Week Three: The Happy Path
AKA: Why Having a Plan Isn't Enough — And What to Do Instead
Software developers have a name for it:
The happy path.
It’s the thing they’re always trying to build — the clean, functional version of the tool. The one users touch. The one where everything works and nothing extra is in the way.
Jae knows what that looks like for VisionaryOS. She can see it from here.
The problem is that every time she goes into the code to try to make it a reality, her brain keeps taking detours.
“My brain basically tries to create a van with all the bells and whistles,” she told me, “when all I need is just a vehicle that runs, that seats six, and that gets decent gas mileage.”
She doesn’t go off-track because she doesn’t know better. In fact, she knows exactly what’s happening — she can name it, describe it, trace the exact moment it starts. Her ADHD brain sees the context, sees what the feature will eventually need to become, and goes: “Well, I’m here, I might as well just build that part now.”
And by the time she’s done, she’s twenty minutes off the happy path.
This is Week Three of Build In Public with VisionaryOS.
Psssst…. ADHD, autistic and AuDHD service providers:
Every week, we publish original content to make your business easier to run. Subscribe now to make sure you never miss a thing.
Something Always Gets in the Way
Here’s what fifteen years of helping people grow their business has taught me:
The happy path doesn’t stay clear on its own. Something always gets in the way.
Sometimes it’s your brain: chasing the shiny thing, going twenty layers deep into the edge case, building the whole van when you just needed a vehicle.
Sometimes it’s life: bad internet at the cabin, in-laws arriving Friday, a tax bill that lands the week you were supposed to be heads-down.
Sometimes it’s the business itself: a launch that’s bigger than you expected, a hire that didn’t work out, a platform that changed the rules on you.
It doesn’t matter what it is.
What matters is whether you saw it coming.
Behavioral psychologists call it implementation intentions: people who plan specifically for what will get in the way are dramatically more likely to follow through than people who just intend to.
And the more specifically you’ve anticipated the obstacle before it arrives, the easier it is to keep going when it does.
This week, I watched as Jae, Twist, Alli and Tharon all worked through a pile of things that threatened to take them off the happy path — all in four completely different ways.
When the Answer Doesn’t Sound Like the Answer
Tharon knows she has a visibility problem.
Her entire framework — cerebellum™ — is built around the idea that visibility solves a staggering number of everyday problems. Systems problems. Relationship problems. Coordination problems.
But this week, she couldn’t find Slack on her phone.
“I have over 800 apps on my phone,” she said. “I can’t even locate the original Slack to move it.”
So she forgets it’s there. Doesn’t see it, doesn’t think about it, and even when she does think about it, she can’t find it without spending extra spoons she doesn’t have.
What’s more, she knows exactly why this happens. She built a whole framework around why this happens. She just didn’t plan for it happening to her, on this specific app, this specific week.
That’s the thing about obstacles: knowing they exist isn’t the same as having a plan for when they arrive.
Take last week for example.
When we left things last week, Tharon was excited about the number of places she was hearing people talk about the types of problems she solves. “It’s everywhere,” she said. “You just have to be listening for it.”
But this week, she hit an obstacle: the words she was hearing from everyday people didn’t sound like the words she was expecting to hear. Like the words she wanted to hear.
And because of that, she started to have doubts:
“Maybe my target market — the companies I’ve been working with all these years — maybe I need to lean harder into what they’re saying. Not what everyday people are saying.”
The truth is, of course, that companies don’t talk, but the individual people who work there, do. So maybe the language she had been hearing everywhere has been wrong. Or maybe it’s right — and the fact that it sounds wrong to her ears, is why nothing has worked yet.
I don’t know the answer, but what I do know is that voice of customer isn’t something you ever find by thinking about it harder. It only comes from talking to people who aren’t yet your customers, but one day could be.
The question is: what will she do when the answers inevitably don’t sound like what she was expecting?
The $1,200 She Didn't See Coming
Meanwhile, the thing threatening to take Twist off the happy path this week was much more practical:
A really, really bad internet connection.
She was back at the cabin, wrestling with a Starlink roaming connection that wasn’t working nearly as well as she’d hoped. So when I asked her what decision she could make that would help her make progress this week, she didn’t overthink it.
“Committing to a day to send the info sheet to my contact in Saskatchewan.”
That contact is someone Twist calls her “little sister.” They met when Twist was in college and the little girl was four years old and in search of a big sister. She asked Twist, and they settled on honorary sisters. Fast forward, and that little girl is in her late twenties, living in a tiny rural Saskatchewan community and sitting on all kinds of community boards and committees.
Of course, like all farming communities, there’s always more projects to fund than money to fund them. So Twist made an offer: what if a percentage of every gold purchase she made in that community goes back to a local project of the client’s choice?
That model would make Twist different from every other gold buyer out there.
She’d instantly become the person who shows up and gives something back, rather than a travelling pawn shop just looking to make a quick buck.
The trick, of course, is that in this small Saskatchewan community, she had a contact. In the hundreds of other communities like it across the country, she doesn’t. And there’s only so many communities she can reach, only so many hours in a day.
She needed someone to do it for her — and she found a student willing to take it on for about ten hours a week.
