The hammer & crowbar of indie hacking

We're pros to others but amateurs to ourselves

This is me, with the hammer.
The wall is indie hacking.

The other guy with the crowbar are all the awesome, successful indie folks I see on my Twitter feed, wondering, being inspired by how tf they did it…

Does this resonate with you?

Because it hit hard for me.

Some days, I feel like I’m just bashing not just my hammer but my head against an immovable wall. Nothing works. Nothing is moving. You’re drenched in sweat and grime from all the literal hacking. You feel so exhausted you don’t even know what to do.

Then someone comes along elsewhere on Twitter and does the Mindas touch to everything. Everything he ships is gold, and brings gold. No sweat. No hammer. He’s the crowbar guy, waltzing in and bam, it’s done.

I have no bitterness with these folks. I’m more amazed and inspired, but it also contrasts hard with mine. If there’s any frustration, it’s more on myself.

Yet when I tweeted this metaphor out, the discussions I had were surprising.

Some folks whom I thought were the crowbar guy actually thought of themselves as a hammer guy. Like Rodrigo here:

It’s so interesting how we’re all hammer guys to ourselves but crowbar guy to others. And there’s always someone who will see you as the crowbar guy, even though you never saw that in yourself.

That’s got to make you think.

Perhaps we’re not that bad after all.

We’re both hammer guy and crowbar guy all at once. And which one you are depends on the lens you wear:

Wear the foresight lens looking ahead at where you want to be, the goals you have yet fulfilled, and you’re the hammer guy.
Wear the hindsight lens peering back at where you used to be, the walls you tore down along the way, and you’re the crowbar guy.

And then there’s this lovely stonecutter’s reed:

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. - Jacob Riis

The crowbar guy broke down the wall on the hundred and first blow because of all the one hundred hammer blows before that.

We can be both hammer guy and crowbar guy. The right tool at the right time, right place, will be the key unlock.

Keep going, hammer or crowbar.

Something will work. It has to.

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