@handotdev: Remember to not smile

x.com · 2026-07-30 · by Long Nguyen ·xcom

Last month, I stood in front of the entire company with a slide that had nothing on it but four words: "Remember to not smile." The reactions were about what you'd expect. Confused looks. A few nervous laughs. After an awkward silence, someone raised their hand and asked, "what does that mean?" A few months ago, Travis Kalanick illustrated a simple point on a podcast. Picture a marathon runner at mile 21. Are they smiling? No. And if they are, they're about to get passed by someone who isn't. Someone who signed up for the pain, and who will go harder and further because of it. The logic extends well beyond running. If a strategic win came easy, you left something on the table. More competitive advantage, more differentiation, more distance between you and everyone else. Easy is not a compliment. Easy is a signal that you stopped short. I've lived that lesson over and over building Mintlify. I've lost track of the number of times we won over a customer because I stayed at the office until 4 AM shipping a feature I knew would blow them away the next morning. I've lost track of the number of times I've had to make a hard decisions that were genuinely painful in the moment, but turned out to be exactly right in the long run. I didn't smile through a single one of them. Endurance athletes have a name for this feeling: "the pain cave". It's the point deep into an effort when everything hurts and quitting starts to sound reasonable, and staying in becomes a conscious choice. You've felt it even if you've never raced. The last mile of a run. The last rep of a heavy set. Ask any of these athletes and they'll tell you the same thing: the pain cave is where you get stronger. Muscle doesn't grow from the comfortable reps. It grows from the ugly ones at the end, the ones you almost didn't take. Doing anything meaningful feels exactly the same way. Every time you trade short-term pain for a long-term outcome, you're doing more than surviving a hard moment. You're building stamina and pain tolerance, capacity you carry into every hard moment after it. So when things feel hard, when the deal is slipping, when the decision hurts, when it's 4 AM and the feature isn't done, it's evidence you're in the pain cave, gaining ground because most people won't stay in it. Remember to not smile.

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11:58 PM · Jul 14, 2026 · View on X

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