TL;DR: Last weekend I built a 20-minute atmospheric horror game and shared it with my friends. Nobody in my network knows I write horror stories or that I’ve been gaming for most of my life. This post is about what happens when you stop performing the professional version of yourself for 48 hours, and why that matters more than I expected.
I’ve been growing my network over the past few weeks. New connections, new conversations, people asking what I do and how I think. And somewhere in all of it, I noticed the same pattern every time: I sound like an ops guy. Systems. Documentation. Processes. All of it true, all of it useful, and about 30% of who I actually am.
The other 70% includes a fairly deep obsession with horror, a decade or so of playing games across every genre, and a long-standing habit of writing stories I rarely share. None of that shows up when I post about workflows.
So last weekend, I stopped posting about workflows.
The Game
My game is called The Lantern. It’s a 20-minute atmospheric horror experience disguised as an incremental clicker. You play a Signal Operator stationed at a remote relay at the farthest edge of charted space. The job is simple: pulse the beacon, strengthen the signal, guide lost ships back to the lane.
It’s quiet work. Lonely work. And then the thank-yous from the darkness start to sound wrong.
I built it in a weekend, vibe-coded from top to bottom. That’s shorthand from the gaming community for code written by feel, without architecture or elegance. It isn’t something the professional gaming world respects, and I understand why. But this game wasn’t built for the professional gaming world, or to show my skills as a developer. It was built for me, for my friends, and to tap into a creative vein I’d been quietly ignoring for too long.
What You Lose When You Only Show the Professional Self
There’s a version of building a business online where you slowly flatten into your niche. Every post, every conversation, every piece of content becomes a vehicle for your professional angle. You become “the ops guy” or “the systems person.” Those aren’t wrong labels, just incomplete ones.
The mask is comfortable because it works. It filters conversations, signals credibility, attracts the right clients. But wear it long enough and you forget it’s a mask. The obsessions that have nothing to do with your ICP start to feel like distractions.
The irony is that those obsessions are usually where the good thinking comes from.
The same brain that spent last weekend engineering narrative dread through a simple number counter is the brain that maps broken workflows and builds systems to fix them. The ability to work within constraints, find the pattern underneath something, make the broken parts feel intentional instead of random, that’s not an ops skill in origin. It’s a creative one. The workflow applications came later.
Most of the founders I’ve worked with who build the cleanest operations are also people with real interests outside the business. Not side hustles. Actual interests. The kind that don’t have a yield.
The Spark Question
If you’ve been running your business for a while and something feels flat, I want to point at a different explanation than the obvious ones. Not a positioning problem. Not a funnel problem. The question worth asking first is: when did you last make something that had nothing to do with the business?
Not a lead magnet. Not content. Not a framework with a monetization path. Something with no downstream use, made because you felt like it.
That’s where the spark lives for most people. Not in the next product launch.
I shared The Lantern with a small group of friends on Saturday night. A few played it. A few sent messages at midnight that were mostly punctuation. That was enough. I felt something I hadn’t felt in a few months.
What This Has to Do with Building a Business
The whole point of working on your business instead of constantly in it is to make room. Room for the thinking that requires your actual brain. Room to breathe between client work and content and the ten other things you’re carrying. Room to be a person with interests, not just an operator with a task list.
The systems work I write about here isn’t just operational in its end goal. The goal isn’t a perfectly documented process. The goal is enough structural breathing room that you can step away for a weekend and nothing catches fire while you’re gone.
I know that for a lot of founders, a full weekend is still a long way off. You’re in the grind. That’s real. But when the breathing room does arrive, I’d push back on using it for productivity content or a new skill. Use it on the thing that has no yield except that it reminds you what it feels like to make something you love.
For me it was a horror game about a lonely operator in the dark.
What’s yours?
If you’re building systems to create that kind of room in your business, the TAW newsletter is where I write about exactly that. Short, practical, once a week.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, and the framing of “worth it” is part of the problem. Not every hour needs a business return. Personal projects maintain the curiosity and range that make you better at your work in the first place. The return is indirect and real, but it shouldn’t need to be justified.
The guilt usually signals that you’ve spent too long treating rest and personal time as deficits to manage rather than inputs to the work itself. If you can’t take 48 hours away from the business without it falling apart, that’s an operational problem worth addressing directly, not a reason to cancel the time off.
In my experience, consistently yes. The same thinking that builds something creative under constraints transfers directly to systems design, process mapping, and problem diagnosis. People with genuine outside interests tend to approach operational problems with more lateral thinking than people who only think about ops.
It means flattening your public presence to match your niche at the expense of everything else about you. You become a category instead of a person. Over time, the gap between the person you actually are and the version you project gets wide enough that the work starts to feel disconnected from you. That disconnection is one of the quieter causes of founder burnout.
Start small and don’t announce it. Pick the thing you used to do or always wanted to try, and do a version of it this weekend without telling anyone. No audience, no accountability, no output to share. The spark usually comes back faster than you expect when there’s no pressure attached to it.