What can you do right now?
My most important lesson from 12 years of blogging
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On the rickety art-table-turned-computer-desk, in the living room of my $565/month apartment in Omaha, Nebraska, 12 years ago today I wrote my first blog post. It would be the worst blog post I’ve ever written, except it’s actually the best blog post I’ve ever written.
I’m glad I decided to just jump into it. I have a tendancy [sic], when I’m learning something new, to try to take in every detail of something before I attempt it. The result is a sort of paralysis.
I had been suffering from the fortress fallacy. I was following bloggers such as Jason Santa Maria, Jason Kottke, and Doug Bowman, all of whom were light years ahead of me. They had well-designed blogs with great writing, and lots of people were reading them. It was intimidating.
I had let my vision of what a blog could be get in the way of just trying to do what I was capable of in the moment.
It would be the worst blog post I’ve ever written for very obvious reasons: It has no real point, it’s all just a jumbled run-on paragraph, and it even has a misspelling.
But, it’s the best blog post I’ve ever written simply because I wrote the damn thing. Once I had finally taken action, it was easy to continue taking action.
Once I fought through my perfection paralysis and hit Publish on my first blog post, my brain lit up with possibility. I wrote my second blog post immediately after my first. I wrote two blog posts the next day.
Within 4 days, I had coded a new template. A year later, I moved to Silicon Valley for my new job.
6 years later, I got a book deal. Now, I live wherever I want.
Before I took action, my blog was just a thing that could be: if only x, y, z. Once I had taken action, it was a living, breathing thing that needed my care. I had given myself the puppy.
I see it all of the time, and I still fight with it myself: That dream you have can actually hold you back.
The perfection you see in your mind’s eye competes with here and now: If only you could find the right idea, if only you could code, if only you could find the right co-founder—then you would be successful.
Your dream is not it. This is it. If you don’t have a good idea, start with a bad idea, if you can’t code an application, code a tutorial, if you don’t have a co-founder, see what you can do on your own.
Your dream can be your guiding star. It can be a tool you use to remind yourself to keep going. But nothing matters more than what you can do right now; and if you don’t do it right now, you can’t appreciate how far you’ve come later.
Every Thursday on my podcast, Love Your Work, I bring you new lessons on how to make your dream happen. Learn how Timehop’s Jonathan Wegener cut his teeth on a strangely popular NYC subway app.
