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Temporal Landmarks

Does tomorrow feel bigger than today? That’s momentum.

Cofounderships run on momentum. Lose it, you're dead. Get it right, the impossible feels inevitable.

Most think momentum comes from external success: funding, press, users. Hundreds of founders have told me otherwise. It’s psychological. Internal.

But the grind of building a company can take a toll on your cofoundership. You’re constantly heads down, shipping, and putting out more urgent fires.

Setting aside time for cofounder chats feels not only difficult but like a distraction.

That’s where temporal landmarks come in.

They’re moments that create some sort of reset. A break between "before" and "after."

New Year's, birthdays, quarterlies. You tend to feel a big sense of fresh energy. A clean slate. You’re ready to regroup and refocus and redefine.

But those are pretty arbitrary dates, aren’t they? What if you didn’t have to wait months for that feeling?

What if you could manufacture these breaks?

The Reset Button

When your cofoundership gets stuck, when growth plateaus, when motivation dips, you might try to brute-force your way out.

But sometimes the smartest thing is to create a psychological break.

The reason temporal landmarks work is that they shift your perspective.

Most of the time, you feel like you’re living inside a continuous stream of events. What happened yesterday bleeds into today, which bleeds into tomorrow.

But a landmark moment snaps the continuity.

It forces you to ask, "Where am I? What do I want to do next?"

When to Use It

Turning every day into a temporal landmark is overkill. If every day was Friday, then Friday wouldn’t be Friday.

It also doesn’t work to attach it to your own milestones because they’re too subjective and easily overlooked. New Year’s comes whether you’re ready or not.

Making a big deal about the start of the month is a good place to start.

If that starts to feel dilutive, try attaching it to events, conferences, anniversaries.

The trick is to choose something with inherent significance. That way, you can genuinely infuse it with personal meaning.

This is why you set New Year’s resolutions. There’s nothing special about January 1st.

But it feels like a clean break and that feeling is enough to make you behave differently.

Play around with it. There’s no prescription here. It’s one more tool in your box to deal with the grind of building a company.

Don’t wait for the calendar to dictate your fresh start.

That’s all for now,

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