“To spend some money on this,” she said, “and have somebody else who’s really excited about it just makes me feel amazing.”
What I noticed about this story was that Twist wasn’t scrambling, and even though she was coming up with new things to do, they weren’t distractions.
I think a big part of it was that she had a clear focus for the week — the info sheet to send to her contact in Saskatchewan — and the bad internet constrained her from deviating too far.
Which is also why she was able to take advantage of an opportunity which saw her end up at McDonald’s at 9:45 on a Tuesday night.
Turns out, someone in a Muskoka community group had tagged her — a woman who’d seen Twist’s posts, decided to do business with her, and had been tagging her ever since.
This particular night, there was a woman who had jewelry she’d been meaning to sell and a financial emergency that made the timing suddenly matter. Twist showed up, and by the time it was done, the woman had the $1,200 she needed.
It seems like that's actually how this business works best. Not from a detailed plan, but by being available to take advantage of opportunities when someone needs her.
One Decision Down, Another One Emerges
At the end of last week, Alli was wrestling with whether to push forward with the experiment of launching a leadership coaching program, or stay focused on Retail Ready for the time being.
By the time I caught up with her on Wednesday, the decision was made:
“I do not have time to work on any sort of other business this week, next week, or the week after. I am prioritizing our $99 sales bad-ass launch and the goal is to have a thousand people in there.”
So that’s one less thing pulling her off the happy path, but what’s left is still a lot.
Because while she’s done launches like this before, it’s the first time in a long time she’s built one from scratch. It’s an all-new format on an all-new topic. That means two emails a week, three LinkedIn posts, three Instagram posts, an Instagram Live, all of it new. She’s building an affiliate structure. She’s managing the content machine.
And she’s still the one on her phone, typing the text into carousel slides.
The thing is, Alli knows how to get stuff off her plate.
She’s got lead trackers, dropped-leads finders, customer service responders, FAQ tools. She built an AI tool that can help her create a custom student growth plan in ten to twelve minutes — something that used to take her an hour. Her product delivery is down to about an hour a week.
And she knows the stuff that needs to stay on her plate:
The thinking work. The copy. The strategy. The voice.
Nobody can do that for her, and she doesn’t want to hand it off.
But there’s a layer underneath the thinking work that desperately needs to get off her plate, if she’s going to stay on the happy path.
“Why am I literally on my phone typing away the text for the slides?” she said at our end-of-week check-in.
“I need a launch bestie. I need a right-hand woman who is at my side doing all this low-key launch stuff that takes time.”
She knows what she needs. The question is, with the launch happening in two weeks, does she have time to find the right person and make it happen?
The Decision She Already Made
Which brings us back to Jae.
Her in-laws were set to arrive on Friday, which meant between prepping for that and wrapping up some client work, the week was already half gone before it started.
By Thursday, the rental van was sitting in the driveway — with its new, smart wipers — and she was in the code trying to stay on the happy path.
And it made her think about how she decides what gets built.
“The decisions I’m making are basically saying no to the things that are ‘I’m here, I might as well do this,’” she told me. “Because I’m here and I’m making these changes anyway, so I don’t have to come back and make the change again.”
She knows that logic is sound. But she’s also learning that it’s what takes her off the happy path every single time.
That if she’s not careful, she may well end up with a van that is smart enough to detect when it’s raining — but which won’t let her back out of the driveway because the steep slope keeps activating the collision-detector.
That’s the question she’s learning to ask herself: Does this actually matter right now? Will the user even see this edge case?
If the answer is no, it doesn’t go in.
And she’s running an AI agent alongside her to track her against it, which has turned up its own surprise.
“I’m having to catch the AI too,” she said. “The AI wants to go even broader than I do, which is very interesting.”
Two of them, trying to stay on the path.
So when the instinct fires — when her brain says “I’m here, I might as well” — she doesn’t need to fight it. She can just point back at what’s already decided.
“I’ve made the decision that I want just the happy path,” she said. “It’s a matter of actually getting to that point now.”
Where We're Headed Next
Here’s what I’ve observed in these four founders this week:
The happy path doesn’t get easier. It just gets more familiar.
Tharon is still finding her way back to it. Alli can see the next thing she needs to do — she just hasn’t done it yet. Twist stayed focused long enough that the path opened up somewhere she wasn’t even looking. And Jae has stopped trying to fight her way through the obstacles and started making the decisions before she gets there.
Because that’s the thing about implementation intentions.
The research doesn’t say you’ll never go off the path.
In fact, it says quite the opposite: that there will always be things that will get in your way.
But the more specifically you plan for what’s coming — the more clearly you can see the obstacle before it arrives — the faster you’ll find your way back when it does.
So the question isn’t whether something is going to get in the way this week.
It’s whether you’ve already decided what you’re going to do when it does.
This summer, Alli, Jae, Tharon and Twist are Building In Public with VisionaryOS. Every week, we follow where they’re at, what she’s deciding, and what’s actually changing — in real time.
Subscribe now for free to follow their story as it unfolds:
And for more on how VisionaryOS helps you plan & prioritize your week in a way that works with your brain — visit https://visionaryos.app and try it for free, today.