> Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
For some types of work, the work we call prep work is 90% of the work and most of what determines how well the finished product turns out.
Painting is a good example. You can grab a bucket of paint and paint brush and start “doing the thing” by slapping paint on the surface. Your paint job is going to be very poor and fail early relative to a professional who properly sands, cleans the surface, preps the work area, and does it right. You might save some time now by skipping straight to doing the thing, but you might also lose more time later when you have to repeat the job because the paint is peeling or you’re cleaning up a paint mess that spilled on to another surface because you didn’t prepare.
I think in this example those prep work items _are_ doing the thing.
But then telling people about a new product could also be doing the thing.
There’s definitely something to be said for defining what the thing really is being an important part of doing it, but that can also spiral out of control into not doing the thing.
I think thingness is more of a variable property of the current thing you are doing. Than a binary is or isn’t the thing.
All we can really do is regularly check how much the thingness of the current thing is aligned with the main thing’s thingness.
Prep work sucks. In whatever field, I always love hearing from the greats how they make the hard work a little less sucky. Good tools, better workflows, figuring out what they can let slide, accepting the struggle and getting zen. The people who do it 80% right and manage to make peace with that always seem the most productive.
You can do a good job if you want to. But that usually required taking a step back and thinking about these 20% you didn't manage last time. Maybe you use the wrong approach, the wrong tool, maybe your tool is no longer sharp because you told yourself prep sucks. 80/20 is a good philosophy if you just want to earn a living, but a bad philosophy if you want to reach mastery (which coincidentally can translate into making a relatively good living).
The important part is, that the greats never were okay with just 80%. Their goal is usually to make the best work they can and that means improving on things they have previously done. That doesn't mean the project needs more work or resources. It means it makes best use of the work and resources available while delivering something that satisfies the masters quality standards.
Also: In some cases 80/20 mediocrity does in fact not cut it and it is just an excuse to do less work and not to think hard about things.
In most of my hobbies I feel like my growth and talent is limited by lack of volume, not my care or attention to detail. It's hard to let go and use one color instead of three, or not fix a flaw in model part nobody will ever see. I'm sure other people have the opposite challenge.
Well, to really know how things would pan out, you have to indeed do the thing.
And it happens that people will procrastinate with preparation. But as someone who does not and is fast at doing things I can tell you that if I want something done really fast preparation will be a good chunk of a projects time. If I want to toy around and the project doesn't matter that much, just doing the thing may do the trick.
Now the advice on that site aims to get people started with the actual work part and tries to do so by telling you preparation doesn't matter. That is not true. But it is true that people prepare forever because they are afraid to cross the threshold where they start translating grand ideas into concrete, protentially flawed reality. That means actually good advice would deal with the question where this fear comes from, how to address it and how to notice you have been preparing too long.
If you want to build a house, drawing the plans and finding the right location where to put said house is part of building a house. Or you could just mash bricks on top of each other in your backyard and then realize you forgot the foundation.
Oh you are absolutely doing the thing in this situation, as in you're in the process of doing it, somewhere between 1% and 99% of the way there depending on the context. You haven't done the thing until you actually fully do the thing, it is true. But most of the work could be in this preparatory meta work, and of course it means nothing without the final all important step of doing the thing, but there you have it, doing the thing before having fully done the thing.
Au contraire! Almost all the time you spend doing the thing is actually doing the things required before the final completion of the thing. I've taken to calling this "the work before the work" and it's at least 90% of the work.
Example: I get asked at the start of a project to provide ModbusTCP comms mapping for a new control panel, so that the client can start integrating it into their SCADA system. It's just a spreadsheet, maybe 100 rows, how hard could it be? They need it right now, why am I telling them it'll take 6 months?
Typing the addresses and descriptions into the spreadsheet is 'the work', and it only takes an afternoon, but it can't start until we do the work before the work:
- To document the ModbusTCP mapping I need to the PLC program
- To finish the PLC program I need the electrical drawings
- To finish the electrical drawings, the electrical engineer needs the device list, datasheets for all the devices, and the functional spec
- To finish the device list and functional spec, we need to agree with the client exactly what we're building and what it's meant to do
None of these things are 'the work' but all of them are 'the work before the work' and usually nobody wants to do, to wait for, or pay for this work.
Right but I see this taken too far. Getting side eyed for creating a Jira ticket not doing it now. Dude, I am creating a Jira ticket because I have 100 things to do and need to actual priorise this! If I do stuff in the order of serendipity I will definitely be inefficient.
1. Ticket
2. Feature branch
3. Write unit test
4. Periodically merge from main.
5. Implement to get tests to pass
6. Push changes
7. Create PR
8. Wait for PR feedback
9. Address feedback and repeat
10. Close and merge PR
11. Automated CI deploy
12. Integration testing as needed
13. Close ticket
14. Include in next prod release
All of these are good things. But the overhead is significant. And there may be times when you want to do spikes that forgo some of these.
I don't think that this is an indictment of creating the Jira ticket, or prioritization, or anything. It reads to me like a reminder that we often focus too heavily on the other work and thoughts that are adjacent to doing something, get lost in the weeds, and don't actually end up doing the thing.
If you don't create the ticket, it may never get done, too! That not doing the thing might lead to convincing others the thing needs to be done which directly leads to doing the thing.
