There’s an article by Nat Eliason that’s stuck with me (despite the click-baity title) called De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness.

The basic idea is that a lot of the current ethos around “productivity” is based on stripping away the non-essential. An example he uses is a Peloton. Ten or fifteen or twenty years ago, people might’ve scheduled a time to meet a group of people for a bike ride each week. Or, maybe they'd belong to a cycling club.

That takes effort. You’ve got to hold a specific time, get yourself to the starting point, go for the ride, maybe grab a beer after, get yourself home. If you’ve got kids, you’ve gotta do something with them.

At some point, we all got very excited about productivity and decided that the “exercise” part of the cycling club was most important - probably because the results of it were easiest to measure (calories burned, weight lost). So we stripped the non-measurable stuff away - the scenery, socialization, exploration, sunlight, laughing, camaraderie, the beer after.

This started with stationary bikes in gyms, then moved to soul cycle-style classes, then, finally, a Peloton. The atomized Mount Everest. Just you, alone, in your basement, with Alex Touissaint yelling at you for the shortest possible amount of time to get the most “effort” out so that you could get on to something else.

The problem with all this, of course, is that the goal posts shift. You don’t atomize the bike ride so that you can then spend more quality time with friends - you atomize the bike ride so you can spend more time on other things you’ve atomized. It’s like getting really good at email - that doesn’t mean you’ll always have inbox zero - it just means you’ll get more emails.

Here’s where we get back to startups.

You’re probably spending today thinking through how to make more time for your startup this year. It’s the season for that type of thinking.

And I bet your approach is atomizing stuff - hours you can spend alone, cranking away, before the kids get up or work starts. And some of this is definitely important. But there’s a reason Peloton’s stock price looks like this:

Because eventually, riding a Peloton sucks and we don't want to do it anymore.

We don’t want that for your startup. The way to stay motivated through these early days isn’t atomization - it’s de-atomization. Getting more people involved with you. Bouncing your idea off more people.

Startups are about collecting unique dots and then connecting them. Dots, especially early on, require other people’s input and process.

All the useful insights you’ll get that'll drive your company aren't somewhere in your head and all you need is more time to think on them - they’re out there, somewhere. It'll be some combination of talking with customers and watching customers and testing things with customers then bouncing what you learn and how you learned it off other founders who can poke holes and other industry experts who can be skeptical and me.

The insights will also come from you critiquing someone else’s startup and then saying “holy shit - why don’t I follow my own advice?!” because we're great at critiquing but awful at looking in a mirror.

The priority for Tacklebox this year is to make this sort of de-atomized interaction easier for our founders. We’re starting with Circle, which launches to you all next week. We’ve got a number of other things to try, including grouping you into smaller, master-mindy-type groups.

This is all optional for you, obviously. Some people love their Peloton. But, if the key to startups is longevity - trying lots of stuff until you get to the stuff other people haven’t tried yet - then you’ve gotta be happy while you do it or you'll stop.

Pelotons are temporary for 95% of people. Cycling groups are much stickier. So whatever way you can de-atomize your startup, however you can bring it into your life so there are other factors that you enjoy amplifying the work, do it.