The Cost of Wanting to Be Everything

There is a version of my life where I hear about a problem and I just live with it. Someone mentions they can not track their team’s progress well. I nod, say that is annoying, and then go home and watch a movie. Normal person stuff.

That is not the version I got.

Instead, I hear a problem and something in my brain starts drafting schemas. It sketches out a backend, a real-time layer, a clean dashboard. Before the conversation is even over, I have already named the product and written the landing page copy in my head. I am sixteen. I have shipped more software than most people twice my age. And some days, I genuinely wish I had a little less of whatever this is.

The curse of capability

When you are bad at something, you get a natural off switch. You try, you fail, you stop. The feedback loop is fast and merciful. When you are good at something, that switch breaks, because you never fail fast enough to convince yourself to quit. Every project feels possible. Every idea feels worth pursuing. And so you pursue all of them, at once, badly, while telling yourself you are being productive.

I have built tools to manage my tools. I have automated my automation. I once spent four hours building a CLI script that saved me approximately forty seconds a week. I did the math. I shipped it anyway. This is not discipline. This is a compulsion wearing discipline’s clothes.

What the week actually looks like

Here is the honest inventory. Family. Eating well, which takes more intention than people think. Lifting six days a week. Cardio on top of that. School, which is genuinely demanding and not something I can half-ass. Homework and studying for a 4.0 I am not willing to drop. Running CyberMinds, a nonprofit I actually care about. An agro tech project I picked up because the problem was too interesting to ignore. A hackathon coming up that needs real preparation. Ryva, which is the main thing, the one that has to work, with GTM work that bleeds into every spare hour. Side projects that probably should not exist but do. This diary. This blog. The brain repo that holds all the writing and needs to be maintained like its own small product.

I almost never have free time. And I do not mean that in the way people say it when they are a little busy. I mean there is genuinely no slot in the week that is not spoken for. The free time I do have I spend on recovery, because if I do not, everything else degrades.

A kid who grew up in a smaller, simpler town would look at this list and ask why. And I do not have a clean answer. The honest one is that I said yes to most of it because I was capable, and capability has a way of filling every container you hand it.

I am nothing, but I must be everything

Karl Marx wrote that once. Not about startups, obviously. But when I first read it, something clicked in a way that most productivity advice never does.

I am nothing right now in the grand scheme of it. No revenue that changes my life. No name that opens doors on its own. No track record that makes investors lean forward. By almost every external metric, I am a sixteen-year-old in a bedroom in Illinois with a lot of ideas and a GitHub account. That is the nothing part. It is real and I do not flinch from it.

But I must be everything. Not because of ego, but because of math. The gap between where I am and where I need to get to is so large that half-measures do not cross it. You do not build something that compounds by doing a good enough job. You build it by being the person who does not stop when a reasonable person would, who ships when tired, who learns the thing they do not know yet instead of hiring around it, who treats every week like it is the week that determines the trajectory. That is what must be everything actually means in practice. It is not a personality trait. It is a requirement.

The tension between those two things, between being nothing and needing to become everything, is where most of the stress lives. But it is also where all of the energy comes from. I have never felt more alive than when I am working on something real that does not yet exist. The nothing is the starting condition. The everything is the direction. And the only way to move is forward.

Intentionality, or why I am not training for the Olympics

Here is something I think about a lot. I train hard. Six days a week, structured, progressive, no days off unless my body forces it. I have gotten strong enough that people ask questions. I have also run enough that cardio stopped being something I dread and became something I use to think. If I had pointed this same obsessive energy at athletics at age twelve, there is a non-trivial chance I could have become something serious in a sport.

I did not. And that was not an accident.

Intentionality is not about doing everything well. It is about knowing which game you are actually playing and making sure every hard thing you do is in service of that game. I lift because a strong body handles stress better, recovers faster, and keeps the brain sharp. I run because it is the only time the scheduler in my head goes quiet. I study because the credential still matters for the doors I want to walk through. I do not do any of these things to be the best at them. I do them because they make me better at the thing I actually chose.

The thing I chose is building. Specifically, building software that solves real problems for real teams, and doing it at a scale that compounds. That is the game. Everything else is either supporting that or it is noise I have not eliminated yet.

