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This is going to sound like unorthodox advice – but I'm an unorthodox kind of gal – and I think you might need to lower the stakes. Let me tell you why.

Last year during my end-of-year review (some screenshots below) – I shared with my team what we had accomplished and what I wanted to do differently in the coming year. I'm literally so proud of how beautiful this deck turned out, it was actually the first project I built in Codex. Let me know if you’re interested in the prompts I used or how I built this in less than an hour?

When we got to the part of the conversation about what I wanted to focus on next, I came prepared with six different ideas. My team listened to them and said something I really appreciated – pick one and go for it.

Soooo I chose was the website.

I don't love our company website. I think it gets the job done – but that's not my how I roll. I want something that looks and feels like the values that I know our team has. Something that actually reflects the spirit of the work.

So this year (ugh, yes, I know it's March!!) my goal has been to make a website for a company that I'm proud of. And yes, I also wish this website had been done sooner. But I realized something important about why it wasn't.

My bottleneck wasn't effort – it was stakes.

I kept getting stuck thinking about the security systems, the infrastructure, the deployment, all the little nooks and crannies that come with building a real website through tools like Vercel and Codex. Every time I sat down to work on it, my brain immediately jumped to all the complexity.

Which meant I never actually started building the thing.

Eventually it dawned on me that what I really needed wasn't to understand everything. I just needed to learn the basic structure.

I needed to understand the equivalent of "the roof goes on top of the house" and "the door opens so people can walk inside." I needed to see how the pieces connect – in a way that felt fun and low stakes – before trying to build the full structure.

So that's what I did.

Over the weekend I spent a couple hours coding my first little app. Nothing fancy. Just a small experiment.

A Magic Eight Ball that makes learning new vocab words fun.

The goal wasn't to build something impressive – the goal was to give myself a sandbox where I could poke around, test things, and understand how the pieces actually fit together without the pressure of it being "the company website."

Sometimes when you hit a bottleneck, the problem isn't skill or discipline. Sometimes the project just feels too consequential.

And when that happens, the answer might simply be to lower the stakes.

Change the sandbox.
Build something smaller.
Let yourself play a little.

You might be surprised how quickly progress starts once the pressure disappears.

Anyway – the Magic Eight Ball app link is below. Dear Lord, I hope it works because I'm still figuring out deployment. Please be gentle with me.

But I hope it encourages you to keep poking and prodding and playing.