Close to a year ago, I picked up bouldering as a way to stay fit. Along with bouldering came the fear of falling. Every time I climbed up the wall, I thought of slipping, losing grip, and crashing down. Being high up on the wall and looking down feels quite similar to being on the mat and looking up. From the ground, the wall looks high. Holds appear impossible to reach. Then when you get on the wall, you're able to magically reach them. If, like me, your climbing technique isn't perfect, you waste a lot of energy during a climb. It sounds contradictory, but your forearms are on fire while your hands are wet. And when you're out of energy and high up on the wall, the mat looks impossibly far. A fall feels like it would break your legs. At the very least, twist your ankle. I really thought there was no way I could improve at climbing unless I rid myself of this fear. I started to practice falling. First from not very high up on the wall, slowly increasing the distance. It took me a few weeks, but I was able to perfect falling from about ten feet without any injury. Ten feet is all you need since a climbing wall is usually fifteen feet tall. Eventually, I took comfort in the fact that nothing would happen if I fell. I had learned how to fall properly. But then I noticed my progress started to stall. Before, when I was afraid of falling, I would push myself just a little harder to try and complete a climb even if my arms were sore. I was much more deliberate about learning different techniques, focusing on flexibility, and being aware of which holds I wasn't good at and incorporating them into my warm-ups. I was making plans before I got on the route, thinking about my position and weight while on the wall. But when I became comfortable with falling, I would sometimes just fall and restart the climb instead of pushing myself. Was the fear of falling making me a better climber the whole time? There are other areas of my life where this pattern repeats. I started writing for two reasons: to think clearly, and to publish. Only the former is a problem to solve. What's the right way to say what I'm thinking? What's the perfect analogy? These small problems appear whenever I'm writing. And once I solve them, I often lose the motivation to complete those final touches and publish the piece. Publishing is just logistics. There's nothing to figure out. Solving the problem is what pulls me forward, and without the problem, the work just sits there. I felt this most clearly when I was building my first app, [[Products/new's|new's]]. Every other feed reader I tried could only parse RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds. I wanted to create an app that could parse any website. I thought others would find such an app useful, and I decided I would publish new's on the App Store when it was done. Well, I was done with new's in September but it wasn't until February that I got around to publishing the app. Between September and February, I worked on the app for less than twenty hours total. The unsolved problem was the engine, and once it was running, I had no reason to drive. The problem is the point. The problem doesn't stand between you and your work — it _is_ the work.