Where traction is typically chased, tremors are where breakthroughs begin.

Traction may confirm the road. Tremors reveal where it could fracture into something new.

In markets defined by noise and velocity, the instinct is often to chase traction—metrics that suggest product-market fit, predictable growth, and operational control. This is understandable. Traction signals safety, suggests that a direction is “working,” and reassures stakeholders. But this very search for traction, when prioritized too early or interpreted too literally, can become the trap that prevents transformation.

Disruption doesn’t come from smoothing out friction. It comes from leaning into it, from seeking out what disturbs the norm, what provokes discomfort, what generates second-order consequences. Tremors—those early, unstable signals that something new is being touched—are more valuable than polished metrics in the early phase of any serious venture. Because tremors suggest the potential for rupture, and rupture is the precondition for true differentiation.

In any domain governed by consensus—investing, product, leadership—traction becomes a social currency. It satisfies boards, aligns teams, and gives the illusion of progress. But the ventures that reshape industries are not the ones that conform most effectively to expectations. They’re the ones that generate a signal no one knows how to measure—yet. That signal is rarely clean, and almost never comfortable. It looks like confusion, contradiction, volatility. But within it lies the raw material for asymmetric outcomes.

The pull toward early traction often leads to local optimizations. Teams refine ideas that should be abandoned, double down on markets that should be questioned, polish narratives that should still be torn apart. The desire to validate suppresses the discipline of exploration. Tremors, by contrast, demand a higher tolerance for ambiguity and a deeper commitment to what’s possible rather than what’s proven. They cannot be easily graphed, but they can be sensed by those willing to listen beneath the noise.

The skill isn’t in running from instability but in being shaped by it without being broken. Not every tremor is worth following. But dismissing them in favor of traction is a strategy that optimizes for mediocrity. It assumes that existing demand signals are sufficient, that customer feedback is complete, that the edges have been fully explored. That assumption is incompatible with building anything that matters.

The real work is not to make others comfortable. It is to make reality visible—even when it contradicts strategy decks, timelines, or investor expectations. The goal is not to confirm what already works, but to uncover what might work better. And that uncovering rarely begins with traction. It begins with tremors—weak, early, unstable signals that something new is happening.

In the end, what distinguishes category-defining ventures is not their ability to scale the known but their willingness to sit inside the unknown long enough for something non-obvious to emerge. Traction tells us where the road is. Tremors suggest where it could break. That is where the edge lives.