Building in a World Where Nothing Lasts

Friends drift apart. Energy comes and goes. Even our bodies don’t stay the same forever. That might sound sad, but really it’s what makes life special. The fact that nothing lasts is the reason moments matter. A night with friends feels precious because you know it won’t happen again in the exact same way. A simple talk feels alive because it will never repeat. The beauty is in knowing it won’t last.

The Japanese have a word for this: Mujo.

Mujo is impermanence: the truth that everything in the world is always changing, breaking down, and becoming something else.

Mujo is also tied to Buddhism. It became natural in Japan because of the seasons. Spring, summer, fall, winter; each passes and returns in a cycle of birth, death, and renewal. This rhythm shaped a way of seeing life: decline is not just ugly, death is not only an enemy. There is beauty in letting things take their course, in not fighting the changing of nature but flowing with it.

Once you see the world through Mujo, change doesn’t feel like chaos. It feels like the way life works. And startups are no exception.

Momentum Over Permanence

Products show the same truth. Every product dies, every feature you love will eventually be deprecated. It used to hurt me to turn off features I had built over months. I believed users would see it my way, but the harsh reality was different. Every miss became a learning. Logos you argue about will be replaced. Even the biggest apps of today will fade into history: from Orkut to TikTok, from PHP to Rust, every peak becomes irrelevant.

If you fight this, you waste time. You cling. You delay. But permanence was never the goal. Momentum is. Shipping today matters more than waiting for something perfect that will still change later.

So what can founders control in a world where nothing stays the same? One thing: energy.

Markets crash. Teams change. Products fail. Yet every morning I still show up with the same energy. Not because the work wasn’t real, but because it was always going to be temporary. The real choice is how much energy you bring to the next chapter. And that energy is not just survival, it is the spark that carries you into new cycles, new experiments, and new chances to build again.

Teams Are Rivers, Not Statues

In the last six months, twenty percent of my team left. Some chose to move on, some we had to let go, and new people joined. At first, it felt like failure. As a founder, you want everyone to stay. But Mujo shows you another way to see it. Teams aren’t statues. They’re rivers. People join, people leave, and the work moves on. You love your team, but you also learn that not everyone’s priority will be your business. The goal isn’t to keep the team frozen. It’s to keep the flow alive.

The same is true in markets. Just as teams shift, entire categories can disappear in an instant. I spent three years building in the real money gaming industry, and then it was suddenly gone when the category was banned in India. One industry vanished, and new ones began to rise. If you can’t move forward, you’ll miss tomorrow.

Momentum Over Permanence

Products show the same truth. Every product dies, every feature you love will eventually be deprecated. It used to hurt me to turn off features I had built over months. I believed users would see it my way, but the harsh reality was different. Every miss became a learning. Logos you argue about will be replaced. Even the biggest apps of today will fade into history: from Orkut to TikTok, from PHP to Rust, every peak becomes irrelevant.

If you fight this, you waste time. You cling. You delay. But permanence was never the goal. Momentum is. Shipping today matters more than waiting for something perfect that will still change later.

So what can founders control in a world where nothing stays the same? One thing: energy.

Markets crash. Teams change. Products fail. Yet every morning I still show up with the same energy. Not because the work wasn’t real, but because it was always going to be temporary. The real choice is how much energy you bring to the next chapter.

The Pivot Shows the Way

Some of the biggest companies only exist because their founders accepted Mujo. They let go of what wasn’t working and leaned into what was.

YouTube began as a dating site but became a platform for sharing videos.
Instagram was a cluttered check in app until the team cut everything but photos.
Slack grew from a failed game into a chat tool.
Twitter came after Odeo was wiped out by Apple’s podcast push.

Others too, Airbnb renting out air mattresses, Netflix mailing DVDs, Shopify selling snowboards, all prove the same truth: letting go isn’t failure, it’s the path forward.

You see it in other corners of the startup world as well. Google has a long list of products it shut down, from Google Reader to Stadia, showing that even giants constantly prune and redirect. MySpace, Vine, and Orkut remind us how fast dominance can vanish. At the same time, TikTok, OpenAI, and Canva remind us that sudden explosive growth can come out of nowhere, and may not last forever either.

Regulation also reshapes categories in an instant: ride hailing, short term rentals, and crypto have all faced waves of rules that forced companies to adapt or fade. Acquisitions transform others, like Instagram folding into Meta or LinkedIn into Microsoft. Nothing stays fixed.

Even size doesn’t protect against impermanence. Nokia once ruled mobile phones, Blackberry defined business communication, and Yahoo was the web’s front door. Each lost its place as the world shifted. Mujo applies as much to giants as to startups, no one is immune to change. I explored this further in another essay on what startups can learn from the fall of Nokia and Blackberry: What startups can learn.

Living with Impermanence

I think of startups like sand art on a beach. You spend hours making something beautiful. Then the tide washes it away. That doesn’t mean you stop building. It means you build knowing the tide will come.

Founders, and people, struggle most when we expect things to stay the same forever. But permanence is the illusion. Mujo is the truth.

When you embrace it, change stops feeling like chaos. It becomes fuel. Teams shift, products change, energy moves forward. The wipe is always coming. Better to build fast and let it come than to hold on to what is already fading.

Mujo doesn’t ask you to give up. It asks you to be fully present. To give everything to this moment, knowing it won’t last. That’s not weakness. That’s freedom.

Like the cherry blossoms in Japan, startups feel beautiful in their brief seasons, in the way a short spring or a festival lights up life for a while before moving on, not because they always end but because their moments of bloom are intense and meaningful. Their meaning comes from the fact that they bloom, shine, and then fade. And that impermanence is what makes them worth building at all.