Doing the thing is doing the thing

https://www.softwaredesign.ing/blog/doing-the-thing-is-doing-the-thing

by prakhar897 • 6 months ago

585 145 6 months ago

As a person with ADHD, I feel personally attacked.

llbbdd4• 6 months ago

Same. I'm tempted to print this post out and hang it for inspiration. But I guess that would also not be doing the thing.

code_biologist• 6 months ago

I have bad ADHD and printed the strangestloop.io blog post out and put it on the wall by my work desk in Oct 2023 according to the printout timestamp. I still haven't done the thing in some meaningful areas, and the print has honestly kind of been dispiriting. I'm going to take this post as the prompt to take it down.

zahlman2• 6 months ago

I guess you understand this and are making a joke, but that "attack" would appear to be intentional (and motivating).

I find that I don't have major issues doing a thing once I get started on it. The main problem is choosing from among many things that I could reasonably consider "the thing", and then feeling confident enough in that choice to start.

dylan6042• 6 months ago

This sounds not too dissimilar to the release the POC to prod mentality.

There are times where you obviously need to do the thing to understand the thing to see the process of doing the thing. This allows for breaking the process down into better steps. Just writing code to do things you think is doing thing but prove not to do the thing when actually doing the thing is common.

drivers99• 6 months ago

What about doing the thing intently for a week and then realizing later you haven't touched the project in 6 months?

dijksterhuis• 6 months ago

sometimes i find that being okay with not doing the thing is exactly the thing i need to do to be okay with getting around to doing the thing

myst• 6 months ago

Coming up with excuses is not doing the thing.

leoc• 6 months ago

Who claimed it was?

arscan• 6 months ago

This is very similar to [1] (as discussed here [2]). It is a good message though, which is why I remember the earlier post at all.

1. https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45939431

crazygringo• 6 months ago

The discussion is going to be so similar, this really ought to be marked as a [dupe].

Goofy_Coyote2• 6 months ago

It’s eye-brow-raisingly similar to StrangestLoop’s original article

HPsquared• 6 months ago

On the other hand.. planning, preparation and mise-en-place can help with doing the thing.

ninju• 6 months ago

But only if you end up doing the thing (and avoid analysis paralysis)

thunfischtoast2• 6 months ago

I think the point is people mistaking planning, preparation, talking about the thing... for doing the thing.

TheAlchemist• 6 months ago

"Doing it badly is doing the thing."

This one works for me, and I've learned it from a post on HN. Whenever I feel stuck or overthink how to do something, just do it first - even with all the flaws that I'm already aware of, and if it feels almost painful to do it so badly. Then improve it a bit, then a bit, then before I know it a clear picture start to emerge... Feels like magic.

gonzalohm2• 6 months ago

Except you do this in a corporate setting and they will stop you the second it works. And then you are stuck maintaining a barely working version forever.

I learned this the bad way, but now I just lie and say it doesn't work until it's good enough for me

olliepro4• 6 months ago

Everyone's threshold is different. I aspire to "move fast and break things", but more often than not, I obsess over the rough edges.

dbvn• 6 months ago

^^^ THIS ... If what you're building is useful, showing someone a prototype too early can cause the whole company to rush you to deploy.

josephg3• 6 months ago

This is what it looks like when trust has broken down at a company. Management don't trust engineers when they say "this needs more time". And engineers don't trust management with the truth (it kinda works - we really could ship it now if we wanted to).

Remarkably common, but not inevitable. Thankfully there's plenty of workplaces which don't look like this.

And yeah, lying is certainly one way to get work done in a bad organisation. I'd much rather - if at all possible - to find and fix the actual problem.

replooda• 6 months ago

"When in doubt, use brute force."

black_puppydog• 6 months ago

"Everything worth doing is worth doing badly."

Got me through many a rough spot.

8note2• 6 months ago

it fits well enough into another frame - make it work, then make it pretty, then make it fast

if youre worried about doing it well, youre a step or two ahead of where you need to be

nlawalker2• 6 months ago

My two favorite bits of wisdom in this vein:

Dan Harmon's advice on writer's block: https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/5b2w4c/dan_h...

You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you're an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team "I will one day write something good" to team "I have no choice but to write a piece of shit" and then take off your "bad writer" hat and replace it with a "petty critic" hat and go to town on that poor hack's draft and that's your second draft.

"The Gap" by Ira Glass: https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/c98jpd/the_g...

