Schlep Blindness and the Jobs Nobody Wants
Paul Graham has an essay on schlep blindness. The way your brain quietly hides the businesses that involve tedious, unglamorous, terrifying work so you never even see them. Stripe sat in plain sight for years because banks and compliance looked like a nightmare, so nobody’s imagination would walk all the way up to it. The schlep was a moat built entirely out of other people flinching.
I work in crypto and payments, a field made almost entirely of schleps other people refused to look at. Liquid staking, back when I helped push it past $500M+ in TVL, was not some secret genius idea. The idea was obvious. The schlep was everything around it. Validator ops, slashing edge cases, reconciliation, the long boring war with everything that can go wrong when there’s real money and no undo button. That war was the moat. Anyone could draw the diagram. Almost nobody wanted to live inside it for two years.
So here’s what I think about schleps now. They’re the most reliable opportunity signal a builder has, precisely because they repel people on autopilot. A good idea with no schlep pulls a hundred competitors by lunch. A good idea wrapped in eighteen months of grinding, regulated, unglamorous misery pulls almost no one, so the few who push through own the whole thing. The suffering isn’t the price of the opportunity. The suffering is the opportunity. It’s what keeps the field empty.
The trap: schlep blindness is invisible from the inside. You never feel “I am avoiding hard work.” You feel “that idea isn’t interesting” or “that market is boring” or “someone smarter would’ve done it already.” Your mind launders the flinch into a reasoned verdict so you never catch yourself flinching. The tell is almost mechanical. When an idea makes you go ugh, the operational stuff, that ugh is a treasure map. It’s pointing straight at the part of the market with no competition.
Crypto is loaded with this. The fun-sounding parts, tokenomics, protocol design, the stuff you can tweet, are packed with the smartest, most easily-bored people alive. The unsexy parts, off-chain reconciliation, the boring rails that make a card actually swipe, the compliance plumbing that makes the magic legal, nearly deserted. Guess which side actually moves money.
So I’ve trained an unnatural reflex. When I catch myself calling an idea boring, I stop and ask: am I seeing clearly, or protecting myself from the schlep? Half the time it really is boring. The other half it’s the best opportunity I’ve seen all year, wearing a disguise my own brain stitched for it.
Run toward the ugh. Nobody else will be there.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.