I generally agree with your comment, but strongly disagree with this part. You will have much more success if you take this first step as soon as possible. No research, no thinking. And a “real thing” first step. You want to start running? Put on some shoes and go for a run. Don’t sign up for a race, don’t look up running tips, don’t buy nice shoes. Just go run for a bit.
Coding? Pop open repl.it. Scuba? Get your head under water. Even for things that might be out of reach like flying an airplane, read up on something specific like how to land.
With your very first step out of the way, you can then start thinking a bit more.
You'll mostly discover the right things by doing, but the wrong things can hold you back, and they're often well-documented. Example: guitar players who discover music theory by plucking and poking until things sound good, but mess up their hands with bad form.
I'd be careful with this advice. Almost every time I climb outside I see groups who clearly have very little idea of what they're doing, because all the small but deadly details are wrong - no stopper knots, not backing up rappels, building weird anchors, having 1 point of failure, etc.
From their perspective, they're just getting out there and taking those first steps - but with an inadequate understanding of how much risk they've taken on. They don't even realize they're doing anything wrong. It's really bad and regularly leads to serious accidents. To actually climb outside they need mentorship or a bunch of research and practice, both of which take a while to acquire. They should definitely not start by doing the thing.
Before they actually started climbing the rock, they had to do a bunch of other stuff. They at least got their hands on some gear, probably drove and hiked. And this is partly what gets them into trouble.
Fooling yourself into doing something unsafe generally requires a bit of work. I think there’s a safety in doing what’s immediately around you. For most people, it would be really hard to kill themselves rock climbing in the next 15 minutes, but very easy to do it next weekend.
My hope for someone doing what I suggest would be something like “I’m gonna go hang from that pull-up bar / low beam / jungle gym on and off for 5 minutes.” Then they research how to actually start rock climbing safely.
I agree, but not for things like this which require significant physical exertion. Many physical things have components that, if done incorrectly, are injurious. And they're not always obvious.
Guitar, for example, has barre chords. And EVERYBODY always teaches them to beginners at the first fret so you can do an F chord.
This is LUDICROUS. That is the maximum tension point on the guitar with respect to barre chords, and it's a good way to injure new players if they're on a steel string acoustic. New players do not have the strength or the flexibility to do that chord.
Good guitar teachers teach that up much higher on the neck, and they generally only barre a couple strings. Once the student gets stronger, then they start moving it down and using more strings.
Good teachers of any physical exertion activity always have some pitfall like this that they instruct you to avoid.
I did that, went for a run every day, overexerted my ankle, couldn't walk normally for a week and couldn't run for weeks after that, and got out of the habit of running again for a very long time.
Your advice might work in specific cases for specific people, but for others it might be harmful. It is, in my opinion, not advice fit for "broadcast": you need to know the recipient and their situation to know whether the advice will not be harmful for them.
He never says in the article to keep doing something even if it is painful. If you went for a run and experienced pain, I think it would be safe to start trying to stretch or figure out why this happens.
This is still compatible with the method he recommends here.
And your refinement of the advice only coincidentally happens to work because my injury was non-acute. There's plenty of sports where you can seriously hurt yourself if you don't know what you're doing, without any prior warning.
And the advice also only works under the assumption that you get multiple chances, that you will not catastrophically fail on your first go. All of the following sound absurd: - if you want to fly an airplane, just fly an airplane - if you want to build bridges, just build a bridge (not a toy one, that's not "the real thing", one that people will actually use) - if you want to skydive, just knit a parachute and jump out of a plane
Of course, you'll say that that's not what you or the OP mean with "doing the real thing" and they're obviously insane. But they're just edge cases to prove a point, you don't need to fail this catastrophically to cause serious harm. OP writes about someone rejecting a job that requires fluency in French, without posting any details about that job, then judges the person for rejecting that job out of hand. That is just crazily irresponsible, it may very well have been a job where she has to communicate in French with French-speaking clients, and where a miscommunication might cost her company a large contract, cost her or her colleagues their jobs, or just sink the company altogether.
I think if your advice has this many edge cases where it is harmful, you should think carefully about who you are delivering it to. I'm not saying it is bad advice in all circumstances, it might be exactly what some people need to hear. But it is bad advice to broadcast unqualified.
It shouldn’t even be a long one. I said “go run for a bit”. If it hurts at all, stop. Don’t do things that you think are dangerous. If you can’t run or aren’t sure if you should, then just walk. Maybe I should refine my advice to “do whatever is closest to the ultimate thing, that you can safely do right now”.
In hindsight you may think you overthought something and should have just started earlier but maybe you really weren't ready.
