The First Sign of Friction

It’s a familiar pattern, especially if you build things for a living. You go all in, stack up late nights, notebooks full of plans, code sprints, launches. And then, often, one quiet week throws everything off. A dud launch, an empty Slack channel, no comments after a release. Suddenly all that intensity flips: the idea seems less promising, and the temptation to switch gears rises. Most of us don’t admit it out loud, but after the third—or fifth—restart, the pile of abandoned projects starts to sting more than we expect.

If you’re in tech, especially as an engineer or someone wrangling AI, the need to reduce context switching becomes obvious as this pattern gets sharper. It’s easy to switch context fast. When the feedback is lukewarm, or a launch barely registers, jumping to a new idea feels rational, even productive. But it’s not momentum. It’s just repeated resets.

Here’s the punchline. After a year of this, there’s nothing shipped that lasted long enough to matter. You look back and see a trail of almosts—half-built apps, nearly-launched products, ideas with no real impact. Momentum never had a chance.

Why We Build Momentum With Small Wins—and Why That Matters

Compounding in products and careers is less about finding a magical unlock and more about building confidence, one week at a time. Every tiny ship—a bug fix, a clearer doc, a smoother onboarding—does three things at once. It sharpens your technical knowledge. It cuts down on uncertainty. It helps others trust what you’re building. Even hitting small milestones boosts mood and motivation way more than you’d guess, because those wins add up to higher productivity over time. That’s usually invisible while you’re in the grind, but the effects stack up quietly. Suddenly that thing you thought you’d never finish starts to feel lightweight.

If you’re someone who likes technical metaphors, think of compounding like interest on your savings, or even gradient descent in machine learning. With compound interest, you earn a little extra, which itself starts earning, and suddenly small deposits become a pile. Gradient descent works the same way. You make lots of tiny steps down the loss surface, each one nudging your model closer to its goal.

Try jumping around to new ideas each time you feel stuck and it’s like resetting to the top of the hill before every attempt. Sure, it’s exciting, but you never actually get lower. It’s the cumulative effect of sticking with one direction, making small improvements relentlessly, that moves you forward. It’s less dramatic but far more effective, especially when the alternative is starting over again and again.

Compare that with another friend of mine, the slow builder. They started with a single customer and checked in weekly to stack small wins—shipping little tweaks—then landed five more users over the next few months. When their product did finally catch attention, folks called it an “overnight success.” The reality was just a lot of slow, consistent progress—weeks stacked on top of each other until the number got big enough to notice.

Six months ago, I honestly used to roll my eyes when someone brought up “compound gains.” It sounded like wishful thinking, the kind of advice people offer because big leaps are too rare to promise. But now, looking at how compounding small wins either accumulate—or, more often, don’t—I see what I missed. You don’t actually see momentum in real time. It’s invisible at first. Progress looks flat, frustratingly slow—until, out of nowhere, the compound gains break through and everyone acts like it was obvious from the start.

So let’s say it straight. Success isn’t a leap. It’s a climb.

Facing the Slow Burn Doubts

If you’re reading this and feeling uneasy, I get it. You start to wonder if digging in and focusing means you’ll miss out on some better thing happening somewhere else. What if you go all-in for a month and nothing moves, not even a single new user, and it turns out you’re stuck in a dead end? There’s this low-key paranoia that your energy’s being spent in the wrong place, or that a slow week means you failed—again. I’ve wondered the same, and sometimes it feels safer to hedge with a new idea than to risk sticking it out.

Here’s a way I started to think about it that helped. Every time you switch projects or ideas, you reset the compounding curve you’ve already started. It’s like pulling your money out of an account before the interest hits. Staying the course—especially when it’s boring—lets all those tiny gains stack up instead.

I won’t pretend this shift was easy. I spent years waiting for the “big break.” New job, surprise viral launch, someone finally noticing my work. It never landed how I hoped. Stopping that chase and looking for my next step instead is what changed the pace for me, even when it felt embarrassingly slow.

Honestly, it reminds me of how I keep my sourdough starter alive. If I forget it for a couple weeks, no heroic feeding schedule will bring it back instantly. It’s the little routines—feeding it, letting it bubble, repeating even when nothing dramatic happens—same as keeping a stubborn houseplant green. Dramatic interventions don’t work. It’s shipping a tiny improvement each week that makes progress real. I admit, every so often I still feel the itch to drop everything and go all-in on something that feels shiny and urgent. And sometimes, against my better judgment, I chase that feeling. I haven’t figured out how to ignore it every time.

Let yourself have slow weeks. Progress hides inside frustration more often than not, and consistency turns that friction into signal. Frustration isn’t failure—it’s progress in disguise. Keep going.

The Weekly Compounder’s Loop

Let’s make this practical. Instead of always reaching for the next shiny thing, build momentum with small wins by creating a weekly loop you can actually stick to—a routine that automatically shrinks your scope just enough, keeps the ball rolling, and turns slow progress into compounding returns. The whole point is to block the “almost finished, but not really” cycle, replacing it with a steady cadence. That way, each week you’re a little bit further along, learning a little more, and pulling one more person into what you’re making.

Here’s how it looks in real life. Start Mondays by reviewing last week—what shipped, what didn’t, where you felt friction. On Tuesday, pick the smallest possible improvement, something you can move from idea to reality in a week. Wednesday’s for building. Thursday, test that change. Catch the bugs, smooth out the sharp edges (I once ended up troubleshooting a bug for three straight hours only to discover I’d commented out my own code the night before. Not my proudest moment. But you remember those weeks more than the perfect runs).

Having real-time check-ins or some face-to-face reinforcement makes these structured loops a lot more effective at driving actual follow-through compared to going it solo link. Friday, ship it—no matter how small. Finish up by talking to a real user, asking what made sense and what needs work. Then reset. Do it again next week. That rhythm is how momentum sneaks up on you. #ConsistencyWins

If you’re aiming for long-term progress for engineers, your next “win” could be as tiny as shaving 50ms off an API call, refining first-time onboarding, slipping in a logging hook to catch hiccups, or shipping a walkthrough tutorial. Small, lumpy ships matter. Tighten a prompt, run a micro-survey for actual user words, add a feature flag to test something live. Each week you pick one and just move it over the line. #YourMove

When the Only Way Is Through

Pick one thing and commit. Choose a project, skill, or goal you’ll actually stick with, then set a promise to ship something every week—no matter how small—until you’ve reached five to ten real users, or you hit a clear traction point. Set boundaries to avoid constant pivoting just because this week feels slow or uneventful.

It’s a fork in the road. You can keep resetting, like my friend chasing the next big thing every month, or you can choose compounding—the slow builder whose “overnight” win was years in the making. Those weeks of steady, almost boring progress stack up and turn into momentum. That’s the difference #LongGame.

So, here’s the next move. What are you picking to stick with? Name it, shrink it, and promise yourself one small ship this week. Compounding starts today.