It may not be doing the thing, but it enabled the thing to be able to be done at all. Cheers to the precursors, the planners and the annotators. Through you, more things are done.
I am creating a jira ticket because I will forget I have done the thing.
I am also creating a jira ticket because 11 months later when another engineer is trying to figure out if the code they're staring at is still actually valuable or if they can rip it out safely, they are going to use git blame to find the pull request where the thing was done, that pull request is going to mention the jira ticket, and the jira ticket is going to reference the design document that justified why we did the thing. If we don't do those things, that engineer is going to yank that functionality out and something way over there is going to break without anybody realizing it broke.
Your mileage may vary. Some teams make the PRs detailed enough that they don't have to fall back on jira. Other teams try to encode this information into unit tests (that helps but it's circular reasoning; the unit test will tell you that somebody at one point thought that this was important enough to verify that it keeps doing the thing; they won't tell you why the thing matters or what customer wanted the thing or whether the thing was the thing we did before we pivoted to doing the new thing cuz the old thing didn't make money).
I see this as a kind of inspiration / perspiration thing, and I’m on Tesla’s side that you perspire less if you think more. I like to not do the thing for a really long time, and then do it quickly, having thought it through. I see some people that jump into things without thinking, and take what is imo the more difficult route, with worse results.
I know there are some things you need to start to really understand what’s going on, but as much as possible I’d rather mull over things a lot and gather information and clarify my thinking before doing the thing.
I'm inspired by this and want to extend it, perhaps telescopically, by discussing what the thing is.
Sometimes we see our task as being, "do C," and we forget the "B" and "A" that come before.
Maybe you can't do "C" without discussing it ("B") or researching how others did it ("A"). In these cases, we shouldn't simply think the thing is "C"—the thing must first be "A," then "B," and then, "C."
If we forget this, we're bound to think "C" is the only thing of value, that it should take an hour and not a week, or that people doing the "A's" or "B's" to enable the "Cs" must be doing nothing at all!
It's not wrong, that's exactly what I'm paying them for. If they didn't have the education then they wouldn't be a doctor, and I wouldn't be seeing them for a consultation.
I'm well compensated not because I'm good at googling things, but because I have a proven track record of being good at googling things. If a junior was able to produce the same results they wouldnt be paid more.
If you pay a doctor, the thing you're doing is paying a doctor. Your "A" or "B" might be booking the appointment or figuring out how to send the payment. I'm not sure I follow.
> Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing
In my book, doing research/understanding the domain is a crucial part of "doing the thing". Often reading about how to do the thing makes you reconsider doing it at all.
I also think this is true, but one thing distinguishes the two and that is commitment. Resarch opens up new possibilities while doing the thing narrows them. Many people (myself included) have difficulties with that. Reading will only get you so far and I think that is what the poem adresses.
Meaningless platitude. All the things mentioned (visualisation, scheduling, breaking into smaller tasks, etc.) are proven to work. If you cannot do a task but you do the above things, you will eventually be able to do the task. You know what isn't proven to work? Willing your brain to "just do it" like this article implies.
Agreed. But there’s still a type of Zeno’s paradox if you don’t start and continue and finish the thing. As someone that has no trouble planning or starting but a lot of trouble continuing to the end, I find this kind of stuff helpful to completing what I set out to do.
Half the struggle is that all the meta actions around doing the thing create a kind of synthetic realness. It feels like progress, but it’s just noise. When the Reality Drift Equation tilts toward excess entropy, your brain mistakes preparation loops for actual work and you end up in identity drift instead of momentum. The only way out is collapsing the loop by acting, not optimizing the wrapper around the action.
Yeah sure. The tricky part is if you even know which action to take.
To actually do that you need to research enough, conceptualize the end goal and envison a rough but workable plan.
Most people don't and blindly stumble going after short term to mid term reward.
Then later life crashes them hard, except for the lucky few.
And the truth is, now some people have many more luck coupons to spend than others.
I have a print out of this on my wall. I also have pretty bad ADHD. It's been on my wall a year and I still haven't done the thing (really a series of small aversive, timeliness and administration heavy things). I oscillate between trying to do the thing, and trying to treat ADHD or at least not regress (sleep (difficult), exercise, nutrition, intoxicants socially only, stay away from digital dopamine sinks (really hard)). Then I have a burst of panic that trying to improve executive function is itself not doing the thing.
I think you really want to be marketing concurrently with doing the thing. Saving it all for the end is probably a mistake. And a lot of projects don't have defined "end"s, like open source projects, or websites.
That depends. If OP’s job is marketing then doing it before is doing the thing even if it pisses off the people who’ll have to do the thing OP made up.
Sometimes doing the thing is just doing a thing and then you get done with some milestone on the thing, you're like "why am I doing this thing. am I crazy for undertaking this thing?"
And yeah you probably are. Only in retrospect will it be knowable if it was worth it or not. Perseverance is necessary but rarely sufficient.
Unless you wasted years by going in the wrong direction which could have been avoided by a week of serious thinking and planning...
(Or even a year. Some mistakes are extremely costly.)
Doing a thing involves doing it, but it's very unlikely that doing a thing will involve exactly one atomic movement. So you have cutpoints at doing the thing.
So to do the thing you first have to decide to do the thing. You have to decide what the thing is, or at least have enough of a vision of the thing to take the first step at doing a thing that might look like the thing.
