Life Lessons From Digging A Hole

When I was younger, I had an obsession with digging a hole in my parents’ garden (yeah, I never claimed to be normal). My friend across the road and I would talk excitedly about building a tunnel between his house and mine. Of course, we knew it was never actually going to happen—we weren’t that delusional—but the idea of it fascinated us.

So each day after school, I’d grab a shovel and get to work, removing more and more earth. Credit where it’s due: my parents were incredibly tolerant about this giant, ugly crater forming in their otherwise lovely garden. I think they saw the curiosity in me and decided to let it run its course. So, with an oversized shovel in hand, digging would resume.

Then one day, disaster struck. One wall of my masterpiece collapsed completely. I was devastated. It was going to take me days of work to clear up the mess. But what happened next turned out to be a lesson that stuck with me.

Later that day, I complained to my Mum: “Dearest Mar Mar, why must such tragedy befall me?” (Or something like that anyway). She replied simply:

“Sometimes you need to dig outwards to go down.”

It was such a small piece of advice, not one I appreciated at the time, but it’s a symmetry that keeps resurfacing in my life and work (along with my relationship, where I sometimes manage to dig holes for myself unintentionally!).

So what does that have to do with app building? Well, it turns out that digging straight down—just focusing on one thing—only gets you so far. Building a great app isn’t enough. You have to broaden your skill set: design, marketing, storytelling, user feedback. You have to dig outwards to keep going down.

And who knows—keep at it long enough, and one day you might just find yourself tunnelling into your friend’s garden, like you always dreamed.