From a Poetry Society to Unicorns: The Less-Traveled Road Isn’t Laziness

Hah, I can’t help but laugh. It just hit me: the first time I ever used Markdown was back when I was building a poetry society. And that’s also when I first learned about Git. Looking back now, if you put all the founding members of that poetry society together, you’d almost have two unicorns.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

Nobody thought it was a big deal back then. We just wanted to write poetry, revise the society’s charter and all kinds of documents, and keep our text in one place instead of ending up with “final version 2,” “final version 3” after every edit. That’s how Markdown came in, and that’s how Git came in.

Looking back now, it feels magical. At first it was just a poetry society, a group of people writing things, changing things, and publishing things together. And it turned out those tiny tools later became a kind of training: how to collaborate, how to keep versions, how to turn an idea into something other people could see.

Even funnier, years later, when you look at who was in that group, you’d almost count out two unicorns.

I don’t actually know why my mind raced and the poetry society came into being. But compared to a flash of inspiration, what matters more is day-in, day-out persistence. Just a few days ago, ycao reminded me of something. He said, kw hears a few fragments, fills in all the intermediate steps himself, and jumps straight to a conclusion. He said this is one of my habits.

My first reaction was: OK, you’ve got me. It’s true. I realized I really do this often.

ycao went on to say, think a little bit. Don’t overthink like him, but I also can’t not think at all, can’t jump to a conclusion the moment I hear something. That would be too reckless.

That sentence actually hit a very deep mental model of mine. What was my most common mental model in the beginning? I wanted to be lazy. I wanted to seek out the quickest, easiest-thinking shortcut. I wanted to find an opening nobody else had seen and slip through it.

But the problem is, a lot of the time I didn’t save any effort. Often I didn’t actually save effort, and in the end it was wasted work.

Yet, turn it around, and part of this is genuinely useful. For example, I’ve said before: take the road fewer people travel. Taking a less-traveled road doesn’t necessarily mean being lazy or taking shortcuts; it means that road might have a better cost-performance ratio.

The key is, while being more cost-effective, we also need to work even harder. And it’s not just me working hard alone; it’s me leading a team, persistently getting one very big thing done well.

Once a team starts doing something, it’s no longer a solo fight. A single person can be lazy easily, but a team can’t. Only this way can we bring about returns of ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times, ten thousand times, even a hundred million times. What we ultimately pursue shouldn’t be a mediocre outcome that merely matches everyone else.

So founders aren’t looking for a lazy path. Absolutely not.

The founder’s road is full of hardship and pain. It’s definitely more painful than working for someone else, 100% more painful than a job. If a person only wants an easy life, then starting a company is the worst choice.

Then why do founders still found?

Because we’re not content to be the rower paddling a pleasure boat on a calm lake. We don’t want to just grow lotus flowers on a flat, still lake. We want to go out to the sea, sailors racing across the surging ocean.

We don’t want to be people skating and playing on an ice rink. We want to be alpine skiers, coming down through avalanches off a cliff, dropping a hundred meters from a jump ramp, spinning 270 degrees, and landing gracefully.

This isn’t because we like pain. No.

What we pursue is a 1,000-fold result, not being blinded by a brief shortcut. We’re not lazy. We’re taking a different path, and after taking a different path, we work twice as hard as everyone else.

Those two things have to be kept separate.

Taking a different path isn’t doing less work. Taking a different path is finding a more cost-effective position. Working doubly hard isn’t blind suffering. Working doubly hard is, in that more cost-effective position, taking on all the suffering others won’t bear, the execution others won’t do, and the uncertainty others won’t face.

Maybe this is what’s truly addictive about founding a company. It’s not a more comfortable life option. What it gives is a sense of accomplishment, joy, the happiness of changing the world, and after reaching the peak, that incomparable pride and sense of glory.

These struggles and this striving are incomparable to working a job.

So now when I look back at the poetry society, Markdown, and Git, I don’t see it as a purely nostalgic story. It’s more like a very early omen: a lot of things start tiny, tiny enough to just get the poetry written, tiny enough to just not lose versions. But small tools change people’s actions, actions change how people collaborate, and how they collaborate ends up changing what a group of people can accomplish.

If two unicorns really do grow out of that group, I won’t think it’s just luck.

It’s more like a set of small choices made years ago, a set of crude tools, and a group of people who didn’t know what they’d become, slowly rolling into today’s result.

What I need to remember now is this: the less-traveled road isn’t reserved for lazy people. It’s for people willing to first see the leverage, and then throw themselves onto it.