Why Not Just Do It

Inspired by the cult of done manifesto and a love letter to myself.

There are three states of being: Not knowing, action, and completion.

Think about this in absolutes. You don’t know, till you have an inkling, then you know. Figuring it out, is a form of action. This is recommended in zero contexts, except for creative work. Almost every pursuit has a creative element. Think in absolutes.

Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

There is no such thing as a finished product. If you write something, leave it to marinate, edit tomorrow. There will always be more to change, more to improve. Work will always be far from perfection; chasing it is a pointless pursuit.

There is no editing stage.

What’s an editing stage? Jokes aside, keep it light, keep it quick. The bulk of content should be production. You should be creating, producing. If you have an idea, scope it quickly, move fast. Duct tape is typically good enough. Ensure you produce a tangible output ASAP.

Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing.

This is the age-old adage of "fake it till you make it.". You have no idea what you’re doing. If you stopped until you became a genuine expert™ in everything you talk about, you would be in a state of complete paralysis. As long as you know more than most people in the room, good enough. If not, accept that you’re the dummy in the space and ask questions.

Nobody knows what they’re doing. People just do stuff. I hop on calls and talk to people decades my senior about things completely out of my skill set. Accept that you know what you know, and if it isn’t valuable, you wouldn’t be there.

Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

If you’re anything like me you have ideas all the time. Act on them quickly. Some of them are grander than others. The grander ones tend to fizzle out, as you scope them out. That may have just meant it was a bad idea, but it also means you didn’t get the feedback your little gerbil brain needs to get things done.

The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

Being done™ implies perfection. You can spend 10 years perfecting the perfect essay, or you can spend 10 years belting out 10 different essays a month. One of those routes is considerably more likely to lead to your success. Guess which.

Once you’re done, you can throw it away.

After you look at something and it looks kind of finished, chill. What does kind of finished look like? You know best.

Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.

Things can always be better, every aspect of your life. Accept that it will never be quite as good as your imagination because you can imagine perfection. Perfection is an abstract concept. Embody "good enough," and it will be good enough. There’s a Korean saying, "The sky above the sky." I’m pretty sure it predates modern science, but the gist is you can always "be better". No one gives a damn.

People without dirty hands are wrong.

You’re going to be constantly staving off armchair experts. Some of your friends and family are armchair experts; they will constantly give you advice without ever taking action. Forget them.  Just do it. Is the market saturated? Screw it. Unoriginal idea? Do it. Make the mistakes; you will learn, and odds are you will be the better for it. Action is truth. People question processes and systems, and people that have navigated those processes and systems have the truth. Develop your own truth.

Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

When you’re in the gym, you continue until failure. Failure is when you’re at the highest state of activity. Work until failure, take a break, heal, and then go again. If that doesn’t parallel life, I don’t know what does.

Destruction is a variant of done.

Occasionally your output is poop. Not worthy of being released into the world. Look at it. Accept it for what it is. Then get rid of it. It’s done, onto the next. Archive it and try again another day.

If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

When something is published, it becomes pseudo done. No matter the state. If it’s out there in the world, it’s pretty much done. Publishing prevents procrastination.

Done is the engine of more.

Done is addictive. The hardest part is the start. That works for literally any activity. The hardest part is the start. Start.

Inspired by the cult of done manifesto