Your taste is why your work disappoints you... it is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.*

llbbdd4• 6 months ago

I miss Harmontown dearly. He was always dropping solid-gold wisdom like this in the middle of otherwise borderline-incoherent rants.

tclancy• 6 months ago

Henry Rollins too.

'“One day, I’m gonna write that novel.” Pal? You better start tomorrow morning because the right time never happens. It’s when you boldly determine it. It’s like running on a rainy day. You’re fine once you get out there. The only difficulty is getting off the couch when you lace your shoes up.'

tstrimple• 6 months ago

Whenever I feel stuck or overthink how to do something, just do it first - even with all the flaws that I'm already aware of, and if it feels almost painful to do it so badly. Then improve it a bit, then a bit, then before I know it a clear picture start to emerge... Feels like magic.

Funny how these things when done by a human is a positive and when done by an LLM is a negative. According to all the anti-llm experts... Humans generate perfect code on the first pass every time and it's only LLMs that introduce bad implementations. And this isn't a callout on this user in specific. It's a generalization to the anti-ai sentiment on HN. If incremental improvement works, incremental improvement works.

degamad• 6 months ago

Funny how these things when done by a human is a positive and when done by an LLM is a negative.
Humans generate perfect code on the first pass every time and it's only LLMs that introduce bad implementations.

That's not what the "anti-llm experts" are saying at all. If you think of LLMs as "bad first draft" machines, then you'll likely be successful in finding ways to use LLMs.

But that's not what is being sold. Atman and Amodei are not selling "this tool will make bad implementations that you can improve on". They are selling "this tool will replace your IT department". Calling out that the tool isn't capable of doing that is not pretending that humans are perfect by comparison.

rewgs• 6 months ago

I always try and keep in mind that we typically think of software as having three versions -- alpha, beta, and release -- but for it's considered even kind of "finished."

In my own work, this often looks like writing the quick and dirty version (alpha), then polishing it (beta), then rewrite it from scratch with all the knowledge you gained along the way.

The trick is to not get caught up on the beta. It's all too tempting to chase perfection too early.

KolibriFly4• 6 months ago

And overthinking starts to feel less like diligence and more like avoidance

neko_ranger• 6 months ago

"Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder but nobody wants to lift no heavy ass weights!"

CuriouslyC• 6 months ago

"Ain't nuttin but a peanut"

augusteo• 6 months ago

I used to think this. Then I noticed how often "preparation" became its own infinite loop.

At work we built something from a 2-page spec in 4 months. The competing team spent 8 months on architecture docs before writing code. We shipped. They pivoted three times and eventually disbanded.

Planning has diminishing returns. The first 20% of planning catches 80% of the problems. Everything after that is usually anxiety dressed up as rigor.

The article's right about one thing: doing it badly still counts. Most of what I know came from shipping something embarrassing, then fixing it.

jstanley• 6 months ago

I think you may have slightly misunderstood the article.

"Preparation" isn't mentioned explicitly, but by my reading it would come firmly under "is not doing the thing".

olliepro4• 6 months ago

Getting everyone to fall in love with the thing is not doing the thing... learned this as a data scientist brought in to work on a project which ended soon thereafter. A team of 20 people spent 1.5 years getting people to love an idea which never materialized. Time was wasted because the technical limitations and issues came too late... it died as a 40 page postmortem that will never see daylight.

dakiol3• 6 months ago

Is it always like that? I worked in teams where we had some planning beforehand (months, like in your example). We shipped just fine and the product started to bring money. I guess it depends, as usual.

sghiassy2• 6 months ago

That’s not a zero-sum game.

Pivoting to zero-planning, would also have a basket of flaws.

dwd• 6 months ago

Rimmer planning for his astro-navigation exam sums up the "infinite loop" of preparation.

From the Red Dwarf book and quoted previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28033747

tshaddox• 6 months ago

I agree that planning has diminishing returns, yet simultaneously nearly every software project I’ve been part of has been under-planned and ended up worse off for it.

josephg3• 6 months ago

I think the original agile people had the right idea. Do some planning, not too much. Then write some code - but not too much. Then take what you've learned from implementing and replan.

Or if you want another way of thinking about it, code isn't only useful for deployment. Its also a tool you can use during the planning process to learn more about the problem you're trying to solve. When planning, the #1 killer is unknown unknowns. You can often discover a lot of them by building a super simple prototype.

KolibriFly4• 6 months ago

Once something exists, decisions collapse around reality instead of possibility

MrGilbert• 6 months ago

"Failing while doing the thing is doing the thing."

