Starting doing something
Hi. I’m starting something right now and something occurred to me. While I’ve heard, read and seen a wealth of documentation about people starting a variety of projects, the documentation usually starts once the project has reached a point of individual commitment that seems to come out of nowhere. I want to explore where that commitment comes from because it seems really non-obvious to me.
Over the course of my life I’ve had hundreds of ideas that I’ve felt interested in but never started acting on. Thoughts that seem worth exploring, solutions to problems that seem worth solving. I’ve thought about writing a book about God, learning how to dance, trying to save the world from the risks of AI.
By the same token I’ve also had more than a few ideas that I have acted on. A secure and anonymous bookmarking service, a Twitter account of creepy sci fi haikus, working in San Francisco as a software engineer.
The ideas that become reality aren’t necessarily the better ideas. Over the last few years I’ve learned that there’s a sequence of stages between me having an idea and becoming committed to it. I used to lump all of these stages in together and say something like “I have an idea”. Now I say something like:
- This is an idea… (random thought)
- I’ve thought about it and this is a good idea… (seems somewhat novel, somewhat achievable, somewhat valuable)
- I want to do this… (desire)
- I’ve decided to do this… (soft commitment)
- I’m planning to do this… (thinking about how I would actually go about it)
- On Saturday I’m doing this… (concrete plan)
- I’m currently doing this… (action)
The goal of statements 1–3 is to decide whether I’m interested enough that I want to do something. Once I know what I want the goal of statements 3–7 is to psychologically drag the risk-averse part of my brain down a slippery slope to getting what I want before I forget about it and move on.
These are also statements to tell my friends and family. Telling people I care about what my wants, decisions, plans and activities are builds my commitment to the project. I don’t want to disappoint my friends and family.
By saying these things in order I have gone from having an idea to starting a project. Some steps are skipped for small projects, and others are expanded for more ambitious projects.
So all that being said, I have an idea to write a very honest series of blog posts about making a text / terminal based adventure game, something that I will largely be learning how to do as I go.
I’ve thought about it and I haven’t read many tech blog posts that dive into the actual process of software design and engineering: trying stuff, getting stuff wrong, asking for help, learning stuff, and fixing stuff. I’ve been doing all of those things for years in software engineering and I’m a half decent writer so I know a blog like this is achievable. I also think it would be valuable to people who want to get into software engineering but don’t know how to get started, or haven’t yet learned to love the psychological vulnerability that comes with committing to do something you have no idea how to do (hint: you’re not alone and the hardest thing about software for me is every single day deciding it’s okay to not yet know exactly how I’m going to do what I want to do).
The idea for the game is also somewhat novel (you play as a disembodied artificially intelligent hacker stealing secrets on behalf of a shadowy crime syndicate — I particularly like the idea that the reason that the game is terminal based is simply the nature of the player character), achievable (I can code in several languages already but might try a new one for this — more on this in a later post) and valuable (it can teach people about computer security and expand how people think about AI risk).
I don’t know for a fact that these things are novel. At this point if somebody has already done it that doesn’t really matter to me all that much. If it’s not novel eventually somebody will tell me who I’m copying and I’ll have learned something that I never would have if I had never started.
So I want to make this game and this blog. I mean I’ve decided to do it. I’m planning on it. Starting this weekend. I mean I’m already sort of working on it.
