Just Start

Everyone's hunting for the hack — the routine, the tool, the framework. After 20 years and a pile of shipped and half-shipped projects, I can tell you the only one that's ever worked for me: I started.

Every V1 I've launched was rough. The first version was ugly, thin, a little embarrassing. But it existed, and a thing that exists can be improved. A thing that doesn't can only be planned. Plans always feel like progress — the outline, the research, the perfect architecture in your head — and they produce nothing you can actually touch.

Starting tells you what planning can't

The reason planning fails isn't laziness. It's that you're guessing about problems you haven't met yet. Every time I've built something, the hard part turned out to be somewhere I didn't expect. You only find that by shipping and watching what breaks. The fastest way to learn what a thing should be is to put a bad version of it in front of reality and let reality argue back.

Your taste is the problem

Most people don't start because their taste outruns their ability. They know what good looks like, they know they can't hit it yet, so they wait. But you can't improve what doesn't exist. You can iterate on something bad. You can't iterate on nothing.

Make starting small

Can't build the company? Register the domain. Can't write the thing? Write one paragraph. Can't ship the product? Put up a landing page. Make the first step so small it's almost impossible to fail at — because the point of the step isn't the step. It's that you become someone who starts things instead of someone who plans them.

And starting isn't a vow. You can stop, you can pivot, you can throw it out. Starting just means you chose to move, and movement shows you options that standing still never will. Whatever you're afraid to start probably matters to you; if it didn't, you wouldn't be circling it.

So stop reading about it. Open the doc. Write the line of code. Make the call. It'll be bad, and that's fine. Bad and started beats good and imaginary.