Is "Just Get Started" a Flawed Idea?
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
It boils down to: majority of people under-start, not over-start.
Let's assume the following numbers:
10% start at the right time
10% start too early
80% don't start at all
Those are, obviously, arbitrary numbers, but I do believe them to be "in the ballpark".
When you're giving generic advice on the internet, that you cannot customize to an individual, the message clearly should be "just get started", because it targets the problem majority of people have. Yes, it's a crude approximation of truth, which is always more nuanced, but a blanket contradiction is certainly not the right answer.
What the article is saying is that it's better to start at the right time than to start too early. It is also an obvious statement and a shallow one because it fails to consider that there are more states to analyze: starting too early, starting at the right time and starting too late and not at all. Starting at the right time is clearly the best choice but if you are to choose between starting too early or not at all, starting too early is a better choice and most people make a mistake of not starting at all and not starting too early.
If someone is setting out to make a career and betting their whole life on it, then 'just get started' is really bad advice. If someone is testing the waters and wants to find out if a career is for them, then 'just get started' is the perfect advice. There's no quicker way to find out what you're getting into than to get into it.
Yes, you'll likely choke on your first time. We learn from failure better than success. "What doesn't kill you will make you stronger."
I start new hobbies all the time. I just jump in and start playing with it. I've found some that are really nice, and some that I apparently just don't have any innate skill for. (That hasn't actually stopped me on some of them!) And at one point, my current career was just a hobby.
Just get started.
The way I see it, what this post is saying is that "Just starting" isn't good enough, since you have to stick with it, sometimes for a long time, before reaching any measure of success. I completely agree with this idea. But I think you'll find that most of the people saying "just get started" are already following it up with "you have to stick to it for a long time to succeed".
In fact, the origin of the common "just start" lesson is the fact that many successful people look at their achievements and think (rightly or not) that they're something anyone can do. The most common reason other people don't do it is because they don't believe they can, hence the "just get started and stick to it, you can succeed too" advice.
The point is nothing will get your idea honed and your skills improved than just starting. Maybe it won't succeed... but that's actually not the point. I don't think anyone is saying "just start" is the key to success (though clearly a prerequisite). I think they are saying that trying and not succeeding is better than never doing anything. The startup's take on "better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all"
My experience has been that if I can't resist procrastinating to begin with, then I likely won't be able to resist procrastination once I've started either. If you need to do "productivity hacks" to get started, is the project really worth doing at all? I mean getting started is the easy part.
Cal's advice, as he says in the article, is for a very specific audience. His whole spiel is to get so fanatically good at one specific, tightly niched skill or knowledge set that it starts returning exponential returns relative to how much time you put in.
This is pretty antithetical to the 'just start -> fail early, fail fast' mindset of startups. And that makes sense: If you're trying to develop a skill (say, being an awesome ruby programmer), then you're better off clearing a week and deepdiving into ruby; the criteria and the bounds on this process are clearly defined. However, if what you're trying to found a start-up from an idea, your scope is totally unknown; there's no way that you can clear off your week and decide to become really good at 'creating the next twitter', because no one knows what that skillset from the outset. The idea of 'just get started' in startups is to help you define that scope of what it is necessary, then give you a chance to see if it's reasonable to develop and execute on it (FEFF).
I went to a military school where we had monthly mandatory lectures by inspirational and successful people. In hindsight, the most startling thing about all of them was that they had nothing in common that you could point to and say, "that's what made them a success." If they did, it wasn't something that many other unsuccessful people didn't also have.
There were a few who admitted that their success was mostly due to other people and luck. Now that I'm older, this rings more true than anything else.
That's not to say that you shouldn't work hard, start your project, and do all the things you think you should to succeed. But realize, despite your best efforts, it just might not work out.
While luck and circumstance tends to be a factor, I believe that a different person given the same circumstances might not have succeeded. So, you can't just throw up your hands and suggest that it's out of your control.
[1] Rarely, this is substituted by insane amounts of luck.
At one point, Seinfeld and Adams have a conversation. Adams mentions that it would be great to be able to make a lot of money for doing what he loves. That he'd like to be like Jerry one day. And Jerry is flabbergasted. Basically he says that if you're doing it for the money, you're in it for the wrong reasons. You do it because you love it. You'd be doing it if you lived on the street eating out of a garbage can because a few times a week, you get to go out and tell jokes, and people laugh at them.
The author of this article is saying the same thing. Unless you're completely dedicated to an idea, unless you can't stop thinking about it, you may fail. The closer you are to being completely encompassed by an idea, the more likely it is to succeed.
I read it as more of a caution than a guideline. If you aren't really in love with an idea, but you still want to go along with it because you think it might make money, or bring you fame, or whatever, you're in it for the wrong reasons. You will be a terrible comedian.
Until you start, you only have other people's knowledge to work with. You're always going to value firsthand information more than what you can read in a book, or on HN, or whatever.
Until you start, your skills won't improve because there's nothing to sharpen them.
Of course, you should look before you leap. You don't want to "just start" by quitting your job with only two weeks of living expenses saved and nothing more than a "Learn Ruby!" book tucked under your arm.
But you can decide that, tonight, and every night, you're going to put at least 60 minutes into making progress on whatever you want to do, whether it's learning programming, starting your project, planning your business or anything in between.
True, but there is something to be said for throwing yourself in the deep end. Totally agree that until you do start, you've only got other peoples experiences and knowledge to go off, which is never going to be exactly the same as your own.
In fact, now that I think about it, what does "getting started" mean? The author seems to think that you can prepare before "getting started", but in my mind, once you have set your goal and are actively working towards it—whether that be research, coding, networking or whatever—you have started.
ie. If you've no problem getting started but have issues finishing, that idea won't help much. You need a different pill.
I do agree that so much is focused on newbies who have a tough time getting started. There is now a significant number of folks who have no problem getting started. They do have a problem finishing. Hopefully we'll see more stuff focused on the later stage.
Since business works over periods of months and years, it's important for me to engage in projects that play to as many of those preferences as possible. Starting at anything new is its own skill; you have to accept an early period of flailing around and making wrong turns, before you can reach the comfortable, confident stages. But it's not really the make-or-break thing here. Common wisdom says that it's the last 1-10% of the project that is the hardest part; you need to line things up so that even those stages are tolerable, or else you'll burn out somewhere in the middle once you see how far you still have to go. If your preferences are misaligned against the project goals, you're also likely to drift off target(e.g. I get caught in building technology quite often) and it helps to have people with other preferences involved so that they can bring you back in line.
However, getting started -in itself- is obviously not sufficient. Getting started on the wrong project is obviously not good (though sometimes, you won't know it is wrong until you do some work on it). Getting started on too many things will result in a lack of focus. Most of this is common-sense. As long as you're aware of all this, I think the "just get started" idea does make a lot of sense.
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Meanwhile, all platitudes and generalizations should be obeyed, except when they shouldn't