Be Honest with Yourself: How to Start Doing

Tue, 16 May 2023 15:27:01 +0700

It’s believed, that if we have a problem, we search for a solution to it. Unfortunately, sometimes Homo sapiens do that in reverse order: they have an idea, want to release it but search for a problem to have an excuse.

I see it among amateur programmers.

New coders learned to use a hammer (any technology) and they invent nails

That’s a great way to learn: if you need to handle a technology, you need to practice with that. However, you can see the same pattern in a life.

People can forget their real aims and stick to an idea

A perfect example is blogging. I started new blogs many times, I used to program blog engines in Django, used to used static generators, used to try services and after a while I got an instrument for writing posts and didn’t have motivation to use it. The last time I started a Russian weekly, I told myself, “You’re going to spend an hour to configure everything and not more”. And that worked. I’m sure I spent more time on completing it with content than burnishing a tool.

Another example can be note taking. I know friends who learned about Zettelkasten, set up their Obsidian and Notion, but didn’t write a decent number of notes. I was the same, but eventually forced myself to write in plain files, using few-line scripts. Later I coded a tool to replace these scripts, and suppressed my Zettelkasten.

The moral is to be honest with yourself.

If you want to start doing something, go and do that. Don’t spend time on preparation

If you want to start a blog, press few buttons in Wordpress and write a blog. If you want to code another blog platform, configure deployment and CDNs, don’t lie to yourself.

Blogging on xie

Be Honest with Yourself: How to Start Doing

New coders learned to use a hammer (any technology) and they invent nails

People can forget their real aims and stick to an idea

If you want to start doing something, go and do that. Don’t spend time on preparation