Run With Scissors

A few weeks ago, I was on a call with a client for work. I was meeting with their CTO to talk through some issues they were having with our product, and was expecting to be chewed out. To my surprise, he was relaxed and calm about the whole situation.

At one point, he made an off-hand remark that stuck with me. He acknowledged that as CTO, he and his team were moving fast and admittedly expected issues to arise. They chose to “run with scissors” in favour of getting things done and making substantive impact. That phrase stuck with me.

What does it mean to run with scissors, and what does it look like?

For me recently, it’s using an LLM to vibe code an idea I had for a personal project, then vibe coding a Terraform script to deploy it on AWS. I ran whatever output I got and experimented until it worked the way I envisioned. I didn’t wallow too much on the details like I normally would, or try to be perfect. I ran with whatever worked.

Within a week, I was able to deploy a containerized full-stack application on AWS that leveraged several AWS services. This was something I had never done before, and something that would have taken me months otherwise.

The result of “running with scissors” is something I can iterate on and revisit later to learn the details and improve.

Food for Thought

I recently rewatched a video from Matt D’Avella called I read 100 self-help books. Here’s what I learned…

Biggest takeaways for me:

• Aim for action over knowledge

• Pick three pieces of advice from each book and implement them right away

• Write down or bookmark important lessons as you read—have a system to capture and organize information