#231: False Summits

Lightly edited from the audio for readability: filler words and false starts removed.

00:00 Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a show about independent iOS app development. I'm David Smith. And this week I'm going to talk about a bit more of a feelings topic. Sometimes these topics are a bit more in the feelings. Sometimes they're a bit more deep in the weeds, technically. This one's very much in the feels.

00:15 And it just relates to a feeling I've been having in kind of the reality of it being the end of a development cycle, the end of a summer, a summer that felt like it was honestly just never going to end, which is essentially what I'm going to be talking about.

00:29 But just to start and kind of lay the groundwork for my discussion, I was going to start with something that you'll probably notice is a bit of a theme with the show, with a hiking anecdote, or in this case, a particular mountain that I like hiking on.

00:42 And one of the things about this mountain... So if you are a video listener to the show, welcome. It's great. Nice to see you. You will notice that the background behind me is slightly different to what it has been in the previous episodes. And that's because the view behind me is the view from a mountain called Loughrigg in the UK Lake District.

01:03 It is one of my favorite views. It's a fabulous mountain. And I shifted my whole office around so that you could see it. Because usually it's not behind me, it's in front of me because I love seeing this view so much. So I want to look up from my computer and see it on a regular basis.

01:16 And one of the reasons I love this view so much is because it's a place that I've had some really wonderful memories, a place that I've gone on some really awesome hikes. And the reason this view in particular...in addition, just it's a lovely view, especially looking down south and west towards Coniston and Windermere, it's amazing, or the Langdales off to the far west. It's a great view, don't get me wrong. But it's also a place that I've taken several people as their first hike in the Lake District. It's a place that is very near and dear to my heart.

01:49 And I love taking people who haven't been to the Lake District to the Lake District for the first time. And when I do, I tend to take them for a hike up Loughrigg because it is this perfect kind of balance between difficulty and challenge, and the reward at the end with this gorgeous view that you get is wonderful. It's close to this town of Grasmere, so this would be...go to a coffee shop before or after, get a good lunch. It's perfect, and it's the thing that I found after years and years of going to the Lake District is the best.

02:16 But the reason I bring it up in this context, not just rambling about a place I love, is because it's a thing where as you go up it, just the shape of Loughrigg, the shape of this mountain is such that you are constantly encountering false summits.

02:35 And so a false summit, if you aren't into hiking, is essentially a phenomenon where because of the perspective you have going up and the shape of the mountain, there will be points ahead of you, along the path you're taking, where it looks like you're about to get to the top, where you're about to reach the actual summit of this mountain, and it looks like that, and there's nothing visually that you could tell that would mean that there was something higher behind it. But in fact, you get to this, what looks like the summit, and as soon as you crest that little rise on the mountainside, you immediately see another one.

03:13 And Loughrigg is kind of famous for having like four of these. Just the nature of the shape of it is such that you keep feeling like you're getting to the top of the mountain, you're about to be rewarded with a view, you're about to get there, and you get there only to discover that there's more work to be done, that there's more that you need to do. There's more climbing that you have to do.

03:36 And that's in some ways one of the things I like about taking people up this mountain, particularly for people who haven't done a lot of hiking. If it's the first mountain they've climbed, they can have this experience because it's kind of intrinsic to both hiking and, the reality is, a bit life.

03:50 And that's the feeling that I've been having a lot recently. So this summer in particular just felt kind of a never-ending series of false summits. We kept having to do things. It's now November, and I think on November 1 or 2, I shipped my final sort of summer release, which November is not summer by any stretch of the imagination, but that's how long it took this year. Because things kept happening. We had the announcements in June of what was going to happen with iOS 27. We did all those updates in September, and then hey, here's the Duo. Exciting, fun, interesting. I've enjoyed developing for the Duo. And we spent an hour last week talking about how Rafa and I did that work, and I'm glad we did it, but my goodness, it just means that we keep having to go. And we launched Check the Weather about a week and a half ago now, which was this brand new app that I've launched. And launching a new app is a place where it just feels even more of this feeling of the sense of false summit because you spend all this time working towards this goal that you're gonna get your release, you're gonna put it out into the world, and then you do it. And then you discover that you've only just reached the starting line. It is not that you have finished the race, you've not come to the end, you've reached the end of something, but realistically, what has happened is you have just now reached the starting line, and you have a whole other summit that you now need to work on.

05:13 And that definitely happened with Check the Weather for me. It was a weird feeling because I haven't launched new apps in a while. Check the Weather is one of the few times I've launched a new app recently. It was just this weird feeling of, right, yeah, in my mind, I think I'd sort of put to the side that that was just getting to the starting point. That was not actually getting to the end of anything. That was just getting to the start.

05:40 And so, I'm not gonna lie, it was a little complicated that next day where it's like, whew. You take in that deep breath, and you have that feeling of, wow, OK, yeah, this is gonna be a lot of work, right? This is gonna keep going and be a lot of things that I need to do, and in some ways that's just the job. That's just doing this work is that never-ending sense of there's always more to be done. There's always something more to do.

06:07 And that's fine. That's good in some ways. It would be kind of sad if I released the first version of Check the Weather's relaunch, and that was it. It's exciting, it's fun, it's interesting. There's lots of ideas and things that I didn't have or that I wasn't able to squeeze into this launch that now I'll have the opportunity to work on.

06:26 There's lots of inevitable things that are going to come up that I'm gonna have to work on with other apps. It's like I thought I'd finally finished getting rid of all my things, and then Apple announces that now Siri AI is available in a bunch of new contexts and for different apps, and it's just like, oh, OK, well, that was a false summit, thinking that I'd finally gotten to the end of this fall's Apple-driven releases.