I needed this today. Currently questioning my career choices, as I hit my first wall where people are involved. Gave me quite the headache.

dakiol3• 6 months ago

I kinda agree, but I also gain pleasure from doing all those things that are not supposed to be "the thing". The thinking, the dreaming, the visualizing... I just like that. I do it a lot when working on personal projects (which some of them I never ship). I think it's fine, and I wouldn't go as far as saying that those things are "not doing the thing"; in many ways those things are "the thing", at least for me.

munificent3• 6 months ago

That's OK. It's totally fine to not doing the thing. Find joy however you want.

But it's not good to lie to yourself about doing the thing while not doing the thing. If your joy comes from the result of doing the thing, but you're putting time into other things that aren't doing the thing, that joy is not getting any closer.

robofanatic• 6 months ago

Ironically people who fall in not doing the thing category of this article are valued more than those who do the thing.

TuringTest2• 6 months ago

Sometimes that's because they're making it worthwhile, by connecting the thing with those who will benefit from it and explaining how to use it, which is as valuable as doing the thing.

I.e. by making sure that they're doing the right thing.

amarant• 6 months ago

Selling the thing isn't doing the thing, but it pays more!

Life is tough like that

direwolf20• 6 months ago

Let's all switch to finance.

Nevermark3• 6 months ago

Are they "not doing the thing", or are they "doing the different thing"?

sghiassy2• 6 months ago

Is planning, like deciding how to position your troops in battle, doing the thing?

munificent3• 6 months ago

Planning is doing the planning thing, but it is not doing the battle thing.

dakiol3• 6 months ago

And running the marathon is just running the marathon? I disagree. Big part of running the marathon is in the preparation. Weeks after weeks of training and not skipping a single session. The marathon itself is the tip of the iceberg; important but not the whole "thing".

TuringTest2• 6 months ago

But both are doing the winning thing, which is more valuable than just the battle thing. Unless you do it just for fun and don't mind the result.

OpenDrapery• 6 months ago

Is telling AI to do thing, doing the thing?

olliepro4• 6 months ago

The more I use AI to do the thing, the more it feels like I didn't do the thing.

flyinglizard• 6 months ago

Yet the thing got done. Perhaps in the age of AI, it’s about making things get done.

tony_cannistra• 6 months ago

Idk, depends. Is going to office-hours in order to pass an exam "doing the thing?" Help seems fine.

keithluu• 6 months ago

When saying 'doing the thing', we often mean getting some progress or a result. I'd say you did the thing if you consider the result created by the AI acceptable.

doodpants• 6 months ago

Similarly, is ordering Zhu Li to "Do the thing!" doing the thing?

poolnoodle2• 6 months ago

Am I crazy or have I read this or a very similar post before?

smingo• 6 months ago

https://www.anquotes.com/charles-bukowski-quotes/ has some similar themes.

“Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all.”

mbsa7• 6 months ago

I thought the same thing. From a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45939431

poolnoodle2• 6 months ago

So this is kind of a rip off! Thanks for digging it up.

thunfischtoast2• 6 months ago

A lot of tech-savvy people (like me) love solving meta-problems. Doing the thing that would take 10 minutes? Na man, let me build an unnecessary complicated technical solution that in theory enables hundreds of people to do the thing much more efficiently in just 2 minutes. That takes a month and the thing has not been done, ha.

ericmcer• 6 months ago

In "Remains of The Day" they call just talking about "the thing" an indulgence. Which is really what it is, it feels good, isn't hard, and doesn't achieve anything.

The characters in the book are quick to cut non-productive discussions short, but it feels like the feel good discussions around "the thing" are about as far as many people want to go these days.

soiltype• 6 months ago

A bit of a meta lesson for me here: Writing a short, pointed, opinionated blog post is blogging. If I care about blogging my thoughts, I need to just do it, not worry about rigor or depth ahead of time

mojuba2• 6 months ago

Doing it badly is doing the thing.

No it's not. Sometimes (or maybe most of the time) doing it badly means maybe it's not your thing.

I used to have a neighbour who liked to play the piano and sing. He was doing it consistently badly and he didn't have anyone to tell him that he should probably stop trying.

funkmasterzeb• 6 months ago

Well you are pretty bad at comments. Hang up the keyboard bud

ashtonshears• 6 months ago

Maybe people did tell him he sucked, but he was having fun

redmattred2• 6 months ago

People sometimes do things because they enjoy doing them, even if they aren’t particularly good at them.

mojuba2• 6 months ago

I have two problems with that. One is, you can do what you like quietly and without disturbing anyone around you. Second is the Dunning Kruger effect: witnessing it first hand is never fun.

scandox• 6 months ago

Yeah the dude should have stopped doing what he liked

jdefr892• 6 months ago

All because this dude is the ultimate judge for all that is good and worth doing somehow..

