The most important lesson I ever learned

It's true that nothing really stops you from just doing it, but in my opinion without anyone there to anticipate your accomplishment it's hard to motivate your self. Sure if you have natural talent, meaning you can naturally generate motivation without anyone's positive feedback. But without any positive external feedback your natural motivation will probably die out.

I can relate to the author in many ways, but I didn't take that lesson away from my time in school. In my view, I was born with a natural motivation to invent and analyze things, and my struggle was to find the right environment, with the right people and tools that could grow this motivation rather than killing it with indifference. It's all about meeting the right people who gives you that push.

The author said he didn't need any professor to get started, it's true, but he did need a friend to give him that push, that showed him that at least someone wanted to see him "do it".

I thought this was pretty well-written, but I didn't come away from it with the same lesson. It didn't seem like you needed any motivation to 'just do it', but that you confused what 'it' was. You thought what you were doing (bugging professors to get funding/advising) was 'it' (doing research). This seemed like the right thing to do since it's the norm (this hints somewhat of cargo culting), but you didn't realize that what you were trying to do, what others had done before you, was not truly a prerequisite to the next step. I'm not clever enough to come up with a slogan like "Just do it" nor am I certain of the pattern behind your realization (skip the prereqs? refocus your efforts? blaze your own trail?); that'll have to be an exercise for the reader.

There are no easy lessons to learn. The world is very complex. The search for easy lessons and universal formulas to success is silly. You have to learn that you don't now. Nobody knows.

"Just do it" is a pretty shitty lesson.