So "doing the thing" involves a lot of doing things that aren't the thing, but without which you won't get towards the thing.
In other words: sitting down and writing down what the thing is _can very well_ be part of doing the thing.
There's a sort of philosophical point too, about whether the thing is what you think it is. Plenty of people have had the "I thought this feature was going to do X, you thought it was going to do Y, and we all realised the mismatch very late in the process".
I think both visions of the world are valid, and things you can keep in your mind at the same time to deploy as needed.
Or you could try and learn by experience. Software is an example, but so could be drawing or composing music. All of those things have been taken to extreme highs by people who had no idea what they were doing.
Becoming someone who can do the thing is how you get to do a lot of things
Not what your boss and your bosses’ boss wants you to do, instead of doing other things you can do to maximize value for shareholders in some arbitrarily chosen amount of time
But thinking of how you wouldn’t have permission to get ready to do the thing in a business context, also, isn’t doing the thing
It's amazing how many people utterly missed the point. I think the first 6 or so top comments just totally wiffed it.
There is nothing wrong with planning/scheduling/marketing/whatever. But a LOT of people use all that as excuses and never actually do the thing.
If you are the kind of person for whom which those are useful, great. Or if you have the self-displine/self awareness to do all that stuff and still follow through, great. But some people just need to do the fucking thing or they never will.
I had this Ah-Ha moment a while back when I was presenting on how to shorten cloud outage times, by aggregating impact into a list of details, and hustling around to make connections to support engineers and their customers and the poor backend engineers running around trying to make sense of it all. Putting a little bit of structure to it, so other people can realize they can make a difference in a large organization.
I had a colleague make a passive aggressive comment about it being really cool how I put together "obvious" stuff. Well, it is obvious. At the same time, I have never seen him do this "obvious thing".
Doing the thing is being a performer. Making the thing happen somehow is called leadership. It's all about doing the thing, and not just seeing and understanding the thing - that's the easy part.
Yes, holy shit yes.... This has been my sentiment for a while now. I see lots of people everywhere especially on social media talking about the thing and no one actually did the thing or is even attempting to do the thing. Honestly thats why i dont have youtube channels or write blogs or anything past casual posts here or reddit... i always think to myself why waste time talking about the thing when i could be doing it now... anyways ima go back to doing the thing. cheers. !
To be fair though, for any cool thing I've done, before actually doing the thing, I've also spent time doing the things that TFA says aren't doing the thing.
I'm trying to do the thing, but the thing is horribly documented and doesn't work. And nobody seems to know why. So am I still doing the thing if the thing isn't doing its thing?
The thing about that kind of writing is that the thing is a uniquely characterizable thing that is distinguishable from other things that are not the thing, thereby enabling the realization of the thing to be a thing, rather than not a thing.
Writing a thing about things that aren't doing the thing isn't doing the thing unless the thing happens to be writing a thing about things that aren't doing the thing
Writing a comment about a thing that talks about things that aren't doing the thing isn't doing the thing unless the thing happens to be writing a comment about a thing that talks about things that aren't doing the thing
Writing a Python program to write N deep nested sentences on how writing a comment about a comment about a .... (N times) comment is not doing the thing is not doing the thing.
It is certainly a truth that many people have a fear to cross the threshold of doing something for real. That fear is usually a fear of committing to a potentially substandard result or a fear of getting started on the meat of what feels like a herculean problem. In short it is the fear of failing.
As an university level educator that helps students with mostly technical projects (so stuff neither I nor them have ever done): This fear is very common. But what I dislike about this advice is that preparing the thing is often in fact a necessary step of (A) deciding whether the thing is feasible and worth doing and (B) a part of what is needed to do the thing. Drafting the general layout and data flow and UI for your software can save you hours later. Having a good and fleshed out concept for a game may tell you if it is even worth putting years of your own time into it, what resources you will need, a research essay on different ways to detect motion may e what makes or breaks the result of your interactive art installation etc.
So preparation is necessary, but true experience only comes from going beyond the preparation phase. Feel it is impossible to start? Usually that means there is something that you feel insecure with. E.g. your game might need an inventory system and while you have a great idea how it should look and work, you have no idea how to actually program it. And if that small part of your task looks impossible, it makes the whole task appear extra-impossible.
The best way to deal with this is usually tackling the problem head on and make it a proof of concept. The problem is you can't program that inventory, and there are many ways to go at that particular problem, but if you can get a draft inventory going that means your biggest worry is taken care of. That means dealing with the hard part first, even if you tell yourself it is just a proof of concept that won't land in the final thing is a good approach. Divide and conquer. The whole thing seems impossible? Break it down into smaller steps thst seem more managable.
Granted the humorous intent, it's a reductionist outlook. If we were to embrace the premise, then life would be about spawning replacements, or, as is sometimes said, "A chicken is an egg's way to make another egg."
When expressed that way, I must differ. Reproduction per se is the least interesting part of human life. Talking about reproduction is much more interesting ... wait, I think that's called "literature."
> Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing. Reading about how other people did the thing isn't doing the thing."
> Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.
Clearly defining and understanding the thing or, as they say, understanding the problem is half the solution. Real life experiences totally crash the OP statements.
I see lots of comments focusing on cases where there is necessary research still to do.
