Sarah Guo on procrastination dressed up as diligence: “A founder who delays a launch to keep polishing or iterating scope or positioning is putting off making contact with reality.” What’s the launch, decision, or hard conversation you’re still polishing instead of shipping?

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sarah guo

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@saranormous

Rude Ducking

Sometimes, in exasperation, I ask my kids: “What do you not want to do, and why?”

They’re smart. More often than not, they know what to do, but they’re avoiding it.

Eat their protein and vegetables. Get through their annoyance without blowing up. Apologize.

Adults often know (and don’t do) the hard step too. We just have better evasive maneuvers. We answer frivolous emails instead of sending the memo. We give someone who isn’t measuring up “one more quarter.”

Avoidance is fear. Sometimes I can feel myself procrastinating a painful phone call, and then I can force myself to make it. But sometimes I don’t know that I’m afraid for a while. My fear looks like busyness, like the rational recognition of risk, like “not ready yet,” — and when I explain why I’m stalling, I believe my own answer. A founder who delays a launch to keep polishing or iterating scope or positioning is putting off making contact with reality.

Engineers will sometime debug with a rubber duck: explain the code line by line until you hit the place where reality diverges from what you thought the system was doing. A forced, verbal stack trace. The duck can be a person, a plastic toy, an AI—it extracts from you logic you already have. It’s very effective.

For bigger problems, it would be useful to have a much ruder duck.

The rubber duck exposes the gap between what you think the code does and what it does. The rude duck exposes the gap between why you think you’re stalling and why you actually are. Most people won’t do this task —they sense the fear and soften the question. They’ll accept a weak answer, they’ll ley an issue go. Most AIs will suck at this task too, because they’ve learned to please.

The rude duck asks: What are you avoiding? Why?

And when your answer is bullshit—sincere bullshit (the kind you believe yourself) it asks again. It demands, with inanimate yellow innocence, that you live up to your own standards of clarity and courage. Put one on your desk.

7:14 AM · Jul 20, 2026592.7KViews

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