Again, don't overdo it. Do something real, look up a simple beginner way to do it, research it for 1 hour or 1 day, then stick to that simple beginner way for some time. The point is to do that thing and not get bogged down by details and researching the tiny things that only matter to the elite expert.
Also, you have to accept some risks. You'll never be fully prepared. You may hurt your ankle by running too much, but it most likely won't be permanent and you learned a lesson.
Gonna learn to lift? Read starting strength. Set yourself up for success by structuring an environment for habit formation. Take the steps to ensure you are getting good nutrition before you start. Don’t just run to the local gym and staring trying to mess around in the squat rack.
Going to build a new app? Get up to date on tech stack choices so you don’t make a dumb decision. Look at prior art and understand the work that has come before you can learn from.
Trying to learn a new skill? Do some research to find out what the best, most high quality resources there are first. Determine what level of mastery you’ll be happy with before diving in unprepared to know how to assess opportunity costs, which can
This doesn’t mean get stuck in analysis paralysis. I feel pretty strongly those who give advice like the advice you mention do not think it’s possible to avoid this obvious trap. It is if you are disciplined and have enough self awareness to know when you have hit the point of diminishing returns. Literally one day of focused thinking can outflank a week or more of pointless execution, even at the beginning. Thinking is underrated, execution without preparation is overrated. The most effective people know how to prepare the mind for execution and not get bogged down doing so. Taking an immediate first step can lead to a bad first impression: a bad lift, a mess of a prototype, or a garbage online course. That can be hard to unwind, since it forms busted initial mental models - and can undermine long term success. There is no hard rule, but aversion to pre-emptive research and analysis is an anti pattern unless you know yourself to be unable to do so.
> Literally one day of focused thinking can outflank a week or more of pointless execution, even at the beginning.
This (and the many other replies) make me think I did a poor job of expressing myself. I absolutely, 100%, do not think people should screw around for a week before figuring out the right way to do things.
I am a huge fan of thinking. I write out long, detailed syllabuses for my students and myself. I am constantly trying to improve both my skills and my process. And I think most people would be well served to do more of that.
I only see one real difference between your comment and what I suggested. I think when someone wants to start weightlifting, they shouldn’t reach for a book first. Do a tiny workout first. Maybe what you remember from PE, maybe life that heavy box in the garage 5 times. Then, with one shitty workout under your belt, open the book and do better next time.
Still, just as in startups the minimum viable product is important, you should get to the point of a simple but complete thing.
Think of it as breadth first, not depth first. You want to go through all main stages, see a simplified full experience. Then you can tweak each part. Instead of reading and never finishimg Starting strength and researching the best squat shoes and the other details, just go to the gym, do something lightweight and something you understand, then go home, feel some of the burn. You just had a full gym experience, a simple one, but full.
I recently made a website I've been endlessly procrastinating on. I was paralyzed by choice of static site generator, template style, hosting provider etc etc. Then I decided to go ahead and make a simple version. A single HTML file and a single CSS file, like in the old days, no framework. It is a complete website. It's alive on Github pages. I can now tweak it in many ways. If it becomes tedious, I can switch to a site generator. The main thing is, I've written the bulk of the content now.
Take the time to reflect and research every once in a while, experiment with different setups and ways of doing things, sure. But going ahead and doing an imperfect but functional first version is hugely important. Writers say you should write a draft in a totally non-judgmental way. Consciously accept it will be bad. But often there just isn't a way around it. The road to good involves passing through the not so good, so you see the feedback of reality, you can update your mental model of how this whole thing works so that the next thing you read already has a place to go in your mind. You don't know what you don't know. You know what you need to look up once you have a bit of experience. The thing gets demystified.
I mostly disagree. Too many people (including myself) get sidetracked with tasks that are not actually “doing the real thing” as the article says. For low risk activities, making mistakes is important. Semi-relevant: one term for wantrepreneurs is “making house” where they give the appearances of building a business without actually doing so.
For some riskier tasks, there are obvious “real“ steps to perform before doing the real thing e.g. doing a SCUBA course before using an aqualung. Or getting advice when buying your first home.
For many tasks, just doing it is far more successful e.g. learning a language by speaking it with people that have that language as their first tongue. Listen to people who have learned English as a second language, and so many mistakes are due to learning from reading rather than just speaking (babies learn languages naturally, and adults can too, but most adults follow the standard crap techniques which screws their language learning, especially trying to learn to speak by following rules and reading written material).
While doing anything, it is important to mix in introspection, videos, books, and training. Repetitive practicing without feedback ingrains mistaken habits into our minds: habits which are extremely difficult to correct later e.g. I have skied a lot but I still make habitual errors learnt as a child. If you are using learning techniques while applying them, the material sticks in your mind and you can take what is relevant.