8note2• 6 months ago

no, theres a different thing here, which is that practice needs yo be deliberate.

the answer isnt to stop practicing, its to practice the right thing and not practice doing it wrong.

theyre probably still better off playing badly and enjoying it, vs just staring at an unplayed piano though

pyrolistical• 6 months ago

Just let people be.

Nevermark3• 6 months ago

Who are you, to define what "the thing" is, for someone else?

Doing the thing isn't about judging other people. That doesn't contribute to your thing.

If someone is bothering you, making it hard to do your thing, then your thing involves talking to them about your problem. Without judging what they are doing.

jdefr892• 6 months ago

Oh.. So you start doing something new and you're top 10% without practicing or being bad at it first? I'd love to test that to see if it's the case... Your logic is "You're not the best ever to do something so you are not doing it" means you have probably never done a single thing your entire life. Maybe you should just stop.

tibbar• 6 months ago

On the other hand: sometimes doing the thing is itself a bad idea. One reason I continue to insist on design docs and code review is that I'd rather find this out ahead of time rather than deal with the damage afterwards.

In the GenAI era, "doing the thing badly without planning" has become so easy that some counterweight is needed.

storystarling• 6 months ago

The happy path is trivial now but I've found the gap between prototype and production is actually wider. You end up spending all your time handling non-determinism and latency issues that simply didn't exist with deterministic code. It seems like the real engineering challenge is just getting the unit economics to work.

jgeada• 6 months ago

At a previous company we used to joke that most of management was a "problem admiration society":

They'd love to talk about problems, investigate them from all angles, make plans on how to plan to solve the problem, identify who caused it or how to blame for it, quantify how much it costs us or how much money we could make from solving it, everything and anything except actually doing something about it.

It was never about doing the thing.

nlawalker2• 6 months ago

Oh man, I feel this.

Somewhat related, I've learned that when you're the one who ends up doing the thing, it's important to take advantage of that. Make decisions that benefit you where you have the flexibility.

dzonga2• 6 months ago

you remove "managers" then simply rate of output goes up.

specially the middle managers i.e engineering managers, senior engineering manager, director of engineering duh duh

there's less coordination to do - to keep managers up to date.

the most functional software orgs out there - don't have managers

bandrami• 6 months ago

Output goes up until everything fails catastrophically

esafak• 6 months ago

Which orgs did you have in mind?

hahahahhaah3• 6 months ago

That is OK if that fed into a decision to do another thing now because of <good reasons>.

falcor84• 6 months ago

That definitely happens, but I wish had the displeasure of working at companies that were enamored with the solution they have, and couldn't be convinced to look again at the problem and see how it's changed since they originally solved it. As with most anything, the best approach is to somewhere in the middle, combining a love for the problem with a drive to repeatedly solve it. And one of the best tools for that seems to be dog-fooding, when the people in the company really want to use it for themselves.

KolibriFly4• 6 months ago

What's ironic is that all that analysis is often framed as being responsible or strategic, when in reality it's risk avoidance dressed up as rigor

theshrike792• 6 months ago

This is an excellent piece about how doing something is better than just talking about it: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

wanderingmind• 6 months ago

My nitpick is that thinking and dreaming about solving the problem is part of doing. Its the planning phase. Skipping This planning phase in Software engineering is the root cause of most Day 2 operations issues. However I agree that thinking or announcing about outcome is not doing.

llbbdd4• 6 months ago

There's probably some fuzziness here. I have notes upon notes going back ugh, 20 years (idk how old I am anymore?) that I could count as planning. At some point I need a kick in the ass to do it. Mike Tyson said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Sometimes getting to prod feels like that.

nowittyusername• 6 months ago

I wholeheartedly agree. In an age of talking heads. you will not hear from the people actually doing the thing. because they too busy doing the thing versus talking about it. now excuse me ima go back to doing the thing.

dzonga2• 6 months ago

in short learn by doing.

ramshanker• 6 months ago

Thank you for shaking me once more .....

rdsubhas• 6 months ago

The article was great — for solopreneurs.

There are things that humans have to unfortunately do when working as a group of people. That's why we became the alpha predator. Not because we were the strongest ape. That includes:

- Filling in timesheets, quarterly, half yearly cycles, company meetings, team meetings is not doing the thing — as a solopreneur. But not as a member of a group.