Which I think misses the point - which is there are times when you’ve already done enough research, but you’re afraid to act so you procrastinate. i.e. not doing the thing.
If you haven't started doing the thing while researching it, you're doing archeology or historiography, not research.
(Different scientific fields. Research requires experiment.)
In order to determine if something is or is not "doing the thing" you must first know what "the thing" is. If it's writing your thoughts on your blog, then this is indeed doing the thing.
Not doing the thing would be: planning to write a blog post, tweeting that you're going to write a blog post, reading articles about how best to word your blog posts, watching some YouTube videos as inspiration, etc.
I think the advice here is an anti procrastination advice: do the thing, don't just think about doing the thing.
- Ignoring that all people are different does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Discovering what procrastination is (and still failing to name it or provide actual coping mechanisms) does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Failing to recognize elementary human behavior does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Utterly neglecting the act of double creation (first imagine, then create) does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Being energetic and with only a few tasks at hand and writing off everyone else as lazy does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Writing a post about human psychology does not make you an expert in human psychology
I would continue my list, but gotta go. To do... , you know.
Today I learned that I know what the thing is, not because I know what the thing is, but because I was informed that I know what the thing is, and that to know what the thing is merely requires to be informed that I know by any person willing to allege such possession of knowledge, thereby eliminating any effort on my part to know the thing and appropriating such effort imposed on other persons whom are able and willing to indicate to me that I know the thing.
All true, but worth noting that sometimes making that to-do list is the first step to doing the thing because picking the first item off the list and taking 10 minutes to do it is doing the thing. If you aren't doing the thing because it's a monolith in your brain that is going to consume the next 6 months of your life and you're paralyzed by its enormity, salami slicing 10 minute chunks off the front of it can be a good way to get started.
What's the thing? If we're being shitty about systems neurodivergent people use to get their laundry done, stop. If you're complaining about the overhead it takes to manage a project with 10,000+ people, yeah no. If there are 2 ICs, 4 managers, a TPM, a PM, a other "P" PM, a UX person, an HR person and a lawyer, yeah you might have a point.
> Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
For some types of work, the work we call prep work is 90% of the work and most of what determines how well the finished product turns out.
Painting is a good example. You can grab a bucket of paint and paint brush and start “doing the thing” by slapping paint on the surface. Your paint job is going to be very poor and fail early relative to a professional who properly sands, cleans the surface, preps the work area, and does it right. You might save some time now by skipping straight to doing the thing, but you might also lose more time later when you have to repeat the job because the paint is peeling or you’re cleaning up a paint mess that spilled on to another surface because you didn’t prepare.
I think in this example those prep work items _are_ doing the thing.
But then telling people about a new product could also be doing the thing.
There’s definitely something to be said for defining what the thing really is being an important part of doing it, but that can also spiral out of control into not doing the thing.
I think thingness is more of a variable property of the current thing you are doing. Than a binary is or isn’t the thing.
All we can really do is regularly check how much the thingness of the current thing is aligned with the main thing’s thingness.
Prep work sucks. In whatever field, I always love hearing from the greats how they make the hard work a little less sucky. Good tools, better workflows, figuring out what they can let slide, accepting the struggle and getting zen. The people who do it 80% right and manage to make peace with that always seem the most productive.
I don’t think prep work sucks. Cleaning up after, though… Although maybe that’s just prep work for the next time ;-).
Unless doing the thing well matters to you.
How do you like those 80% Boeing aircraft with optional parts that may or may not come away in flight?
You can do a good job if you want to. But that usually required taking a step back and thinking about these 20% you didn't manage last time. Maybe you use the wrong approach, the wrong tool, maybe your tool is no longer sharp because you told yourself prep sucks. 80/20 is a good philosophy if you just want to earn a living, but a bad philosophy if you want to reach mastery (which coincidentally can translate into making a relatively good living).
The important part is, that the greats never were okay with just 80%. Their goal is usually to make the best work they can and that means improving on things they have previously done. That doesn't mean the project needs more work or resources. It means it makes best use of the work and resources available while delivering something that satisfies the masters quality standards.
Also: In some cases 80/20 mediocrity does in fact not cut it and it is just an excuse to do less work and not to think hard about things.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. It's complicated.
I'm a perfectionist miniature painter by hobby. I love the stories floating around about how quantity can lead to quality (photography, pottery): https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality...
In most of my hobbies I feel like my growth and talent is limited by lack of volume, not my care or attention to detail. It's hard to let go and use one color instead of three, or not fix a flaw in model part nobody will ever see. I'm sure other people have the opposite challenge.
In the Viable System Model[0], "doing the thing" is System 1. Yes of course you need System 1 or the thing won't get done.
But in any viable system, you also have the "meta-systems", Systems 2-5:
- System 2: coordination between multiple Systems 1 (which includes prioritization, communication, and exceptional conditions)
- System 3: resource allocation and process development
- System 4: strategy and risk management
- System 5: values and holistic organizational design
As a human, you are also striving to be a viable system. You can't only just "do the thing", you have to:
- prioritize which thing to do
- take notes and keep records to communicate between past and future versions of yourself
- make sure you have the requisite resources for doing the thing
- construct your environment and processes for long-term success (habits not motivation)
- consider what happens when the thing is done and how it fits into your larger strategy
- keep your head and heart connected to make sure you're doing the right thing
None of these things are doing the thing! But they're also rather essential for getting the right things done well.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model
Thing is, you have to start doing the thing to figure out what things you need to do the thing.
