Just do it

I was toying with a few different titles for this article. Something like "Over-planning leads to failure". I ultimately landed on "Just do it". Just build the app, just start the business, just clean the house, just send the e-mail, just make the phone call, just have the conversation... just do it.

See, I am a planner, but I wasn't always. Some people seem to thrive in this mode, but I seem to drown in it. I don't know exactly when it changed, but it was a distinct shift in how I approached problems, which further progressed into how I approached life. It wasn't a good change overall for me, and in-fact it wasn't even something I realised was a change in me until very recently.

The first website I ever built was a video game cheat-code website. I used to take all of the cheats from my Playstation Magazine and Nintendo Powers and pop them on my little website built with Homestead. This was the late 90's and I was probably 9 or 10 years old. I didn't know about copyright or really anything, my Dad made me take the website down. I knew I had something I wanted to do so I did it.

I became quite good at working in the abstract. Fast-forward a bunch of years and most of the projects I built, both personally and professionally spawned from essentially a single sentence.

I wonder if I can create a Forum for gamers?

We need a control panel to manage our fleet of physical servers in a few data centres.

How can we grade students doing ultrasounds when we have eye tracking data, and a video feed?

How can we equip remote workers to do their best work anywhere in the world?

One prompt, no planning and just action. These are all things I've done and worked on along with a slew of other green-field projects that were spawned in almost the same way.

They were all built solving one problem at a time. Building off each win. Discovering an understanding of the problem domain by iterating fast, getting feedback and making the necessary changes. So what happened?

I honestly don't know! I know anticlimactic right? Hey, it took me long enough to understand that there was a shift.

It's time to just do it!

There is a difference between building something new and further developing and maintaining something. This whole post revolves around building something new.