POST 21: Needing Space — and Why I Had to Write a Pack About It 

Listen, I don’t know what I expected from a Martin Short documentary at midnight but it wasn’t this.

Martin Short said something that I haven’t been able to shake. He said that 97% of the time, it’s failure. Just… failure. And he said it so matter-of-factly, like a man who made peace with a math problem a long time ago.

And I thought — this man has been beloved for decades. This man made Innerspace, which I watched as a kid in Russia and thought was the most brilliant thing I’d ever seen. And he filed it under failure.

Which made me wonder how many things I’ve filed under failure that are actually living rent-free in someone else’s heart right now without my knowledge.

Then, almost like the universe wanted to make the lesson personal, I saw an ad. A mood and emotion tracking app. Cute, polished, clearly funded. And my first thought was: fuck. Someone launched my app. And I’m a loser because I’ve been sitting on mine doing nothing while someone else turned my idea into a gold mine.

I went to the dark room. Headphones on. Mindless movie. Boiling.

Because it wasn’t really about the app. It was about a voice I’ve known since childhood — one that doesn’t belong to me but moved in anyway and never paid rent. Most of us have one. It was installed early, usually by someone who had their own version of it living in them. A parent, a teacher, a moment that calcified into a belief. Mine said I’d never amount to anything. And the insidious thing about that voice is it doesn’t argue. It just waits for evidence. And when something like a polished competitor ad shows up at 8pm on a Tuesday, it goes: See? I told you.

I slept on it.

And when I woke up, something quieter came through. Not motivation, not a pep talk. Just a rational whisper that said: there are different flavors. People like red. People like black. Neither is wrong. Neither cancels the other out. There are a hundred apps that are essentially the same thing in different colors and people love them all for different reasons.

And my app isn’t even the same app, as it turns out. But that’s almost beside the point.

The point is — I almost quit something I haven’t even fully built yet because someone else built something adjacent to it. I almost let someone else’s launch be the verdict on my idea. I almost confused their timeline with my failure.

Martin Short’s “flops” are someone’s favorite movies. Your forgotten compliment in a parking lot three years ago might be the reason someone kept going that day. The thing you quietly abandoned might be the exact thing someone needed.

You are not the right person to be keeping score on your own impact. You don’t have enough information. Nobody does.

The 97% isn’t failure. It’s just the part that hasn’t found its people yet.

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