The wrong question

Somebody asked me recently which customer Ānanya is for.

It is a completely fair question. It is the one any sensible person asks, and there is a sensible answer involving age and income and how many weeks a year somebody travels. I have that answer. I can produce it on request.

I have also come to think it is the wrong question, and that answering it too early is how most things end up mediocre.

Ask a thousand people what they want in a campervan and you will get a list. The list will be accurate. Build exactly that list and you will produce something nobody dislikes and nobody would cross a road to look at.

This is not a hypothesis. It is most of the market. It is why fifty manufacturers arrive at more or less the same vehicle every year, each of them having listened very carefully to their customers and none of them having produced anything anyone will remember.

I did not want to be the fifty-first, and I have had to be quite stubborn about it, sometimes with people who were being helpful.

Ānanya did not come from a survey. It came from a conviction about how a morning should feel — one I could not fully justify when I started and cannot fully justify now. Everything else has been arithmetic in service of that.

The moment you start making what people expect, the thing you were actually chasing quietly leaves the room.

That one is not mine. An actor said it far better than I can, years ago, and I have never quite been able to put it down.

Happiness, he said, is a response to an outcome. It requires the thing to go your way. You get the result, you feel the feeling, and the feeling lasts about as long as the result does.

Joy is different. Joy is what you get from doing the thing you are built to do, regardless of how it turns out. Joy lives in the process. It does not wait for the verdict.

I did not understand why that mattered until I was two years into something I cannot prove will work.

Because here is the honest position: I do not know whether Ānanya succeeds. I do not know whether the conviction I built it on is shared by enough people, or whether I have spent two years and a great deal of money being precisely, expensively wrong. Nobody can tell me.

The only instrument that measures this is time.