The next handhold

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Why I called it Tiny Edges

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I lean perfectionist. Left alone, I will try to get everything right before I let anything move, and I will happily redo a thing five times, chasing a version that finally feels complete. That instinct has its uses, but it also has a failure mode: nothing ships, because nothing is ever finished.

The name is a correction I gave myself. "Tiny" is the reminder that a small step taken now beats the perfect leap I am still planning. Forward in small moves, not all at once. When I feel the urge to fix everything before shipping anything, the word is there to pull me back to the next single step.

"Edges" is the other half, and it points the same instinct in a better direction. Every advantage matters. The small details are worth caring about, because they are usually where the real difference hides. Perfectionism is not the enemy here; ignoring the small things is. The edges are exactly what most people skip.

So the name holds both sides of me. Care about the details, every one of them. Just take them one small step at a time.

There is a less romantic version of this story, and it is just as true. By the time I was naming the business, I had a short list, and the factor that actually decided it was which .com I could still register. Most names I liked were long gone. Tiny Edges was free, and it happened to mean something I already believed, so it became an easy yes. The meaning is real. It also had a little help from whatever domains were still available at that moment.

Woo Kin Wai

The next handhold

Why I called it Tiny Edges