Episode 816 | Developing an Editorial Eye, The Right Kind of Stubborn, and The Power of Focus (A Rob Solo Adventure)

Hiring engineers right now is noisy. You post a role and get flooded with AI polished resumes from people who've never actually shipped anything. G two I cuts through all of that. They've pre vetted over 8,000 engineers, all with over five years of experience, and they do live technical interviews with real humans checking for real skills. There's no time wasters, no guesswork, just candidates who can actually get the job done. Meta trust them, Microsoft trust them, and so do bootstrap founders who need to move fast without making expensive mistakes. Check them out at g2i.co/rob. Get a seven day free trial and $1,500 off when you mentioned startup for the rest of us. That's g2i.co/rob. Welcome back to another episode of startup for the rest of us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. And in this solo adventure, I'm gonna talk about developing an editorial eye, a realization a founder had about solving problems and being the right kind of stubborn. Before we dive in to today's topics, MicroConf Europe this year is heading to Iceland. The dates are September 21 through the 2026. Tickets have just gone on sale. And if you want to buy a ticket, and you should, you should use promo code Rob 50 at microconfeurope.com. We are selling all of our micro conf in person events out and have for several years. So if you want a ticket and you want it at the cheapest price it will ever be, head to microconfeurope.com and enter code Rob 50. First topic I wanna touch on today is about developing an editorial eye or as I've sometimes called it on this podcast, developing taste. And I I think in most of the instances I'm thinking about it, editorial I might be better. But I think about this applying to all creative or intellectual domains like movies, books, visual design, software, code. And when you're first exposed to any of these things you don't yet know what's good or bad because you lack taste. You lack that editorial eye. And the reason I like the term editorial eye is it implies a level of discernment and it applies the ability to not just have taste and be snooty, whether this is good or bad, but to potentially editorialize it. And that's what I wanna talk about today. I was thinking about the three stages of developing an editorial eye in any medium. Again, whether that's movies, books, design, code. The first is exposure. To just figure out what's good and what's bad. Right? It's exposure to many films or to many books or to writing and reading a lot of code, not just writing code, by the way. I find that the people who have only written code, have never worked on a team, have never had to get into a code base that they've never seen before. It's like they're code blind, and they've only experienced the way they do it. And they have these …