The Pull
That feeling that won't leave you alone
Got a call last month from someone I’d never met. Found me through X. Twenty minutes in, I stopped him mid-sentence.
“You’ve already made your decision. You just want me to validate it, right?”
Silence. Then a laugh. He’d been working on this thing nights and weekends for over a year. He had a family, good job, kept telling himself it was a hobby. But he just couldn’t stop. Every morning he woke up thinking about it. Every meeting at work felt like time stolen from the real thing.
That’s the pull.
You can’t justify it on a spreadsheet. You can’t even explain it to yourself half the time. But it won’t go away. Especially when you try to make it.
Lenny Rachitsky has 1.2 million newsletter subscribers now. Before any of that, he was on a trip to Joshua Tree, on psychedelics, sitting on a rock for three hours watching some kind of Buddha visualization with one phrase stuck on repeat: I have wisdom to share. Three hours on one rock with one phrase.
Nine months into writing weekly, he told a friend he didn’t understand why he kept doing it. That he should be focusing on his startup. His friend asked him something he couldn’t answer: how often do you enjoy something and people actually value it? Maybe follow that thread.
He almost didn’t. Most of us almost never do.
Everyone’s felt some version of this. A problem that nags at you. A market that looks broken in a way only you seem to notice. A skill you keep building even though nobody asked. If you can’t articulate the thing, how can it be real?
So, you wait. The timing isn’t right. You need more experience. After the next promotion. After the next vest. After the kids are older. Your family, your friends, they reinforce it because they love you and stability feels like the loving answer.
But, that thing keeping you up at night? The problem you think is so glaring someone smarter must already be on it? There’s a very good chance nobody is. The gap between what you see and what everyone else sees is not a reason to wait. Act on it. Most of my greatest mistakes in my career have occurred because of this gap.
The cost of ignoring the pull is time. Scrolling past someone else’s launch in three years thinking, I saw that. I had that idea. Nobody is ever haunted by the things they tried.
The pull doesn’t show up often. FOMO shows up daily. Impulse shows up daily. The pull lingers for months, years sometimes, and you can’t argue your way out of it no matter how hard you try.
If you’re feeling it right now, you already know what it’s about. Share it openly, invest in it, build something based on it. Today.