I’ve started doing something every time I kill an idea.
I write the autopsy.
Not because every project needs to become some profound lesson. Mostly because I realized how easy it is to walk away from something, call it a failure, and learn almost nothing from it.
You spend three weeks building something. It doesn’t work. You get annoyed. You close the tabs. Two months later, you’re building something completely different with half the same mistakes baked into it.
That’s expensive.
So now when I decide something isn’t worth continuing, I give everything to AI: the original idea, what I built, what I thought would happen, what actually happened, where I got stuck, why I’m killing it.
Then I have it write me a postmortem.
Not “why did this fail?” That question is too emotional and too simple, and it tends to produce either a pep talk or a confession. Neither one is useful to me a month later.
What I actually want to know:
What did I believe that turned out to be wrong?
What actually worked?
Where did the project become unnecessarily complicated?
What did I learn that transfers to the next thing?
Was the idea bad, or was my execution bad?
If I started again today, what would I do differently?
That last one usually gets me, because sometimes the postmortem tells me the idea wasn’t actually bad. I just built the wrong version of it.
THE PLAY
Next time you abandon something, don’t just delete the folder.
Give AI everything you have on the project and use this:
I’ve decided to stop working on this project. Treat this as a postmortem, not encouragement to continue.
Analyze what I originally intended to build versus what I actually built. Identify what worked, what failed, assumptions that proved wrong, unnecessary complexity, mistakes in my decision-making, and anything valuable that should transfer to future projects.
Separate problems with the underlying idea from problems with execution.
Then tell me what I should do differently the next time I build something similar.
Be critical. I’m trying to extract the lesson, not protect the idea.
Save it in the same place every time. One file, not a folder of them. Then read it before you start the next build, not after you’ve already committed to it.
Now you’ve turned a dead project into infrastructure for the next one.
And that’s the part I’ve started appreciating.
Not everything you build needs to work.
But it should probably leave you better at building.
- Fresh
OWNWARD
Game worth giving.