.com for automation yet and you are running any kind of business with repeatable processes, it is worth a serious look. Use my link: Make.com

The question I have now started asking at the beginning of every project, every task, every conversation about deliverables: what does this look like when it is finished? Not in general terms. In specific, concrete, I-know-it-when-I-see-it terms. The format. The length. The audience. The outcome it needs to create. The single clearest signal that we are done.

When I can answer that question clearly at the start, the work has a way of sorting itself out. When I cannot answer it clearly, no system in the world will save me from the confusion that follows.

One more layer to this: I think a lot of what gets labeled as procrastination is actually ambiguity. People are not avoiding work because they are lazy. They are avoiding the work because they have not given themselves a clear enough target to aim at. Fix the clarity problem first. The execution problem often disappears on its own.

Define the finish line before you start running. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. Turns out it is not nearly as obvious in practice.

Let me extend the clarity point into sales for a second, because it comes up constantly in client work and I think it matters beyond just task management.

When people tell me they cannot seem to close clients consistently, I almost always find the clarity problem starts before the sales conversation ever happens. They have not defined what a good client looks like specifically enough. They have not defined what outcome they are creating for that person in concrete, measurable terms. So the sales conversation meanders because there is no clear endpoint to organize it around, and the prospect can feel the ambiguity even if they cannot name it.

Same in content creation. The posts that miss are almost always the ones where the idea was still fuzzy when I sat down to write. The posts that land are the ones where I knew exactly what I wanted the reader to walk away thinking or feeling before the first sentence. Clarity of outcome before execution is not a productivity hack. It is just honest work. Know what done looks like. Then go build that thing.

And one final thought here: patience and avoidance are not the same thing, but they can look identical from the outside. Real patience waits for something specific, a piece of information, a condition to be met. Avoidance disguised as patience has no trigger. It just waits indefinitely for a feeling of readiness. If you cannot name the specific condition that would move you from waiting to acting, that is worth examining honestly before next week starts.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.

Dan Kaufman