Good Infrastructure

Upfront “infrastructure” investments have been a recurring theme in my head for quite some time that I feel like writing it down to flush it out out of my system.

The general hypothesis: spending upfront investments for establishing solid infrastructure in something important almost always pays off.

Now let’s backtrack a bit.

For as long as I can remember, I feel like I always want to do things quickly and as hassle-free as possible. This sometimes means that if I think I have everything I need to do something, I will just go ahead complete what I need to do despite knowing that there’s this better alternative way that my friends swear will make my job much easier.

Why bother learning a new tool that probably takes hours/days to learn?

Why should I do X first when I could just directly do what I need to do?

So I said.

I’ve read numerous claims that better tooling or a solid infrastructure could make life much easier but I never really internalize it well to my beliefs. In a quick glance, it seems counter-intuitive to take the longer “route” to accomplish something. But after some reflection, it does makes sense when what you are trying to accomplish is something important and hard.

To illustrate, let’s say in this hypothetical world you need to get to somewhere to receive some kind of rewards. The first thing that popped into mind is just walking straight to the target point, which is a great way to do it if the place you needed to go to is very near, like a couple of blocks away.

But what if the end goal is very far, say in another country. Walking now seems out of the question since it now would have taken months to get to the end goal where it’s possible for you to give up half-way since it takes too long. Now, it seems more sensible to take a step back and invest in some kind of infrastructure so that you could reach your goal more effectively. For example, you could learn how to drive a car, rent it, and use it to get to the end goal. Now what’s initially would have taken months will now take a couple of weeks which is much better, even when you spend the first couple of days not making any progress to reaching your goal (since you’re busy learning how to drive).

Could the illustration be better? I think so but I hope that this shows the power of investing in infrastructure in reaching your goal.

Some addition real-life examples of upfront infrastructure investments that I could think of:

Software Development: Setting up a workflow to automate tasks in your development pipeline such as formatting check and testing (infrastructure) to ensure developers could check-in codes constantly and confidently (goal).

Personal Finance: Create a budget to partition income into expenses, investments, etc, and stick to it (infrastructure) to ensure that you are financially resilient for future life changes (goal).

Career: Strive for finding places where you could continuously learn and grow (infrastructure) to ensure that you could progress according to your career aspiration (goal).

Note that what your goals are and what you deem to be the necessary infrastructure to get you to where you want to be could vary greatly to another person. The main point is that reality is more often much more complex and hard that simplistic “quick-win” solution is often too brittle. We need to analyze whether we could identify the infrastructure we needed to acquire/build so that achieving success would be more certain in a world where it seems like nothing is certain.