I'm Guilty of DKE (Day 65)

Image from Authentic Medicine

Wikipedia: A graph of how confidence to speak on a subject develops depending on experience and knowledge. According to the Dunning–Kruger Effect, people tend to overestimate their cognitive ability until/unless their competence increases to the point where they become aware of their shortcomings.

DKE is a graph of competency vs confidence. Developing indie projects often follows a very similar curve and stages.

In reminiscence of many of my personal project journeys: I always started at "Mount Stupid", thinking I got a great idea, let's make a killer product! And when I started to work on the implementation, it strikes me how difficult certain parts are! Some projects are challenging for a reason! Sometimes it's not necessary on the implementation part, it could be on marketing, or on communicating to the end-users, etc. After some hard work and unsuccessful attempts, when I reach the "valley of despair", that is when usually a project gets dropped.

"The slope of enlightenment"--progressing from the "valley of despair" towards the "plateau of sustainability" is so hard because at "the valley of despair", all hope seems lost, and doubt creeps in, I'd start to question if the project is feasible at all, or if I'm capable of pulling it off after all. Sometimes giving up could be the right thing to do.

Grinding through the "slope of enlightenment" could be the hardest thing to do, and often times we should just pivot and restart. But if we have the conviction that the idea is valid, we should definitely see it through.