Well, to really know how things would pan out, you have to indeed do the thing.
And it happens that people will procrastinate with preparation. But as someone who does not and is fast at doing things I can tell you that if I want something done really fast preparation will be a good chunk of a projects time. If I want to toy around and the project doesn't matter that much, just doing the thing may do the trick.
Now the advice on that site aims to get people started with the actual work part and tries to do so by telling you preparation doesn't matter. That is not true. But it is true that people prepare forever because they are afraid to cross the threshold where they start translating grand ideas into concrete, protentially flawed reality. That means actually good advice would deal with the question where this fear comes from, how to address it and how to notice you have been preparing too long.
If you want to build a house, drawing the plans and finding the right location where to put said house is part of building a house. Or you could just mash bricks on top of each other in your backyard and then realize you forgot the foundation.
Yes. Also, attempting to do the thing and failing is indeed doing the thing. (although you may only know in retrospect)
Certainly, but don't get confused: You are not doing the thing, until you do the thing.
There are many ways to do the thing. There are many more ways to not do the thing.
Oh you are absolutely doing the thing in this situation, as in you're in the process of doing it, somewhere between 1% and 99% of the way there depending on the context. You haven't done the thing until you actually fully do the thing, it is true. But most of the work could be in this preparatory meta work, and of course it means nothing without the final all important step of doing the thing, but there you have it, doing the thing before having fully done the thing.
That's right, you're not producing paperclips unless one minute you have metal wire and the next minute you have a paperclip.
Au contraire! Almost all the time you spend doing the thing is actually doing the things required before the final completion of the thing. I've taken to calling this "the work before the work" and it's at least 90% of the work.
Example: I get asked at the start of a project to provide ModbusTCP comms mapping for a new control panel, so that the client can start integrating it into their SCADA system. It's just a spreadsheet, maybe 100 rows, how hard could it be? They need it right now, why am I telling them it'll take 6 months?
Typing the addresses and descriptions into the spreadsheet is 'the work', and it only takes an afternoon, but it can't start until we do the work before the work:
- To document the ModbusTCP mapping I need to the PLC program
- To finish the PLC program I need the electrical drawings
- To finish the electrical drawings, the electrical engineer needs the device list, datasheets for all the devices, and the functional spec
- To finish the device list and functional spec, we need to agree with the client exactly what we're building and what it's meant to do
None of these things are 'the work' but all of them are 'the work before the work' and usually nobody wants to do, to wait for, or pay for this work.
You can’t know in the moment whether the thing you are doing is doing the thing. In retrospect alone does it become clear.
This would have been neat in business school
Business school is a great way to postpone doing the thing...
writing this reply on hackernews is not "doing the thing" bro.
You have no idea what my thing is and whether or not I'm doing it via this post on HN.
Some replies I have made in Hacker news I later expanded, refined, and included in my classes or books.
Right but I see this taken too far. Getting side eyed for creating a Jira ticket not doing it now. Dude, I am creating a Jira ticket because I have 100 things to do and need to actual priorise this! If I do stuff in the order of serendipity I will definitely be inefficient.
It does add up though.
All of these are good things. But the overhead is significant. And there may be times when you want to do spikes that forgo some of these.I don't think that this is an indictment of creating the Jira ticket, or prioritization, or anything. It reads to me like a reminder that we often focus too heavily on the other work and thoughts that are adjacent to doing something, get lost in the weeds, and don't actually end up doing the thing.
If you don't create the ticket, it may never get done, too! That not doing the thing might lead to convincing others the thing needs to be done which directly leads to doing the thing.
It may not be doing the thing, but it enabled the thing to be able to be done at all. Cheers to the precursors, the planners and the annotators. Through you, more things are done.
I am creating a jira ticket because I will forget I have done the thing.
I am also creating a jira ticket because 11 months later when another engineer is trying to figure out if the code they're staring at is still actually valuable or if they can rip it out safely, they are going to use git blame to find the pull request where the thing was done, that pull request is going to mention the jira ticket, and the jira ticket is going to reference the design document that justified why we did the thing. If we don't do those things, that engineer is going to yank that functionality out and something way over there is going to break without anybody realizing it broke.
Your mileage may vary. Some teams make the PRs detailed enough that they don't have to fall back on jira. Other teams try to encode this information into unit tests (that helps but it's circular reasoning; the unit test will tell you that somebody at one point thought that this was important enough to verify that it keeps doing the thing; they won't tell you why the thing matters or what customer wanted the thing or whether the thing was the thing we did before we pivoted to doing the new thing cuz the old thing didn't make money).
It's called documentation. Somehow people forget to include a non-external service dependent version with their code these days.
Probably because "nobody is paid for doing that".
I see this as a kind of inspiration / perspiration thing, and I’m on Tesla’s side that you perspire less if you think more. I like to not do the thing for a really long time, and then do it quickly, having thought it through. I see some people that jump into things without thinking, and take what is imo the more difficult route, with worse results.
I know there are some things you need to start to really understand what’s going on, but as much as possible I’d rather mull over things a lot and gather information and clarify my thinking before doing the thing.