- Writing tickets, reviewing PRs is not doing the thing — as a solopreneur.

- Commuting to work and back is not doing the thing — If I'm a solopreneur this doesn't even matter.

- Answering technical questions, analyzing data, attending to bugs is not doing the thing — If I'm a solopreneur especially on a greenfield stuff, I have zero baggage.

- Writing test cases and putting up alerts is not doing the thing — if it's only me judging me, I have nothing to judge.

jjmarr• 6 months ago

"Filling in timesheets" sucks until you want to qualify for R&D credits.

hahahahhaah3• 6 months ago

I dont take the post too literally.

I take it to mean: if you can just do the thing now (you are in the right place, healthy, with tools and prerequisites) and you choose not to because of (procrastination reasons) then you could be doing the task but you choose not to.

For corps: timesheets is one of the things.

matchagaucho• 6 months ago

"If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four sharpening the axe."

I still believe there's a mise en place step before doing the thing, when quality counts.

Nevermark3• 6 months ago

If some task has a known step-by-step pattern, then doing it step by step makes perfect sense. That is doing the thing. Taking the known shortest/best path.

Doing the thing is going to involve both direct steps, and indirect steps necessary to do the direct steps.

Not doing the thing involves doing things other than the shortest/safest/effective path to getting the thing done.

cortesoft4• 6 months ago

Sure, but a lot of the things on the list marked as “not doing the thing” are actually important early steps to doing the thing.

cortesoft4• 6 months ago

I get the sentiment, but thinking and planning are important steps to doing things. Obviously you can’t stop there, and you shouldn’t spend too much time on that part, but it is still important.

hahahahhaah3• 6 months ago

Planning to do the thing is a new thing, thing2

Doing the thing2 is doing the thing2

cortesoft4• 6 months ago

Ok, but thing2 is a dependency of thing, so you have to do thing2 before you can do thing.

What do you gain by saying it isn't thing? You have to do it first either way.

mike741• 6 months ago

TLDR: "Just do it." ~ Nike

LTL_FTC• 6 months ago

I don’t get it? Are they sharing a quote they liked or taking credit for it? Maybe they just saw the YouTube video and decided to turn it into the page?

Edit: Seems like a way to show they’re looking for roles, I guess.

_springbootapp• 6 months ago

Brother please add proper exception handling :/D

longnguyen• 6 months ago

The essay is quite similar to this one from strangestloop.io[0]

[0] https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...

lessconfused• 6 months ago

I’m glad someone mentioned this. Couldn’t remember where I’d read this but knew there was something really similar.

HendrikHensen• 6 months ago

Honestly, it feels like straight up plagiarism. When I saw the title, I thought I knew which website was posted because I had seen it before. When I clicked, I saw an unfamiliar website and was surprised that it was posted 3 days ago rather than a couple months ago.

The contents are so similar, that it cannot be coincidence. It really seems like the author of this blog simply plagiarized the strangestloop post without referring to it at all...

Goofy_Coyote2• 6 months ago

Same thoughts here. I gave it the benefit of the doubt, thought it might be an adoption for a specific field, or an extension of thought, or maybe a fun twist or something.

This is a tasteless copy.

globalnode• 6 months ago

as a counter point, in another current thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46789913, there's a discussion of the "hostile codebase" of openssl. maybe they neglected preparation and "just did it"?

calebhwin• 6 months ago

Will this continue to be true? I do agree with the principle. But I've sometimes had the feeling that poor design upfront can have compounding consequences, especially when AI is filling in ambiguities.

zikani_03• 6 months ago

"Buying tools for the thing is not doing the thing."

This one hit me right in the feels, I have been buying more woodworking/DIY tools than the projects I've worked on with them.

s3micolon0• 6 months ago

This is a useful methodology and article nudges the reader towards doing things and "taking action". I am sure it will appeal to a huge number of people and indeed, rightly it has climbed to the top of HN, else I would have completely missed it.

I have found these articles on the exact same topic to be creating more actionable mindset.

1. The cult of done by No Boilderplate: https://youtu.be/bJQj1uKtnus?si=efV5OTF35LcDjuN3. Through the years, I have come back to this video many a times and even have the Cult of Done manifesto (snipped from this video) stuck on to my wall.

