Passion is a terrible co-founder
Your feelings won't save you. Your system will. A short guide to getting your own momentum when motivation runs out.
I was talking to a friend the other night. Let’s call him Leo.
Leo is one of those lethally sharp data guys who sees the world in clean, logical systems. He found a problem he knew inside and out, built an elegant tool to solve it, and put up a landing page.
And then… nothing.
Not a single sign-up. Not an angry email. Not even spam. Just a profound, deafening silence.
When we spoke, he was vibrating with frustration.
"I don't get it," he said. "When I ship code, I get an error log. I get data. I know if it works. Here? I get silence. How am I supposed to know if I’m even moving? I feel like I'm completely lost."
This is the moment. The exact place where most good ideas die.
Not with a bang, but with a quiet, draining apathy.
Leo’s problem wasn’t his product. It was the silence. His entire career was built on the clean, satisfying loop of immediate feedback.
And in the fuzzy, unpredictable world of building something from nothing, his instruments were gone. He was flying blind, and the silence felt like definitive, damning proof of failure.
This is the crisis of the competent. The smarter you are, the more you’re addicted to clear feedback, the more unnerving the silence becomes.
And it’s a crisis fueled by the single most dangerous piece of advice in the startup gospel: the myth of passion.
We’re told that passion is a bottomless well of motivation. That if you just care enough, you can grind through anything.
This is a lie.
Passion is an emotion. A feeling. Passion is the co-founder who's first to pop the champagne for a small win, but first to head home when the team has to stay until 2 AM to fix a critical bug.
Stop trying to win a war against your feelings. You’ll lose.
The goal is to make your feelings irrelevant.
You don't need more passion. You need a system. A machine you build yourself that generates its own momentum, independent of applause.
Here is a way to construct that system.
First, set the clock.
The most common way good projects die is a mismatch between the map and the territory.
You think it will take two months. It takes ten. That gap doesn't just create disappointment, it creates a story you tell yourself: I'm failing.
The first move is to accept a hard truth. Any new venture has a time-to-feedback that is multiples longer than you think is reasonable. You have to consciously override your brain’s desire for instant gratification. This is an act of will.
Before you start, sign a simple mental contract with yourself:
This will be hard.
The feedback I want will not come quickly.
My only job is to run the process.
🔳 Action: Find your timeline.
Before you start, find three people who are two years ahead of you on a similar path. Ask them one question: "How long did it really take before you felt like this was working?"
Not the press-release answer. The real one. Their answers, likely full of painful and hilarious detours, are your new reality. Calibrate to that.
Second, build your own casino.
When the world won't give you a feedback loop, you build your own. This means rewarding the process, not the outcome.
I know, it feels like a silly mind game.
That's because it is.
You're trying to outsmart your own brain, a powerful opponent, with a known weakness for shiny things and expensive cheese. You're rigging the game. You're creating dopamine hits for the inputs you can control, not the outputs you can't.
Let's say you're building a new product.
Finish the customer interviews? That's dinner at the new steakhouse.
Ship the beta version? That's the ridiculously overpriced gadget you've been eyeing.
Onboard the first ten users? You’re buying that bottle of nice whiskey you've been saving for "a special occasion." This is the special occasion.
🔳 Action: Reward the inputs.
Break your project into concrete, controllable steps. Attach a specific, tangible reward to the completion of each one.
You're hijacking your own reward system to serve your goals. You're creating a positive feedback loop that runs on your terms.
Third, find your control group.
Working in a vacuum is poison.
You lose perspective. Without external data, your own anxieties become the loudest voice in the room. You have to get better data.
This requires two kinds of data.
First, look backward. Go find the early work of people you admire. Their first clumsy blog posts, their first pixelated videos, their first clunky products. You'll quickly see that the expert of today was the beginner of yesterday. This is proof that the path is possible.
Second, look sideways. Find a small, private group of peers at your exact same stage. The only agenda is to honestly share input/output data.
No vanity metrics. No ego. Just the raw numbers.
"I published 4 posts this month and got 15 new subscribers."
"I sent 50 cold emails and got 2 meetings."
"My last video got 300 views and one comment calling me an idiot."
This is your sanity check.
When you realize that other brilliant people are seeing the same "disappointing" numbers, the anxiety turns into analysis. You stop seeing your project as a singular failure and start seeing it for what it is: a data-gathering operation.
🔳 Action: Create a small peer group.
A monthly call or a private chat. The rule is absolute: Everyone shares one win and one f-up.
This data is the antidote to the lonely, distorting feeling of going it alone.
For people like Leo, who live in a world of logic, waiting to feel motivated is a trap.
The desire to do the work doesn't show up before the work gets done. It's generated by the work.
Motivation isn't the cause, it's the effect.
I actually have to remind myself of this constantly: The person I am after I do the work is always more motivated than the person I was before.
So stop waiting for the feeling.
Run the system. The feeling will follow.
Hi!
I'm Yuehan. After a decade spent building businesses in both the West and China, I'm sharing my most valuable, road-tested lessons right here on Substack.
Since I'm starting from scratch on this side of the world, your support means a great deal. If this piece resonated, a restack or a simple ❤️ is massively appreciated.