06:49 Yeah, and that can be a bit discouraging. It can be a bit tricky, and yeah, so I just wanted to have a discussion about that. Because I think it is very easy to focus on these incremental summits, and it's good to celebrate them, it's good to recognize them, and I think that's one of the most important things. Similarly in hiking, when you get to the false summit, it's a great time to pull some chocolate out of your backpack and have it yourself, share it with the person who was just sort of disappointed by realizing that they weren't at the top of the mountain.

07:21 But in practice, there are these moments where, on the one hand, it can be exciting, it can be interesting, you can think about what's next, but it can also just as much sometimes be a bit discouraging and feel a bit of a letdown, especially if the release you're doing or the reception to it isn't what you had in mind.

07:42 And I think this is something that I've also gotten very aware of the more I've been doing this job, is that it is very easy doing this work to want to have things feel like you've really accomplished something, that things are gonna go amazingly. This is totally new, it is novel, everyone's gonna love it. You are bringing forth into the world this most incredible thing.

08:12 And in some ways you have to have that kind of almost unfounded optimism about your work, because in order to get from one false summit to the next, you need a drive, you need a motivation, you need a sense of impetus behind you to get you there. And a lot of times, in my experience, it's just sort of this optimism you have. You get excited, you get giddy, you're like, yeah, this is so cool. I can't wait to show everybody, this is gonna be incredible.

08:38 And the reality, unfortunately, as someone who's launched a tremendous number of things over the years, that is very rarely the case. Sometimes you can be very fortunate and you can have a situation where it truly lives up to the expectation, the optimism, the sense of desire you have for what it will be. The majority of the time it isn't. But that unfounded optimism though is essential.

09:02 You couldn't do this work, especially as an indie, especially as someone who isn't doing it as a job where you have to do it. In some ways, if it was your job, well, you don't need optimism to drive you into work every day. You go to work because it's your job. But if you're the one kind of making these decisions and deciding that you want to do this work, it's something you have to kind of keep convincing yourself to do. And I think that does require a lot of kind of this unfounded optimism. And so it can be kind of a weird letdown when the optimism has brought you to a place, and then now you're there.

09:41 And so, yeah, it's tough. But I think maybe it's just thinking about a bit, what does that actually mean? What can we do if we start to view our work in the sense of a series of false summits that you never actually are reaching somewhere? Because in some ways that sounds very forlorn and sad, that you're just sort of on this endless treadmill that's never going anywhere, and what's the point of any of this if that's what's really happening? You're climbing a mountain that you can never see the top of. You can never reach the amazing view looking out from the summit.

10:14 And I don't have a great answer to that. I don't think there is to some degree an answer. It's one of those sort of just realities of life rather than something that some sort of trite saying would be able to turn around.

10:26 But I think some things I have learned...one is that it's very important to celebrate when you get to these false summits, to view them as milestones and checkpoints and opportunities to celebrate with the people you've worked on something with, or just with your family, loved ones, whatever it is, take that time to take a step back and be like, yeah, we accomplished something. Yeah, that was really cool. We did it. And celebrate that in a tangible and real way.

10:52 If I'm gonna torture the metaphor a bit, this is the turning around when you're climbing a mountain and seeing whatever the view is you've reached at this point, because typically the views get better the farther you go, the higher you go. And so that is something that you can celebrate along the way. It isn't about just the summit, it is about these incremental checkpoints and moments and times that you can take a step back.

11:17 And I think the other thing that it makes me think about is it's just if you know the summit ahead of you. So when I go and climb Loughrigg, I know all of those summits are false. I know that when I get there, it's not the top. I know what the top actually looks like in that case. I do think it makes it easier to do the climb. I think there is something about being clear-eyed and honest about what you're accomplishing that is useful and important in this context.

11:46 So in my work, it is useful that I have the experience that says you're never going to arrive. You are only ever going to be on this process where you are incrementally making steps and reaching checkpoints along the way. That is weirdly encouraging, because if I decide to move forward to do the work, to start the project, knowing that it's not gonna be the end, there's never going to be a point where you've actually finished and accomplished something, that's weirdly encouraging because I'm making that choice in full knowledge of it. There's not as much disappointment when you get to the checkpoint if you knew it was just a checkpoint.

12:25 And so that's part of why I wanted to record this episode while I have these feelings a bit fresh. Because while I still have that kind of like, oh, boy, do I wish it was a bit more of a summit than a checkpoint, knowing that it is a checkpoint, knowing that this is just the natural part of the process, and I'm gonna start another thing and I'm working on the next update for Check the Weather, and I'm working on the next update for Widgetsmith, and I'm thinking about Siri AI integration in my apps now that Apple's announced that, those are just the inevitable and natural part of this, and that is weirdly reassuring that, yeah, I'm doing this because I want to do the work, not because I want to reach the destination.

13:01 I go hiking to take the steps, not just to reach the top of the summit. If I got in a helicopter and it dropped me off at the summit, I would not have as good of a day as I would have starting down at the lake and walking all the way up to the summit myself.

13:20 And I think that is just an encouragement that I tell myself when these days where my feelings are a bit more mixed up and I am both sort of sad and encouraged at the same time and things are a bit messy. It's like I enjoy the feeling that I can look up at that next summit and say, boy, I wonder what the view is gonna be like up there.

13:40 And so hopefully that's helpful for you. Anyway, thanks.