In 1829, one of the most talented young writers in France owed his publisher a novel.

He had signed the contract in 1828. Two volumes, due in six months. He had taken the advance. He had made the promises.

He had not written a word.

Victor Hugo had a very good reason, as he always did. A play needed finishing. A poem was calling. A revolution broke out in Paris. At one point he told his publisher he had lost his notes, which is hard to do when you have not taken any.

The publisher gave him one extension. Then another. Then he lost patience and issued an ultimatum: finish by February 1831, or pay 1,000 francs for every week you are late.

So Hugo did something that sounds absurd and works perfectly.

He bought a bottle of ink. He bought a huge grey knitted shawl that covered him from his neck to his feet. And he locked every piece of his formal clothing in a wardrobe and gave away the key.

Then he sat down and entered the novel, in his words, like a prison.

He could not go out. There was nothing to wear. The only way to leave the room was to finish.

He wrote through the autumn and the winter. In mid January 1831, weeks ahead of the deadline, he put down the last line. As the story goes, the ink ran out on the final word.

The book was Notre-Dame de Paris. You know it as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

Here is what I love about this story.

Hugo did not lack time. He did not lack talent. He did not lack a good idea or a reason to do it. Nobody on earth was better equipped.

What he lacked was a door he could not walk back through.

You have probably run this exact experiment on yourself, and I am not being polite when I say that. The proposal. The launch. The hard conversation. The thing you keep describing as “almost ready.” Every week there is a perfectly respectable reason it is not today.

And the reason always sounds like logistics. It never sounds like what it actually is.

This edition is late. Later than I would like to admit. I had the ideas and I had the time, and I had a very respectable list of reasons.

I did not lock my clothes in a wardrobe. I should have.

So this week is about the thing underneath all of it: why smart, capable people stall, and what the ones who finish do differently.

Let’s get into it.

In 1995, a man named McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight and robbed them. No mask. No hat. No disguise of any kind.

He was arrested that same night, less than an hour after the surveillance footage aired on the 11 o’clock news.

When detectives showed him the tape, he stared at it in disbelief.

“But I wore the juice,” he said.

Lemon juice. He had rubbed it on his face. The idea came from his accomplice, who had noticed that lemon juice works as invisible ink on paper, and reasoned that it would make your face invisible to a camera.

Here is the part that makes this story worth telling.

Wheeler was not reckless. He was skeptical. He did what a careful person does before betting everything on a plan. He ran a test.

He put the juice on his face and took a Polaroid selfie. The photo came out with no face in it.

Plan confirmed.

The most likely explanation is a bad camera or bad film. Nobody can say for sure. But Wheeler had run an experiment, received a clear answer, and acted on it. The answer was wrong, and nothing inside his head could tell him so.

Then a psychologist read about him.

David Dunning, a professor at Cornell, saw the news story and asked a question that is both funny and unsettling. If Wheeler was this bad at robbing banks, maybe he was too bad at it to know he was bad at it.

With his graduate student Justin Kruger, he put the idea to the test. They gave people exercises in logic, grammar and humour, then asked them to rank themselves against everyone else.

The people who scored in the bottom quarter averaged the 12th percentile. They estimated they were at the 62nd.

The finding that matters most came next. When the researchers trained those same people and their skill improved, their ability to see their own limits improved with it.

The problem was never character. It was a missing instrument. The skill you need to do the thing is the same skill you need to judge how well you are doing it.

What this means for you.

You are not Wheeler. You would never rob a bank with citrus on your face.

But you have a Polaroid. Everyone does. The survey of ten friends who loved the idea. The one customer who said “I would totally pay for that.” The dashboard that moved in the right direction. The mentor who nodded.

Every one of those is a test that came back positive. The question is whether it was capable of coming back negative.

Before you bet on a plan, ask yourself what your Polaroid is. Then find a test that can fail.

Wheeler’s problem was never confidence. It was a test that could only ever tell him yes.

Sources: Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (1999), “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Most founders validate their idea the same way. They describe it to a friend, the friend says “that’s great, I’d totally use that,” and they carry on feeling confident.

Rob Fitzpatrick’s point is that you learned nothing. His standard is that your questions should be so good that even your own mother cannot lie to you.

He boils it down to three rules:

He also names three kinds of bad data that feel like progress: compliments, fluff, and ideas. A compliment is “love it.” Fluff is “I would definitely pay for that.” An idea is “you should add this feature.” All three feel like encouragement, and none of them cost the person saying them anything.

