So, chin up.

Let’s be vulnerable again. You’re in the valley right now, near the bottom, desperately looking for the stream, to find refreshing water before you attempt the hike up the other side. And the hike looks daunting.

Let’s ditch the metaphorical language as well. With help with the team, and through many months of consensus building, you’ve managed to put this project on the road map. And not just on the road map – it is one of the key initiatives for Q1 and Q2 in 2015. It’s not just the product team that’s excited about it either. The support team is looking forward to it – already they are thinking up how to improve customers’ lives when this thing launches. The engineering team is scratching their head in the best way possible, because they understand its importance, and they are asking you those tough questions in order to figure out what they have to build.

Remember to celebrate that. It’s not easy to get people on the same page. Even that is an achievement.

You’re frustrated. It’s understandable, because now you’re in the weeds. The idea of “IFTTT for automating risk-related decisions” looked beautiful from a distance, but now you’re up close. From this distance, you see edge case upon edge case. You’re learning about how search works in a space where the properties of items are mutable. You’re solving a three-piece puzzle where you’re trying to shape the technology into a product that fits into the hole in the market. All the while you’re trying to slice it down to MVP size, and at the same time not forgetting that V stands for Viable.

It’s a left-brain right-brain combo problem – which was always what you wanted to do, wasn’t it?

So when your team give you feedback, it feels like people are lobbing stones at your glass house. Which you’ll have to put back together without gloves on. But all they’re reminding you of is that the design needs to be more robust. Remember the lesson about pride and fear? It would be such a shame to give up now because your draft isn’t up to standard yet – remember that’s what drafts are for. They’re lobbing stones at the project, not at you. They are, and have always been, rooting for you.

Put some gloves on, maybe pick a different building material. The project is too early to have this level of polish anyway. And remember the last time you worked on something this hard. You threw the whole thing out to start again, not just once or twice, but three times. It ended up being the best thing you’ve ever worked on.

You’re at the bottom of the valley now. It’s okay to be there. It’s almost necessary to be there. So take a break, find the stream and sit by it. Remember the other valleys where you’ve been, and how you got out, and why you sought out another one. It’s about the journey.

So, keep your chin up. And by you, I mean, me.