do it badly

allegedly “you can just do things” [citation needed]. but in order to avoid enacting the politician’s syllogism, you must focus on doing things that are worth doing. and if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

your first attempt at anything should be your worst. not your worst effort, but the worst result you produce from then on. this allows you to mark your height on the wall. have something tangible that marks the start of your journey, a benchmark to measure progress against. a reminder of how far you have come when you get discouraged or lose focus. it is cathartic to look back and laugh at another you. they are, after all, the only person you should compare yourself to. and the version of you who did it badly is better off than the version of yourself who hadn’t done anything yet.

if you want to start writing, like me, write a bad blog and post it.

if you want to learn gpu programming, go write a memory bound kernel. last on the leaderboard is still on the leaderboard, so go get on the leaderboard¹.

if you want to program satellites, hook up some sensors to a raspberry pi and orchestrate them with some flight software. who knows, you may just be contributing to the framework a few months later.

start with the minimum viable commit. it doesn’t have to be good. it just has to be done.

nobody needs to derive any value from it. except you. its purpose is to get your personal flywheel turning.

optimally it would be just bad enough that you have the intrinsic desire to improve upon it.

then do it again

now that you have something done, something real to show for your time and effort, it is time to do it again. pick one thing you learned and focus on improving just that.

the whole can still be bad, it just has to be a little better than v_n-1.

and again, and again

run it back. tighten the feedback loop. get your flywheel spinning faster and faster. pretty soon you will learn both how much work it takes to do something exceptional and that you too are capable of producing exceptional work.

in the limit, your success won’t hinge on how well you started, but rather on how little time you wasted standing still.