♟️ The Metagame #039: Work Like a Lion, Not a Deer

Welcome back to The Metagame.

After a short hiatus, I’m back. In my brief time away from my newsletter, I've been coding some new projects, teaching people how to build products using new AI tools, and traveling the world. If you’re still here, I want to say thank you—your support means everything to me. Stick around to the end for a free surprise 😉

Here’s what I have for you today:

• The difference between working like a lion vs. a deer

• My new project, Lexica.io

We’ve all heard it before.

“Work hard if you want to be successful.”

It’s drilled into us as kids, reinforced in school, and preached all throughout adulthood.

Hustle culture is romanticized, and being online at 3 AM is a bragging right.

Entire industries are built on selling the idea of hard work.

But what is “working hard”?

It’s a phrase that gets thrown around like everyone understands exactly what it means. However, everyone has a different version of working hard that’s suited for them.

For some, hard work is a 16-hour day in the office, nonstop grinding, minimal sleep, and sacrificing weekends.

For others, it’s turning off notifications, blasting their best Spotify focus playlist, and coding with their head down and no distractions for 3 hours straight, followed by a long period of rest and relaxation.

This is where the lion and the deer come into play.

A lion works in short, powerful bursts. It sits under a tree for hours, sleeping in the shade, conserving energy. But when it comes time to hunt, it explodes at full speed, using every ounce of energy to attack its prey. And after feeding time, it’s back to resting.

The deer, on the other hand, is always working. Constantly on the move, grazing, and scanning for threats. Always on alert. Its survival depends on staying in motion.

Both work hard.

But they do it differently.

Neither approach is inherently wrong. It all depends on the type of work you’re doing and the environment you’re doing it in.

A startup founder might need to work like a lion. Weeks of calm, business-as-usual work, followed by intense investor meetings, weekend-long coding grinds, life-or-death deal negotiations, and the fate of the company resting in every decision made in the next 24 hours.

And once that’s all over, they rest.

A customer support representative might need to work like a deer. Steady work throughout the day requiring constant attention. Ten different chats at any given time. No rest. Always solving problems. There are no breaks allowed, so expending your social battery in the first hour of a 12-hour day might be unwise.

A developer under a time crunch shipping a big product feature? Lion. (Me at my day job right now.)

A social media manager creating daily content? Deer.

The key is knowing what kind of “hard work” your role demands, and the problem most people run into is mismatching the styles.

If you’re working a job that requires your constant attention (deer), but you try to work like a lion (procrastinate and catch up), you’ll quickly fall behind and struggle to keep up.

The other way around has its issues, too.

Working like a deer when the job calls for lion’s work will lead to burnout. If you’re busy trying to look out for every problem, instead of focusing on the single most important task in front of you, you’ll miss opportunities and fail to give it your all when they do arise.

This is a huge reason why people fall into the self-believe trap, thinking they’re unproductive even while “doing work.”

We’re not actually lazy or unmotivated.

We’re just using the wrong model for the type of work we’re doing.

Energy Management > Time Management

We tend to think that if we control our time, we control our energy levels. But that’s actually backwards. You can schedule your calendar all you want, but if your mindset and energy levels don’t match your schedule, it’s pretty hard to get anything meaningful done.

Have you ever scheduled a full day into your calendar with all your to-dos, only for you to push everything off for later when the time actually comes?

This is because you’re planning your day like a deer, but your body wants to work like a lion.

If you can understand your mind and body and know when it’s time to work and when it’s time to relax, planning your days and getting meaningful sh*t done becomes a breeze.

Speaking of working hard…

My little surprise for you is that I built Lexica, a daily vocabulary agent that sends you a “Word of the Day” text every morning.

There are no ads, no app to download, just a single text message every day.

And right now, while it’s still in beta, it’s free.

I bring this up for 2 reasons:

1. I want to promote this project to you, my loyal audience.

2. I built 95% of Lexica in a single weekend.

This might sound cringy, but I followed my inner lion. After coming up with the idea for this project, I had a burst of motivation to sit down and build it out.

And in one weekend, I had nearly all the moving parts working.

The code. The cloud configuration. The SMS integration. The sign-up website. The whole shebang.

Sure, over the past week-and-a-half, I did a bit of cleaning up, security checks, and code organization, but the working product was there.

And THIS is what I mean when I say work like a lion.

So if you’re like me, the next time you want to get something done, don’t graze like a deer.

Sprint like a lion.

(And if you want to start your day with a tiny new learning habit, sign up for Lexica while it’s still free. It won’t be for much longer 🙂)

Quote of the week

Thanks for reading!

If you have any questions, hit me up on LinkedIn or on Twitter/𝕏 at @sam_starkman, or feel free to reply to this email!

— Sam