Goblin mode

The awkward art of doing without thinking

If you suffer through my writing, you are an overthinker.

Which means you, like me, often get stuck in your own head. Asking seemingly reasonable questions like:

• Is this the right path long-term? How will this play out in 5 years?

• Will this scale? Will it even work?

• How do we find the best approach to X?

We can waste hours and whiteboards trying to answer these questions and find clarity in the mess of the early stage. But these questions are “tarpit” questions - they are not only unanswerable, but the more we try to answer them, the more stuck we get.

I’ve seen founders “test” two different product ideas to figure out which one customers wanted more. They did 300+ demos, and the more information they got, the more data they had to make compelling arguments for *either* option. AKA: The harder the decision became. Tarpit.

On the other hand, founders that I’ve seen get unstuck and make massive progress go into an execution state I can best describe as “goblin mode.” It’s like the human equivalent of the zoomies:

When operating in Goblin Mode, we avoid the existential, future-oriented, strategic questions at all cost. We simply accept that we’re setting our future selves up for some pain:

We have no clue how it will scale, how we’ll deliver it, or even what the plan is for next month. These considerations stop mattering. We turn off our brains in order to maniacally execute on the ONE thing that matters right now. Examples:

• Talking to as many potential customers as possible in the next 24 hours to try to convert one or two.

• Getting on a plane right now to onboard customers 1:1 to our hacky v1, see how they use it, in a way that definitely defies any reasonable sense of unit economics.

• Getting a deal done that requires us to work insane hours to get the product ready in time for next week’s onboarding call.

• Getting someone crazily influential to angel invest by doing weird, inadvisable things to get their attention.

How do you get into Goblin Mode? You find the ONE thing that’s your bottleneck right now, and ask, “How would I solve this in one day? One hour?” And you attack it with all your effort. Inbox, other priorities, second thoughts, hell even decency be damned.

How do you know you’re not in Goblin Mode? You’re thinking about the future, trying to figure out stuff two steps out. You’re following the process, the system. Often you’re delegating that thing that’s really important that you don’t want to do, hoping that it will work out - when you know it almost certainly won’t. Really, you’re just putting off action.

When should you go into Goblin Mode? When you’re feeling stuck or slow-moving. Which, if you’re a recovering overthinker like me, is more frequent than you’d like to admit.

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Goblin Mode is myopic, unscalable, unsustainable, uncomfortable, and unreasonable. Spending some time in Goblin Mode helps us move faster in steady state. Spending too much time in Goblin Mode is… probably inadvisable.

Polite society looks down on Goblin Mode, for good reason. They imagine a world where they can build great new things that work without entering Goblin Mode. Hell, *I* wish I lived in a world where Goblin Mode wasn’t necessary. The only problem is I don’t think that’s our world.

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PS:

• Goblin Mode is not to be confused with its close cousin, Gobblin’ Mode, AKA why I black out at all-you-can-eat buffets

• Starting to bring in my next batch of founders for 0-1 work - more info & link to my calendly HERE

• Waffle is now in goblin mode for getting you SOC 2 compliant AWS infrastructure in 2 clicks!