👋 Hi, I’m Jeff. I write weekly about lessons I’ve learned leading product teams and working to lead well in chaotic environments, drawing on 25+ years of building.
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I recently rewatched The Martian, and the ending is still fantastic. Some of the best career advice I know comes from a stranded movie astronaut.
I always want to replay the speech Matt Damon (as Mark Watney) makes in the film’s closing scene. Astronaut Watney, having survived alone on Mars and been rescued in space by his crewmates, is now beginning life as a NASA instructor by passing along some hard-earned wisdom to a group of new astronaut candidates beginning their training.
One part of the speech is perfect for starting to build, fix, or create any product—even when the stakes aren’t life or death. Here’s the quote:
At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you...everything’s going to go south and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem...and you solve the next one...and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.
That’s it, isn’t it? It applies to any problem or task, and to any large-scale issue in life.
In building products, this is how MVPs ship. How bugs get fixed. How messy v1s become polished v2s. How teams begin experimenting with AI—imperfectly—and slowly build capability. I’ve watched this play out on nearly every team I’ve worked on—from Headspace to Included Health to Facebook.
Sometimes we overthink things. Most things get built or solved because someone—or some team—got started. And then kept going.
Here’s the scene from the movie:
The work rarely becomes clear before you start.
What are you overthinking right now?
I agree that Mark Watney in The Martian offers some great examples of work ethic. Break big, abstract problems into smaller concrete problems and as Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to quote from this film "science the shit out of this."
Of course, the other side of the problem that this film does not quite address so well is knowing what to do. Maintaining collective mind share across a team about what to do is something I've seen organizations struggle with. Mark Watney had the advantage of a very clear goal (staying alive) and was a team of one.
Any thoughts about how to keep the team doing the math in the same direction when the team is much bigger than one?