A: There's the right way, the wrong way, and THEN THE MAX POWER WAY!
B: Isn't that just the wrong way?
A: Yes! But faster!
Honestly sometimes that's the right way.
I'm inspired by this and want to extend it, perhaps telescopically, by discussing what the thing is.
Sometimes we see our task as being, "do C," and we forget the "B" and "A" that come before.
Maybe you can't do "C" without discussing it ("B") or researching how others did it ("A"). In these cases, we shouldn't simply think the thing is "C"—the thing must first be "A," then "B," and then, "C."
If we forget this, we're bound to think "C" is the only thing of value, that it should take an hour and not a week, or that people doing the "A's" or "B's" to enable the "Cs" must be doing nothing at all!
You pay a doctor for a consultation. saying you paid the doctor for medical school and for the legacy of doctors that came before him is.... wrong.
It's not wrong, that's exactly what I'm paying them for. If they didn't have the education then they wouldn't be a doctor, and I wouldn't be seeing them for a consultation.
I'm well compensated not because I'm good at googling things, but because I have a proven track record of being good at googling things. If a junior was able to produce the same results they wouldnt be paid more.
Who's paying to school them at googling? Certainly not you...
If paying for medical school is not what youre doing why not just do your doctors appointment at Burger King?
If you pay a doctor, the thing you're doing is paying a doctor. Your "A" or "B" might be booking the appointment or figuring out how to send the payment. I'm not sure I follow.
$5 for adjusting the screw. $495 for knowing which screw to adjust.
> Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing
In my book, doing research/understanding the domain is a crucial part of "doing the thing". Often reading about how to do the thing makes you reconsider doing it at all.
I also think this is true, but one thing distinguishes the two and that is commitment. Resarch opens up new possibilities while doing the thing narrows them. Many people (myself included) have difficulties with that. Reading will only get you so far and I think that is what the poem adresses.
Meaningless platitude. All the things mentioned (visualisation, scheduling, breaking into smaller tasks, etc.) are proven to work. If you cannot do a task but you do the above things, you will eventually be able to do the task. You know what isn't proven to work? Willing your brain to "just do it" like this article implies.
Agreed. But there’s still a type of Zeno’s paradox if you don’t start and continue and finish the thing. As someone that has no trouble planning or starting but a lot of trouble continuing to the end, I find this kind of stuff helpful to completing what I set out to do.
As Jobs said “real artists ship.”
Half the struggle is that all the meta actions around doing the thing create a kind of synthetic realness. It feels like progress, but it’s just noise. When the Reality Drift Equation tilts toward excess entropy, your brain mistakes preparation loops for actual work and you end up in identity drift instead of momentum. The only way out is collapsing the loop by acting, not optimizing the wrapper around the action.
Yeah sure. The tricky part is if you even know which action to take. To actually do that you need to research enough, conceptualize the end goal and envison a rough but workable plan.
Most people don't and blindly stumble going after short term to mid term reward. Then later life crashes them hard, except for the lucky few.
And the truth is, now some people have many more luck coupons to spend than others.
I have a print out of this on my wall. I also have pretty bad ADHD. It's been on my wall a year and I still haven't done the thing (really a series of small aversive, timeliness and administration heavy things). I oscillate between trying to do the thing, and trying to treat ADHD or at least not regress (sleep (difficult), exercise, nutrition, intoxicants socially only, stay away from digital dopamine sinks (really hard)). Then I have a burst of panic that trying to improve executive function is itself not doing the thing.
I wonder what thing the author was avoiding when they published this thing ;)
IIRC, the author said somewhere that this essay was effectively a “note to self”.
did they tweet about doing the thing while not doing the thing?
Maybe his thing was “write an article about things that aren’t doing the thing”. :)
yep hev forgot to add "riding this blog post" to the list
Marketing is absolutely doing the thing; ignore this to your peril. I don't think reality is quite as binary as this post suggests.
But that would be doing the thing after you’ve done the thing no?
I think you really want to be marketing concurrently with doing the thing. Saving it all for the end is probably a mistake. And a lot of projects don't have defined "end"s, like open source projects, or websites.
That depends. If OP’s job is marketing then doing it before is doing the thing even if it pisses off the people who’ll have to do the thing OP made up.
Movie trailers come out before production is finished. In fact sometimes before production has even meaningfully started.
I am sitting on the toilet right now, and while reading this article, I am really actually doing the thing.
At the core, doing is paramount.
But doing the wrong thing, poorly, is also not doing the thing. To avoid that, you need to do some of the things that the post mentions.
That concludes my morning dose of Zen.
Sometimes doing the thing is just doing a thing and then you get done with some milestone on the thing, you're like "why am I doing this thing. am I crazy for undertaking this thing?"
And yeah you probably are. Only in retrospect will it be knowable if it was worth it or not. Perseverance is necessary but rarely sufficient.
It doesn't matter how fast you are moving if you are going in the wrong direction.
Nonetheless, these are good points.
Well, if you learn something along the way that teaches you what the right direction is, then you still made progress.
Unless you wasted years by going in the wrong direction which could have been avoided by a week of serious thinking and planning... (Or even a year. Some mistakes are extremely costly.)
If you have no idea how to do the thing, isn't reading about how others did the thing doing the thing?