What to do with it this week: Take the question you are about to ask a customer, “would you use this?”, and delete it. Replace it with three:

Then ask for something real. A fifteen minute follow up. An introduction to their boss. A deposit. If they will not give up something they value, you have a compliment, not a customer.

Fitzpatrick says a startup he worked at burned roughly ten million dollars treating polite enthusiasm as demand. You can run the cheaper version of that lesson this week.

Most founders decide what a result means after they see it. That is how every outcome ends up being read as “promising.”

The fix comes from Annie Duke, the former professional poker player turned decision scientist, in her book Quit. She calls it kill criteria: conditions you write down before you begin, that tell you when to walk away.

Her best example is Everest. Climbers agree on a turnaround time before they leave camp, usually 1 p.m. If you are not at the summit by then, you turn around. It does not matter how close you are or how good you feel. They decide in advance because, once you are up there, summit fever makes the choice for you.

Duke’s rule is that every kill criterion needs two parts: a state and a date.

The template:

Examples:

How you can run this:

Write it before you start, while you are calm. Put it somewhere you cannot quietly rewrite it. Tell one person who will hold you to it. Duke notes that you can still set criteria after you are already in, so if you are deep in something right now, you have not missed your chance.

You are not setting a trap for yourself. You are making the decision with a clear head, so you do not have to make it later with a sunk cost in your pocket.

Everyone selling you performance is selling you an addition. A new stack. A new routine. A cold plunge, a protocol, a 5am alarm.

Nobody sells you the subtraction, because you can’t put it in a box.

Look at an ordinary day. The phone first thing. An hour of reels that you did not plan. Breakfast from a wrapper. Eight hours in a chair and barely a walk. A bet on the game that night. A little pouch of nicotine to get through the afternoon.

None of it feels like a decision. That’s the trick. It’s just the default.

And the default is where the damage happens quietly. In 2004, 28% of Americans read for pleasure on a typical day. By 2023, it was 16%. Nobody voted for that. It drifted.

Here is the contrarian part. The top 1% is not a room full of geniuses. It is a room of people who refused a handful of things the rest of the crowd slid into.

No betting. A body that moves, 8,000 steps a day at least. Food that was once alive. Scrolling that stops before the hour. No pouch or pill to fake the energy you didn’t sleep for.

You cannot out-hustle a day that is leaking. Plug it first, then build.

Pick one thing from that list. Tomorrow, just stop. Don’t add anything.

In 1806, a 23 year old from Boston loaded 130 tons of frozen pond water onto a ship and sailed it to the Caribbean.

The newspaper ran the story as a joke. It hoped he would not be making “a slippery speculation.”

His name was Frederic Tudor, and he had a problem nobody in the Caribbean knew they had. The people of Martinique had no idea what to do with ice. He lost money.

So he did something odd. He told his agent to give it away to bartenders.

Ice became cold drinks. Cold drinks became a habit. A habit became a market.

It was still a terrible business. Tudor was broke. The War of 1812 wrecked his shipping. He was thrown into debtors’ prison, and not just once. He kept going back to the ice.

He also found a free input that made the whole idea work. Sawmills treated sawdust as waste, and sawdust turned out to be the best insulation for a block of ice on a long voyage. They were glad to give it to him.

Then in 1833, 27 years after the first joke, he tried the unthinkable. A ship called the Tuscany left Boston with 180 tons of ice and sailed 16,000 miles to Calcutta, across the equator, for four months.

About 100 tons arrived.

India wanted more. By 1846, his company was shipping 65,000 tons a year.

The lesson: Tudor did not sell ice. He sold a habit that did not exist yet, and he paid for it by giving the product away until people could not live without it.

Most founders wait for demand to appear. He waited 27 years and built it himself.

A little action is worth more than a lot of planning.

One last thing.

FASTer stays ad-free. That is settled. So it grows exactly one way: someone reads it, thinks of a specific person, and sends it on.

If something here landed, forward it. To the friend who quit the thing they loved because it wasn't making money. To the founder stuck in a fight they're winning and losing at the same time.

That is the whole growth strategy. It has always been you.

If you're a founder who's stuck on the commercial side, that's the work I do: www.chinookstrategy.com

Better Outcomes to all…

-Faizan…