There’s a point in every serious effort where you could know. Not guess. Not hope. Know whether the thing you’re doing is working. And you don’t check because you don’t want to confirm what you already suspect: that you’re off. That this won’t hold. That it’s not as good as it needs to be. That you don’t have it yet.
So you stall. You polish around the edges. You talk in maybes. You do what looks like work. But underneath, you’ve already left the core. You’ve already started avoiding what matters.
This is how people go months, years, tinkering without testing. Moving without impact. Repeating patterns that should’ve been broken by a single hard look at the truth.
Principle
Avoided proof is a form of self-sabotage.
If you delay looking at what will give you a verdict, you are choosing comfort over clarity. That choice compounds. The longer you avoid it, the less confidence you’ll have in anything. You stop trusting your own sense of direction.
And then you stall because you no longer know which way is forward.
Application
Build a rule: No meaningful action without a mirror.
That means every major move must have a corresponding proof checkpoint:
- What data would falsify this?
- What signal would confirm it’s directionally correct?
- Who would I ask to tear it apart?
Don’t wait until it’s “done.” Put it up against the wall now. If you’re scared, even better.
Limit / Cost
This makes you fragile. For a while. Because when you see the truth often, it will keep showing you how far off you still are. You need to learn to see without flinching. That’s the cost. Clarity hurts. But building without it? That’s suicide at scale.