This hints at the antithesis to this article
Doing a thing involves doing it, but it's very unlikely that doing a thing will involve exactly one atomic movement. So you have cutpoints at doing the thing.
So to do the thing you first have to decide to do the thing. You have to decide what the thing is, or at least have enough of a vision of the thing to take the first step at doing a thing that might look like the thing.
So "doing the thing" involves a lot of doing things that aren't the thing, but without which you won't get towards the thing.
In other words: sitting down and writing down what the thing is _can very well_ be part of doing the thing.
There's a sort of philosophical point too, about whether the thing is what you think it is. Plenty of people have had the "I thought this feature was going to do X, you thought it was going to do Y, and we all realised the mismatch very late in the process".
I think both visions of the world are valid, and things you can keep in your mind at the same time to deploy as needed.
"Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be entreated not to hit the nail at all." -- Nietzsche
Or you could try and learn by experience. Software is an example, but so could be drawing or composing music. All of those things have been taken to extreme highs by people who had no idea what they were doing.
Naivety has its perks.
No, you’ll still need to do it.
Yes just do it without knowing how to do it! That always works out well.
In software, where the consequences for initial failure are extremely minimal, sometimes it does actually work well.
But learning about, while possibly a prerequisite, still isn’t getting it done.
The point is: don’t stop at learning how to do the thing.
Actually do the thing.
So skip medical school and grab a scalpel and cut out brain tumours?
I don’t believe I ever said “don’t learn how to do the thing”.
But many learn how to do the thing, and still never do it.
Then it isn't a thing you can do.
Becoming someone who can do the thing is how you get to do a lot of things
Not what your boss and your bosses’ boss wants you to do, instead of doing other things you can do to maximize value for shareholders in some arbitrarily chosen amount of time
But thinking of how you wouldn’t have permission to get ready to do the thing in a business context, also, isn’t doing the thing
LinkedIn is over there.
So obnoxious. More bullshit to make us self-conscious.
It's amazing how many people utterly missed the point. I think the first 6 or so top comments just totally wiffed it.
There is nothing wrong with planning/scheduling/marketing/whatever. But a LOT of people use all that as excuses and never actually do the thing.
If you are the kind of person for whom which those are useful, great. Or if you have the self-displine/self awareness to do all that stuff and still follow through, great. But some people just need to do the fucking thing or they never will.
Source: I'm one of those people.
Having a meeting about doing the thing isn’t doing the thing
There's a Romanian proverb: Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
Corollary: Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today, put off until the day after tomorrow, maybe by then it won't be necessary.
I had this Ah-Ha moment a while back when I was presenting on how to shorten cloud outage times, by aggregating impact into a list of details, and hustling around to make connections to support engineers and their customers and the poor backend engineers running around trying to make sense of it all. Putting a little bit of structure to it, so other people can realize they can make a difference in a large organization.
I had a colleague make a passive aggressive comment about it being really cool how I put together "obvious" stuff. Well, it is obvious. At the same time, I have never seen him do this "obvious thing".
Doing the thing is being a performer. Making the thing happen somehow is called leadership. It's all about doing the thing, and not just seeing and understanding the thing - that's the easy part.
What about reading about the thing which is about reading a thing is then the thing of doing the thing.
Yes, holy shit yes.... This has been my sentiment for a while now. I see lots of people everywhere especially on social media talking about the thing and no one actually did the thing or is even attempting to do the thing. Honestly thats why i dont have youtube channels or write blogs or anything past casual posts here or reddit... i always think to myself why waste time talking about the thing when i could be doing it now... anyways ima go back to doing the thing. cheers. !
To be fair though, for any cool thing I've done, before actually doing the thing, I've also spent time doing the things that TFA says aren't doing the thing.
Helps me get pumped up or whatever
I'm trying to do the thing, but the thing is horribly documented and doesn't work. And nobody seems to know why. So am I still doing the thing if the thing isn't doing its thing?
Then the thing becomes :
Understand how to do the thing
Do the thing
Write down fresh documentation about the thing
1st line: >Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
One day, when I get enough spare time, I will make the thing. I even have some components ready.
Until then I daydream of how I will make it and how it will fit together.
If I never get round to it then that time will have been wasted. But if I do, all that daydreaming will have been useful mental prototyping.
But was it «doing the thing»?
Writing about what things aren't doing the thing is not doing the thing.
The thing about that kind of writing is that the thing is a uniquely characterizable thing that is distinguishable from other things that are not the thing, thereby enabling the realization of the thing to be a thing, rather than not a thing.
Writing a thing about things that aren't doing the thing isn't doing the thing unless the thing happens to be writing a thing about things that aren't doing the thing
Writing a comment about a thing that talks about things that aren't doing the thing isn't doing the thing unless the thing happens to be writing a comment about a thing that talks about things that aren't doing the thing
Writing a Python program to write N deep nested sentences on how writing a comment about a comment about a .... (N times) comment is not doing the thing is not doing the thing.
For skilled, innovative, and complex work, all the things he says is not doing the thing: are part of doing the thing.
This post is foolish and self-destructive.
If I trace backward from the ideas that earn me money and prestige today, every one of them is rooted in playful or apparently unproductive behavior.
> Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.
Don’t agree. Planning steps is part of doing the thing.
I was thinking the same, but at the end of the day the author has a point and it's not doing the thing.
