You’ve started a project or company. Great idea, great team, you’re cranking away. Build a prototype, work on acquiring the key partnerships, figure out launch planning, get a few initial users… simple enough right?

One day you wake up and you’re overwhelmed. Everything is more complicated than it has been up till now. “If I had really understood how complicated this was gonna be, I might not have started this,” you think.

This is the point where your impact is reaching an inflection point. You may not see it yet, and it feels bad in the moment, but this point of slightly-overwhelming complexity is a point most new endeavors pass through. It’s the point where the idea is down to execution. The rubber meets the road, and all that. You’re finally contacting reality, and reality has something to say about it.

Fortunately, you now see what work is needed to solve the problems. So it’s complicated—but also, you can solve it, you just need to get back to work, focus on what’s important and sort the problems one by one.

Before this point, you were naive. Your idea hadn’t properly contacted the world yet. Things seemed simple, but you just didn’t realize the complexity ahead.

A month or two in the future, you’ll have solved all the problems or died trying. If you survive, things will not exactly go back to being simple, but you won’t be surprised again about the complexity, and there will be systems in place to deal with it.

So take a few seconds to savor this moment if you can. You’re actively “de-risking” your idea, you’re possibly about to “reach product/market fit”. Then get back to executing because your project needs you the most it ever will. Good luck!