Just get Started

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

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.