Super reductionist, is the moment between clicks on the keyboard also not doing the thing?
It is certainly a truth that many people have a fear to cross the threshold of doing something for real. That fear is usually a fear of committing to a potentially substandard result or a fear of getting started on the meat of what feels like a herculean problem. In short it is the fear of failing.
As an university level educator that helps students with mostly technical projects (so stuff neither I nor them have ever done): This fear is very common. But what I dislike about this advice is that preparing the thing is often in fact a necessary step of (A) deciding whether the thing is feasible and worth doing and (B) a part of what is needed to do the thing. Drafting the general layout and data flow and UI for your software can save you hours later. Having a good and fleshed out concept for a game may tell you if it is even worth putting years of your own time into it, what resources you will need, a research essay on different ways to detect motion may e what makes or breaks the result of your interactive art installation etc.
So preparation is necessary, but true experience only comes from going beyond the preparation phase. Feel it is impossible to start? Usually that means there is something that you feel insecure with. E.g. your game might need an inventory system and while you have a great idea how it should look and work, you have no idea how to actually program it. And if that small part of your task looks impossible, it makes the whole task appear extra-impossible.
The best way to deal with this is usually tackling the problem head on and make it a proof of concept. The problem is you can't program that inventory, and there are many ways to go at that particular problem, but if you can get a draft inventory going that means your biggest worry is taken care of. That means dealing with the hard part first, even if you tell yourself it is just a proof of concept that won't land in the final thing is a good approach. Divide and conquer. The whole thing seems impossible? Break it down into smaller steps thst seem more managable.
Doing the thing without preparing to do the thing is, depending on your exact definitions, either unwise or impossible.
Granted the humorous intent, it's a reductionist outlook. If we were to embrace the premise, then life would be about spawning replacements, or, as is sometimes said, "A chicken is an egg's way to make another egg."
When expressed that way, I must differ. Reproduction per se is the least interesting part of human life. Talking about reproduction is much more interesting ... wait, I think that's called "literature."
This gives very strong War of Art (Pressfield) vibes.
As simple as it is, just remembering this is enough to make me go do the thing.
And on that note, back to the thing.
Didn't that roughly end with "dying of cancer isn't doing the thing"?
I distinctly recall it becoming a bit extreme in the last chapter(s).
ok
i'm pretty sure there is a "oh no!" comics (https://webcomicname.com/) saying the same but i couldn't find it
https://webcomicname.com/post/183722270609
I am replying to this post without planning whst to actually say
I must add: discussing (or showing HN) To-Do apps or systems on how best organize yourself to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
> Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing. Reading about how other people did the thing isn't doing the thing."
> Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.
Clearly defining and understanding the thing or, as they say, understanding the problem is half the solution. Real life experiences totally crash the OP statements.
Obligatory https://youtu.be/mofRHlO1E_A?si=aEimHOsDYa3FkGYv
-Nike
Y'all saying things like "but you still need prioritization and tracking, bro!" are not the target audience of this post.
I see lots of comments focusing on cases where there is necessary research still to do.
Which I think misses the point - which is there are times when you’ve already done enough research, but you’re afraid to act so you procrastinate. i.e. not doing the thing.
If you haven't started doing the thing while researching it, you're doing archeology or historiography, not research. (Different scientific fields. Research requires experiment.)
See also: "brain crack" (2006) https://archive.org/details/zefrank-theshow-080
And now we have a whole post about not doing the thing, which is also not doing the thing.
In order to determine if something is or is not "doing the thing" you must first know what "the thing" is. If it's writing your thoughts on your blog, then this is indeed doing the thing.
Not doing the thing would be: planning to write a blog post, tweeting that you're going to write a blog post, reading articles about how best to word your blog posts, watching some YouTube videos as inspiration, etc.
I think the advice here is an anti procrastination advice: do the thing, don't just think about doing the thing.
Here's my take, in no particular order:
- Ignoring that all people are different does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Discovering what procrastination is (and still failing to name it or provide actual coping mechanisms) does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Failing to recognize elementary human behavior does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Utterly neglecting the act of double creation (first imagine, then create) does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Being energetic and with only a few tasks at hand and writing off everyone else as lazy does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Writing a post about human psychology does not make you an expert in human psychology
I would continue my list, but gotta go. To do... , you know.
Today I learned that I know what the thing is, not because I know what the thing is, but because I was informed that I know what the thing is, and that to know what the thing is merely requires to be informed that I know by any person willing to allege such possession of knowledge, thereby eliminating any effort on my part to know the thing and appropriating such effort imposed on other persons whom are able and willing to indicate to me that I know the thing.
All true, but worth noting that sometimes making that to-do list is the first step to doing the thing because picking the first item off the list and taking 10 minutes to do it is doing the thing. If you aren't doing the thing because it's a monolith in your brain that is going to consume the next 6 months of your life and you're paralyzed by its enormity, salami slicing 10 minute chunks off the front of it can be a good way to get started.
Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Advice from my Grandpap before he died (must read!)
What's the thing? If we're being shitty about systems neurodivergent people use to get their laundry done, stop. If you're complaining about the overhead it takes to manage a project with 10,000+ people, yeah no. If there are 2 ICs, 4 managers, a TPM, a PM, a other "P" PM, a UX person, an HR person and a lawyer, yeah you might have a point.