Barbells Revisited

Why everything feels extreme but isn’t

Week 5 became an uncomfortable mirror. I’m quick to tell others to “trust the process”, but the moment my own work plateaus, I start to beat myself up. I’m hardly alone. Dennis (founder of Amie) poured himself into software he loved; when the launch metrics sagged, he re-skinned it as a generic productivity SaaS in search of faster growth. How do you learn at your own pace and still build things of Quality? True exploration is slow, deliberate. It requires what Rich Hickey calls “hammock time” – space for the mind to wander, ruminate, and recombine.

The trap of binary thinking

Peter Norvig’s classic Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years reminds us mastery is measured in decades. Yet entrepreneurship keeps chanting winner-takes-all mantras: “30-day bootcamps,” “no-code millionaires,” “Build your MVP with AI!” We fetishize lifelong craft while secretly pining for a month-long hack to success.

Revisiting barbell theory

It therefore follows that tech is increasingly reliant on barbell theory as the stakes seemingly get higher. It is easy to adopt this framework wholeheartedly when AI is the driving force behind much of innovation. The country that gets AGI first dominates the next century, maybe the rest of humanity. Tina He’s recent exploration, The Illusions of Barbell Theory, along with my old piece, Barbells Everywhere, question the validity of this claim. Tina does a great job of illuminating the distinctions between perception and reality of barbell theory, driving home the idea that genuine work demands time... time that, in a world hungry for quick results, is often sacrificed. Many ambitious young people fall into this trap: being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage indeed. With today’s technology and access to information, it takes surprisingly little time to find the edges of known knowledge. From there, the hard work of step-by-step exploration begins, like tiny slime molds branching out on a map of knowledge still shrouded in a fog of war. The messy truth is that most meaningful work occurs in the neglected middle distance between these extremes, probing the edges.

A prime example of dedication to the craft is Robert Caro, who has spent 45+ years writing about two individuals. His research is meticulous: he would travel and interview staffers, their spouses, friends, skim microfilm newspaper archives in small county offices in rural Texas... all for one small quote or headline to drive home a character trait he's trying to make. His approach underscores the value of deep and sustained effort. Meaningful work requires time and dedication, even if it is not immediately apparent.

There are, of course, alternatives

Take Bryce Roberts and Indie.vc. By treating profitability as the starting constraint, not an eventual pivot, Bryce shows that startups can grow on their own. No “go-big-or-bust” barbell, just steady compounding: keep more of the cap table, choose when—or if—to raise again, even share cash dividends along the way. Same upside, less whiplash, even for the investors.

There is also Nadia Asparouhova. In her new book, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, she argues that the supposedly binary shift from the algorithmic loudspeaker of Twitter to private, cozy group chats is a mirage. Ideas now move along a gradient: a voice memo in Signal turns into a Substack post, which becomes a podcast episode that 100k people hear on their commute. Ideas flow through people along a gradient.

Le Guin foresaw this. In The Dispossessed she writes that every living system is a negotiation, not an ultimatum. What looks like an either-or is usually a tension held in balance. Barbell thinking flattens that nuance.

And that brings me back to Week 5. I felt like my gears were really grinding, but that friction was evidence of contact with reality, not failure. The middle is unglamorous, but it’s where the fog of war begins to lift, where surface knowledge hardens into judgment, where Quality gets built brick by brick.

So no, the work isn’t extreme. It only feels that way when we fixate on barbell thinking. Step away from them and the landscape widens: long gradient slopes, surprising plateaus, and, somewhere beyond the next rise, a horizon worth marching toward.