Project Hail Mary

The movie Project Hail Mary debuted last weekend to record box office earnings. The sci-fi film is based on the popular Andy Weir novel of the same name.

It might be one of favorite books of all time.

I haven’t seen the movie yet. I will. But I am always a little hesitant with film adaptions of books I love.

I still cringe when I think of the film version of Ready Player One, also one of my favorite books.

When I left the theater upon seeing the movie, I was borderline angry. How could they do that to such an incredible story?

The movie wasn’t bad. It just felt… thin. It strayed so far from what made the book special that it lost its weight.

In reality, my criticisms of Ready Player One are unfair. Adapting a book into a movie is incredibly difficult.

Books create depth over time. You get pages of internal dialogue. Characters evolve across chapters. Subplots build and reinforce the core story.

Movies don’t have that luxury.

Even with the power of visuals, translating all of that into a two-hour film for a broader audience forces tradeoffs. The screen play is cut, simplified and compressed.

I see the same dynamic in business. Founders and business owners struggle to adapt the vision in their head to the realities of the marketplace.

The vision in their head is like a 500 page novel, complete with character profiles, story arcs, etc.

In reality there is:

• limited time

• limited capital

• technical tradeoffs

• customer feedback

• market expectations

So what ships is not often not the original vision.

It’s a compressed, simplified, compromised version of it.

Just like a filmmaker adapting a book, founders are forced to reshape what’s in their head into something that can exist in the real world.

Most struggle to do so. They delay, add more features, avoid shipping, or simply ignore reality.

This leads to mis-use and allocation of resources, over funding, and often failure.

This is known as the Adaption Gap.

How can you avoid the traps and make it across?

The Adaption Gap

These are five traps I see founders fall into (myself included) that prevent them from turning a clear vision into a working product.

Compression

In your head, the idea is expansive.

You see the full product in detail with every feature and edge case. You know the market, the customer, and exactly how it all fits together.

However, reality forces you to cut features, simplify workflows and remove nuance.

Just like cutting subplots from a novel, this can be difficult to do.

Founders often find themselves in all-or-nothing thinking, believing the product can only exist in its fullest manifestation.

This often leads to overbuilding, delayed launches and mis-allocation of resources.

The way through this is counterintuitive.

You don’t start with the full vision. You start with the smallest version that works.

A simple MVP tells you two things quickly:

• what actually matters

• how badly the customer wants it

If the problem is real and painful, customers won’t just tolerate an incomplete solution.

They’ll use it, push it, and tell you what to build next.

More importantly, they’ll help you avoid keeping the superficial while discarding the essential.

Invisible Value

If you think you won’t enjoy Project Hail Mary because you’re not into science fiction, you might be mistaken.

At its core, it’s a buddy movie set in space.

If you enjoyed films like The Shawshank Redemption or Tommy Boy, you’d likely enjoy Project Hail Mary. The sci-fi is there, but it’s not the point.

The same mistake shows up in business.

Founders confuse what they build with the value they provide.

Features are visible.

Value is not.

I wrote about this earlier this year: Why what you sell isn’t what your customer buys.

If you don’t clearly understand the job your product does for the customer, you risk cutting the most important part of your idea during execution.

Instead, founders get attached to, specific features, original assumptions, and their version of the problem,

Not the actual problem.

In Project Hail Mary, there’s a lot of science. For people like me, that’s part of the appeal.

But the story works because of the relationship at its center.

If the film preserves that, it succeeds. If it loses that, it doesn’t matter how accurate the science is.

The same is true for your product.

If you stay focused on the customer and the problem, you can change everything else.

If you don’t, you risk shipping something that looks right to you but doesn’t solve anything.

Context

In your head, everything makes sense.

Like a reader who has lived every chapter, you know the backstory, the logic, and how all the pieces connect.

Your customer doesn’t.

I often hear founders say, “They just don’t get it.”

But that’s the point.

Your customer has to understand the problem without all the context you’ve built up over time.

There’s a famous six-word story:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

No further explanation is needed from this unfortunate story.

That’s the standard.

If your idea requires layers of explanation to make sense, it’s a signal. Either the problem isn’t clear, or it’s not urgent enough.

Founders assume customers will fill in the gaps, but they often don’t.

Just like a reader understands a character deeply, while a movie viewer might feel confused or disconnected, your customer only sees what’s in front of them.

Clarity doesn’t come from adding more.

It comes from removing the need for explanation.

The less context your product requires, the more likely it is to resonate.

That’s how you avoid the context trap.

Constraints

While compression is the act of reducing scope, constraints are what force you to do it.

Constraints aren’t just limitations, they’re signals.

A filmmaker isn’t told to cut a story down to two hours just to make things harder. The constraint is what the market will bear and forces focus.

Founders tend to treat constraints as obstacles to overcome. But constraints are often useful guides.

If you can’t raise funding, it might be a signal the product hasn’t been validated yet.

If the technology can’t support what you’re trying to build, it may be a sign the solution is too complex for where you are.

If you don’t have enough time, it’s a forcing function to prioritize what actually matters right now.

Constraints limit execution but they also shape it.

Where founders get stuck is trying to preserve the original vision in spite of them. They delay, add more, and keep trying to close the gap.

But the gap exists for a reason.

Constraints are telling you where to focus, what to cut, and how to simplify.

The goal isn’t to fight them but use them as a guide.

Because the best products aren’t built in the absence of constraints, but forged from them.

Attachment

We humans become very attached to our ideas and visions. Mostly, this is a good thing and has saw many entrepreneurs through uncertainty, doubt, and early failure.

Our attachments can also become liabilities.

The more attached you are to the vision, the harder it is to see where it’s wrong.

Shipping something smaller or different starts to feel like a compromise. Like you’re lowering the standard or losing what made the idea exciting in the first place.

So you resist and hold onto the original version longer than you should.

The problem is, the market doesn’t care about your vision.

It only cares whether the problem is real and whether your solution works.

That requires two things: constantly testing whether the problem is valid, and staying flexible in how you solve it.

The best founders aren’t attached to their ideas.

They’re attached to finding what actually works.

The Next Step

The founders who make it through the adaptation gap don’t try to preserve every detail of what they imagined.

Instead, they:

• Identify what actually matters.

• Stay focused on the problem, not their version of the solution.

• Use constraints to guide decisions, not avoid them.

• Ship before it feels ready.

• Be willing to change or abandon the original idea if reality demands it.

Progress doesn’t come from protecting the vision, but exposing it to the market as quickly as possible.

Your idea isn’t real until it’s tested.

The faster you move through the gap between what you see and what actually works, the faster you find something worth building.

That’s the only version that matters anyway.

My goal with The Leap is to provide you each Saturday with the knowledge, tools and lessons learned to help you get started and keep going toward building your future. 

Whether you are making the leap to startups, solo-entrepreneurship, freelancing, side hustles or other creative ventures, the tools and strategies to succeed in each are similar.