Doing stuff

You really can just do stuff. There’s nothing stopping you. The main thing that’s stopping you is yourself. My favorite expression is the Marcus Aurelius quote from Meditations: “The impediment to action advances action; what stands in the way becomes the way.” It’s so true.

When I was younger, I distinctly remember the energy a few of my friends and I had, where we’d just try stuff. Not much of it was ‘good’ by any standard, but that didn’t matter. We never once thought of whether what we were making would be ‘good’; we simply started. There’s something really beautiful in that. Want to try podcasting? Let’s just record a show and put it online. Want to make a movie? Sure, let’s dress up and play around. Want to make a card game? Sure, let’s just get paper and start drawing. Want to write a song? Sure, let’s think of something to sing about.

As you become an adult and get deeper into your passions and develop more of an aesthetic sense, ‘taste’, it becomes harder and more embarrassing to just ‘do’. The further away you get from thinking ‘Oh yeah, I can just do that’. Sure, to do it well isn’t easy; life very much gets in the way, but there’s not much stopping you from just trying things and seeing how it works out.

There’s so much knowledge out there in the world right now; it can be overwhelming. On the other hand, it’s never been a better time to be a doer. Just try stuff out, see if you like it. If not, you can always return whatever gear you’ve bought — you’ll still be coming away that much richer for the experience.

Pushing through being worried about being cringe is an important impulse. It’s important to understand that you will not like the stuff you do for a while, that there’s going to be a gap between the ideated version, the perfect version you’d like to execute, and the version that you actually can execute. There’s a chance that gap never gets reconciled. That’s fine. You need to keep working and building and releasing and doing anyway.

It is extremely hard to make a living by yourself releasing nothing but your ideas, or coding projects, or art to the world. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep at it. It’s free to keep swinging. There’s no three strikes and you’re out; you’re allowed to take as many swings as you’d like. To continue extending this baseball metaphor, even the best hitters in the world only make contact a third of the time.