Avoiding schlep blindness

Just over a decade ago, Paul Graham coined the phrase “schlep blindness”. It essentially means that we often become blind to tedious, unpleasant tasks and simply put up with them.

Paul shared this example from Stripe, the credit card processing company:

The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe’s idea. For over a decade, every hacker who’d ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world’s infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.

In that case, most developers just accepted that payments were painful part of the system and worked on other things instead, quietly deciding that the schlep was unavoidable.

Harvey Firestone

David Senra shared another example of schlep blindness on an excellent episode of his “Founders” podcast, this time going back more than a century to focus on the awful tires made by Ford for the Model T. Harvey Firestone started his famous company…