I once spent the better part of a year building something almost nobody wanted. I'd like to tell you it was a noble failure. It was just a failure, and the most useful thing I own now is a clear memory of exactly how it happened.
It started well, which is the trap. The mission was clean: help our customers grow, give them insight that actually moved their numbers, make money by making them money. You could have put it on a wall. Then, somewhere around week three, a better-sounding idea wandered into the room.
“Why act on the insight we already have, when we could spend six months building an AI-powered predictive analytics platform nobody has asked for, that sounds extraordinary in a board meeting, and that roughly four people on earth will ever fully understand?
Reader, we built the platform.
We told ourselves it was strategic. We said "future-proofing" and "category-defining" with straight faces. What we were actually doing was running away from a small, boring, solvable problem towards a large, impressive, imaginary one. We chased a payoff that lived entirely in the future tense. We did not make much money. We spent a great deal. By the end it felt like sprinting on a treadmill that was on fire, after someone had already cut the power.
The thing nobody warns you about shiny object syndrome is that it never feels shiny from the inside. It feels responsible. Visionary, even. Nobody stands up in the meeting and proposes wasting two quarters on something speculative. They say "let's think bigger," and the room nods, because thinking bigger is supposed to be the entire job. The pull towards the impressive thing is so strong precisely because it wears the costume of ambition.
And the bill isn't just the money you burn. It's everything the thing then demands forever after. A feature built for a problem nobody had still needs maintaining, explaining, apologising for. It squats on the roadmap like a monument to a decision you'd rather forget, taxing every quarter that follows.
I no longer trust my own enthusiasm, which has turned out to be a genuine upgrade. Before anything gets built, it has to survive three questions, and most exciting ideas quietly die on the first one.
None of this makes you look visionary in the meeting. It makes you boringly, reliably, profitably useful, which is a much better thing to be and a much rarer one.
The treadmill is still there, in every business, humming away and faintly smoking. Someone has helpfully labelled it "the exciting thing." The discipline was never about avoiding excitement. It's about refusing to step on until something other than your own ego is telling you to.