This is also why the overwhelm is tolerable. When you know why you are doing something, the weight of it changes. It does not get lighter exactly, but it becomes load-bearing weight rather than dead weight. There is a difference between being crushed by things and carrying things. Most days I am carrying. Some days the line blurs. But the intentionality is what keeps me from dropping everything and starting over every time it gets hard.

The people who burn out, in my observation, are not the ones who work too much. They are the ones who work a lot without knowing why. The hours are the same. The clarity is not.

The specific weight of building things

Software is never done. Every product I build immediately reveals the next thing it needs. Better memory, a better CMS, a CLI for the CMS, documentation for the CLI, a redesign for the documentation. There is no finish line, only the next commit. Most of the time that is fine. Sometimes it is suffocating.

Photography is the opposite of this. I shoot on a Nikon D5000 that is older than most of the startups I admire, and when I press the shutter, that is it. The moment either worked or it did not. There is no pull request, no iteration cycle, no user feedback to address. The image is the image. I can edit it in Lightroom, adjust the exposure, push the shadows, but I cannot change what was actually there when the light hit the sensor. That finality is something I did not know I needed until I started chasing it.

What I have learned to do instead is find things that actually end. A hard run where the only goal is to not stop. A training session where the only question is whether you can grind out one more rep when your body is already done. A frame where a bird breaks from a branch and you have maybe half a second before it disappears into the tree line. Those things have a finish line you can feel in your body, or see in the viewfinder. And somewhere in grinding through them, I started to understand something that building software never quite taught me: that pain is not a signal to stop. It is just information. You can acknowledge it and keep going anyway.

That shift changed how I work too. The stress of building something real, the weeks where it sits on your chest like something physical, became less of an emergency and more of a weather condition. Something to move through rather than escape from. I am not sure I could have learned that without the training, or without photography forcing me to be present in a way that a code editor never demands. The weight room has a kind of honesty that a code editor does not. So does a good lens pointed at something that will not wait for you.

What simpler people have that I don’t

I have a close friend who does not code. When something annoys him, he either ignores it or finds the simplest possible workaround. He does not build a SaaS around it. His life is not worse than mine. In a lot of ways it is better. He finishes his evenings. He is not juggling seventeen browser tabs of documentation at ten PM.

I used to think people like him were just less ambitious. I have slowly come to understand they might just be less addicted. There is a version of ambition that is genuinely motivated by vision, and there is a version that is just compulsive output dressed up in the language of goals. I have been both. I am not always sure which one I am on a given Tuesday.

Photography is probably the one place I let myself be something closer to the first version. I shoot macro and wildlife under @snapuree and nobody is waiting on a deliverable. There is no sprint, no GTM loop, no conversion metric. Just a subject and whatever light is available and the question of whether I saw it clearly enough to catch it. The pictures are small in the way that matters. They do not scale. They do not compound. And maybe that is exactly why I keep coming back to them.

Sometimes I think about a parallel version of me. Born somewhere smaller. A town where the biggest ambition is a good harvest or a trade you pass down to your kids. No pitch decks, no metrics, no positioning strategy. Just a life that fits in your hands, that you can actually hold. I think that version of me might sleep better. And I think about him more than I probably should.

The honest part

Here is the thing though. I do not actually want to trade it. The stress is real, and it does not go away on its own. I deal with it by talking to people I trust, by training until my arms give out, by pressing the shutter on something that will not wait, by doing work that does not let the brain run loose. It helps. I get through it.

But I also know what this version of me is building toward. I know what it takes. And somewhere underneath the exhaustion and the compulsive shipping, I believe it. I think I can actually do it. Build something that matters at a scale most people never get to touch. There is probably a universe where I do not want that. Where a younger version of me never got obsessed, never taught himself to code in a new country in a new language, never redirected something destructive into something that compounds. That version of me is probably fine. Probably happy, even, in a quieter way.

But he would not be sitting in his bedroom at sixteen with a real team that changed their entire documentation workflow because of something he made. He would not know what that feels like. And he probably never stood at the edge of a field at seven in the morning waiting for a bird to land in exactly the right light, patient in a way he could not sustain anywhere else. I do. And it is worth it.

The cost of wanting to be everything is that you can never fully rest, never fully switch off, never let a problem just be someone else’s. But the alternative is wanting less. And I have tried that universe in my head many times. I never stay long.

Written on a Saturday when I was supposed to be doing something else.