2. High agency by George Mack: https://www.highagency.com/. This is a long form article and sitting and just reading it has helped me unblock myself. I have a bookmark of this on my favourites bar at all times.

taikahessu• 6 months ago

Reading or adding comments is not doing the thing.

oldestofsports• 6 months ago

Buying tools for the thing is not doing the thing.

Why not? If i need a saw to build a deck, buying a saw must be the first step?

jillesvangurp• 6 months ago

Analysis paralysis is a thing. And as the article makes very clear, there are a lot of ways to get stuck doing anything else then the one thing you are supposed to be doing.

The way to break through that is indeed to start doing. Forget about the edge cases. Handle the happy path first. Build something that does enough to deliver most of the value. Then refine it; or rebuild it.

Seriously. The cost of prototyping is very low these days. So try stuff out and learn something. Don't be afraid to fail.

One reason LLMs are so shockingly effective for this is that they don't do analysis paralysis; they start doing right away. The end results aren't always optimal or even good but often still good enough. You can optimize and refine later. If that is actually needed. Worst case you'll fail to get a useful thing but you'll have a lot better understanding of the requirements for the next attempt. With AI the sunk cost is measured in tokens. It's not free. But also not very expensive. You can afford to burn some tokens to learn something.

A good rule is to not build a framework or platform for anything until you've built at least three versions of the type of thing that you would use it for. Anything you build before that is likely to be under and overengineered in exactly the wrong places. These places make themselves clear when you build a real system.

retropragma• 6 months ago

Just don't mistake prototyping for doing the thing.

Good enough is a self limiting fallacy.

A prototype failing to attract fans doesn't prove a lack of a market for the job the prototype attempts to perform. It only proves the prototype, as it stands, lacks something.

Beware quitting early. All good builders do.

seec• 6 months ago

So the typical nonsensical argument is that an architect should be a builder. Alright.

You can very much do the thing when it's not too costly to fuck up. For many important things, thinking about doing the thing is even more important than doing the thing.

trentnix• 6 months ago

Thanks for this. It is timely.

otikik• 6 months ago

Writing a blog about doing the thing is not doing the thing.

I like that this was included.

KolibriFly4• 6 months ago

Failure, bad execution, and tiny progress all count. That's the part people conveniently forget while optimizing their toolchains and workflows

rkangel• 6 months ago

I split activities at work into "Engineering" and "Talking about Engineering". We're a consultancy so there's a certain amount of "Talking about Engineering" that is required and good, but I try not to lose sight of what is actually engineering and what isn't.

What I am still on the fence about is when "design" or "architecture" type work counts as Engineering. There's a certain amount of design work that is valuable to do before coding and is part of the thinking process. But sometimes you get into a lot of abstract talking that is "not doing the thing".

tolerance• 6 months ago

This version has the general form of the original, So why does it seem there is something odd about it?

Whoever the guy from ‘Strangest Loop’ is it’s my impression that it’s meant to resonate with self-starters; as if he’s speaking from that vantage of and for hustle culture. The grinders. The movers. The seniors. The managers. The founders. [1]

I don’t get that vibe from this derivative and in fact I think it carries a slight affect of a neurotic employee while the original airs determination. Reading this brings one into the mind of an observer, the founder of a VC firm, watching OP wring over a Palo Alto brewed latte.

[1] Am I the only one who was unable to find out his actual name on this website?

hrtk• 6 months ago

Could’ve ended with “I should get back to doing the thing”

ge96• 6 months ago

This is something I ran into, ego satisfaction, where you tell people/show things like concepts, talk about it, get the "that sounds cool" but yeah it's not real. I now try to build something real like a hardware project before showing it.

COMMENT___2• 6 months ago

Oh, now HN is discussing a meaningless copy-pasted self promotion blog post. I guess this says something about the current state of the HN community.

1317• 6 months ago

most of the time the article doesn't matter that much and you can still have interesting discussions of the topic at hand

gordonhart• 6 months ago

I like that this place still primarily focuses on the message (even just the headline) rather than the messenger. Feels like an antifeature of the big social media platforms that who’s saying it is often more important than what’s being said.

COMMENT___2• 6 months ago

Your point is quite good. I like it!

stared• 6 months ago

Writing a litany about doing the thing is not doing the thing. Posting on HN about doing the thing is not doing the thing. Commenting about doing the thing is not doing the thing.

Guilty as charged, going back to work.

moralestapia• 6 months ago

1,000,000% agree.

Corollary: whoever has done something, even "wrong", is 1,000x more valuable as somebody else who is "planning to do it someday".

Doing the thing is doing the thing

Related Stories