A common problem which I have is that I daydream up these complicated, quite ambitious projects, and then I set the bar for the first version to match what is in my head. In software engineering, we would call this architecture astronauting, where you are more focused on abstraction and the system around what you are doing and then the essence of the thing which you are doing itself.

The essence of this project is to create a weekly cadence of intentionally planning my week, executing against that plan, and then sharing what I did last week. The main reason I wrote the Just Get Started essay was to give myself permission to do the rough version of this project.

I mainly write for myself. Past Me benefits by doing things, that I wouldn’t have other wise, so that I can write about them. Present Me benefits by being more intentional about the things I am doing as I write about them, and the Future me gets to reference what Present Me wrote.

March 7, 2025, was my half birthday, or as my mother calls it Ram Day. In the last six months, particularly the period from about a month before my 25th birthday to now, there has been a fundamental shift in the trajectory of my life (something that I will talk more about later).

I started being able to coordinate with myself over the span of a day (i.e. consistently completing my daily todo list) and am now working on coordinating with myself over the span of a week https://t.co/Nk2OukgkTu

— Ram Vasuthevan (12/100) (@RamVasuthevan) March 25, 2025

(This tweet is worth being expanded into an essay, but making that a blocker for publishing this essay will turn this update, which was posted a week late, into an update which was never posted.)

I am now working on coordinating with myself over a week. I have been daydreaming about this project for months now, thinking about what the best version of it looks like. But those were months of me avoiding contact with reality. I am afraid that this is going to be a failure. That I will have poor execution or just get bored and stop. But failure is a risk that you must take on when starting any project.

But I will leave with this mantra from one of my favourite intellectuals, Visakan Veerasamy:

1. Do it 100 times.

Write 100 songs, cook 100 omelettes, talk to 100 people. It never seems like a huge deal until you try it yourself. It’s manageable, and yet it stretches you, and you’ll be observably different at the end of it. Effective way to get a foothold on a new thing

— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) November 23, 2020

Write 100 weekly updates. Start 100 side-projects. Just Get Started.

This is mostly a letter to myself. I am drafting this by rambling into Google Recorder in an attempt to capture my shower thoughts before they slip away.

If you can perceive excellence, if you have taste, you are cursed to perpetually see the flaws in your work. The work you produce will never be as good as the works that inspired you to create it. This is necessary for improvement. How can you get better if you cannot see the flaws in what you created and where you need to improve?

But it is important that you remember that those you look up to got there through thousands of iteration loops. If you set the quality bar for releasing work to be the same as the quality of the work that inspired it, then you will never get started.

The only way forward is to just get started, learn something about the world, publish and then repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

And then, gradually, over time, you will improve. One of my favourite writers is Patio11 (Patrick McKenzie). Bits About Money has one of the highest signal-to-noise ratios of any publication I’ve read. He seems to try to make every piece into the canonical piece for non-experts to come up to speed on a topic.

But McKenzie started writing in 2006 about what he was working on that day. The 2nd post on kalzumeus.com is Dev Journal: First Three Days in the Trenches, which is 570 words (according to str stats) on setting up a payment page in the days before Stripe.

Over 20 years of honing his craft and publishing 4.3 million words (as of 2025-03-23), he has earned the right to move his quality bar from journaling about what he did over his weekend for an audience of one to responding to congressional testimony and being heard in the corridors of power.

The only way to raise the quality of your work to match the quality of the work of those who you respect is just to get started, create something, publish it, learn something about the world in the process and then repeat hundreds or thousands of times. That seems like a lot of work and a lot of time. But if you didn't do that, what work were you going to do instead? Let's be honest: your opportunity cost is doom scrolling Twitter, vegging out to Netflix, or getting your mind fried by reels-style content (e.g. TikTok). Time is going to pass anyway, so you might as well put good use to it.

I know this. I have about written this before, in my other blog, Bits, Bips and Bricks and on Twitter many times, but I still struggle to give myself permission to just get started.

But I need to just get started.