In Terence Tao's MasterClass, he compares doing mathematics to rock climbing. Nobody jumps from the bottom of a thirty-foot cliff to the top. You look for a handhold just within reach, stretch a little, pull yourself up. Secure that position, then look for the next one. His advice is to seek problems that are just barely beyond the reach of known techniques. Not the grand leap. The next foothold.
I have written before about why I named the business Tiny Edges, and this was not the origin story. But when I heard Tao describe it, I recognised the same idea I had been trying to hold myself to, said more precisely than I had managed. The instinct I fight is wanting to be at the top of the cliff in one move. The Tiny Edges name was supposed to pull me back to the move that is actually available.
In client work, the handhold looks different every time. Sometimes it is one page on a website that needs fixing, then the meta tags, then the form nobody fills in. Once, it was an email sequence that started as one sentence to one person. The problems feel small, almost embarrassingly simple, and I have learned that is usually the point. The cliff does not care how confident I feel about the overall strategy. It only cares whether I find a handhold and hold on.
What still trips me up is that the reachable problem feels like a detour. I catch myself wanting the bigger move, the one that would end the problem entirely. But the bigger move almost always turns out to be a sequence of smaller ones, and most of the time I am still looking for the first foothold when I think I am ready for the summit.
The part of Tao's analogy I needed most was about falling. Climbers fall, and it is not the end. A failed attempt, a project that does not land, a client relationship that does not work out. What I have noticed lately is that AI has shortened my own recovery time: something I would have rebuilt over days, I can now rebuild in hours, watch it fail again, and adjust. The cliff is the same. The falls just cost me less than they used to, which makes me a little braver about reaching.