"There are no tricks, that's just a distraction. Just sit down and do it. Ass in chair gets you there."
I tend to overthink a lot, to try and 'figure it out' or to 'make sense of it all', but really I just need to do the things that I already know need to be done, I always know things I need to do, I always have the next step, but because it doesn't quite feel enough or because it's not overly clear to me how the parts fit together or what will happen, I will go back into 'trying to figure it out mode'
It's depressing when I stop to think how little time I actually spend doing the things that will actually make the difference and move forward and how much my mind goes in circles trying to figure out how I need to change to make progress, but the truth likely is, I just need to do the thing, do more of it and do it faster, everything else becomes an excuse.
In some ways it's an insecurity, because you can't know the future ahead of time and you don't know how what you are doing now will fully link up to what you are hoping to achieve on a bigger scale, but you just have to take that leap.
I think this is super common amongst HN at least. I had to work on it too, but the mindset I fall back on now is that you can start doing it and figure it out along the way. Works for tons of things, from software, to plumbing. Worst case, we can come back later and clean up any mess we made along the way.
Best part is, every time you do something new, you get better and the next time is easier.
A pet peeve of mine is when people I know say things like "oh I don't know how to do my taxes". Just google it, there are so many great resources and you'll be done in 2 hours. (These are people with 1 state and 1 W-2, nothing complex).
"Another thing you have to do, of course, is to have a lot of assiduity. I like that word because it means: sit down on your ass until you do it."
"Then we had Dan Ingalls whose job was to be smarter than me and make it all really work,
and his favorite line was you just do it and it's done... and that's what he did and and so we had it almost right away"
("it" is an early Smalltalk interpreter).
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