
Writer's Block, or the Wantrepreneur Blues - fazkan
https://www.indiehackers.com/@thwiv/writers-block-or-the-wantrepreneur-blues-76ab4a93b6?utm_source=Indie+Hackers+Newsletter&utm_campaign=indie-hackers-newsletter-057&utm_medium=email
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pfisch
Quit your job. Make it real. Fear is one of the best motivators.

Unfortunately this is bad advice for most people, because the truth is most
people don't have the full skillset required to own a business. Maybe they
could learn it if they apprenticed under an entrepreneur or in an executive
role, but I'm honestly not sure.

I own a business with studios in New Orleans and Atlanta, but I worked in the
real world, went to grad school, and then came out and immediately went out on
my own which is easier for a lot of reasons.

I also think a series of fortunate and somewhat unreproduceable events led me
here, strangely enough involving Gabe Newell, though I'm sure he wouldn't
remember.

I honestly don't think reading a bunch of books telling you how to be an
entrepreneur are helpful or real at all. In fact I would describe them as more
of a stalling tactic.

~~~
flachsechs
> _most people don 't have the full skillset required to own a business_

i agree with your post but i never miss an opportunity to be pedantic --
reality is nobody has the full skillset to run a business -- in my mind it's
really just a bunch of intangibles like vision (goal setting), determination,
ability to take staggering amounts of abuse, ability to work insanely hard
when it's necessary, and ability to know how to hire an expert in matters you
are not skilled or experienced in, which means the ability to clearly
communicate and know what to ask for through deductive reasoning.

most people have NONE of those skills, because working a normal job doesn't
require any of them. zero, zip, nada, zilch. a high functioning professional
has like 2 or 3 of those things. i would guess less than 5% of the general US
population has those characteristics in the large amounts required to start a
business from scratch, and most of the time that talent is channeled into
something like e.g. investment banking or corporate law or being a surgeon.

on top of all that, the ability to take a financial and social risk is just
too much to handle for most people. they just won't do it. period. you might
as well ask them to sprout wings and fly.

but that's why starting a business has the potential to be so god damn
lucrative -- basically, nobody else is doing it relative to the demand the
overall economy generates.

i also agree that the only way you're really going to get anywhere is if you
quit your job, or were fired. the slow drip of a paycheck is the biggest
obstacle.

~~~
crush-n-spread

      financial and social risk is just too much to handle for most people. they just won't do it.
    
      nobody else is doing it 
    

People tend not to try because they cannot embrace the intermediate feeling of
"I f __*ing suck at this. "

When you embrace that you are not very good, you become the master. It is a
tautology.

~~~
OtterCoder
I feel like that's the step I'm on, and I really hope you are right.

------
brian-armstrong
There's a really simple gimmick I use to get myself to do work. Set timer on
phone for 20 or 30 minutes. Until the timer goes off, I won't intentionally
engage in any distractions, just my project. When the time is up, I'm free to
go do something else if I want. Sometimes I will stop working. Many times I
will have got engaged by whatever I was doing and will keep going for a few
more hours.

Even if I stop, 20 minutes of undistracted work is actually pretty
significant, so it's win/win

~~~
thwiv
The pomodoro technique is very useful. Check out the app Forest, it's kind of
a cool app for this technique.

------
ThomPete
I have done a ton of successful side projects, one of them even turned into a
great and growing business for me.

As a former musician the concept of jamming seemed like a great way to think
about side projects.

In other words in my experience the best you can do is not even think about
your side projects as projects (as the require process) but rather as jam-
sessions.

Hopefully you have hundreds of little ideas to explore not just one (if you
have that one big idea you should probably turn it into a real business, quick
your job and maybe get funding)

The worst thing you can do is to worry about process (buy domain name, spend
time on logo etc)

~~~
jmiserez
Very insightful. Jam session also sounds better, less like work and more like
fun. Easier to justify (to yourself and to others) if it doesn’t go anywhere,
and less pressure.

~~~
ThomPete
Yes Side projects should normally be measured by you don't want to go to bed
because you want to do just one more thing rather than you can't go to bed
because you need to finish some thing. It should be purely driven by desire.

~~~
moretai
Jeez, I wish I could verbalize things like this because they are so
insightful. Thanks for that. It makes sense, but I'd never think to phrase it
like that, and hence it doesn't seem apparent that's what I want in my side
projects. But the abstract gut feeling is essentially that.

------
jonny_eh
Step 14: Find out in a couple years that someone else took the same idea to
fruition and succeeded.

When that happens I'm sad that I didn't fully pursue it, but happy that
someone did.

~~~
reificator
Back in high school I had an idea for a video game that I really wanted to
make, but didn't because I was focusing on learning to program instead. That
was probably the right decision, because that time investment I made during
those years has really paid off for me.

The game was a two-genre mashup between two _very_ different genres, that I
thought I could pull off blending together. (I still kind of think it could be
done, whether or not I still think _I_ could do it alone is a different
story...)

A few years ago, someone came up with exactly the same genre mashup, and in
fact the main character looked extremely close to what I had in my notes.

I was thrilled about it because I didn't just want to make it, I wanted to
play it. Someone else did the work and took the risk of making it for me, and
I get to fork over a few dollars and play it myself! Sure I wanted to be the
one to make it, but if it existed at all that was huge.

I'm a millennial, so the first thing I did was go look it up on YouTube. And
what I saw was incredibly disappointing, didn't do any of the things I was
hoping it would, and frankly I didn't even bother to go buy it and play for
myself. It didn't look like it had that fun factor, and it didn't do either
genre justice.

Still makes me sad, and if I were to go into game development as more than a
hobby, doing that game right is top of my list.

~~~
georgeecollins
In games ideas are almost never original. I used to work with a designer who
said if you think what you are doing is new you probably haven't been paying
enough attention. But ideas matter very little and execution is golden. So I
wouldn't worry too much if someone tried your idea.

------
aregsarkissian
The key is to reduce the friction of getting features out on the open web and
getting feedback from real users. have just one generic domain that can be
repurposed to any idea. Attach it to a static ip on aws do or up cloud as an
example. Use a rad framework like rails django or laravel and launch a
permanent hello world by pushing to github. Now find a small group of users
that have a problem you can solve. Spend an hour a night adding a page to your
site and gather feedback. Rinse and repeat. The key is to have a basic ci/cd
pipeline setup at the outset. Then iterating on ideas becomes much more easy.

------
ak39
Forgot to list:

"Tell your friends about your brilliant ideas."

~~~
zippergz
I'm at the point where I don't do that any more, to avoid the shame of being
asked about it later and having to admit I haven't worked on it in months.
Some people say they find having others know about it to be a motivator, but
that hasn't been true for me.

~~~
ehnto
I don't tell others either. Not right away. Telling someone is almost as good
as it being finished. You have gotten that sweet social reward and pat on the
head for being clever.

If I don't show anyone until it's real in some way then I have to make it
happen if I want that sweet social head pat. Obviously that's not the reason I
do things but I do find telling people can undermine my motiviation a bit.

------
DesiLurker
Serious question for those in software development, Have you ever had a
debugger/problem solver's block? how do you get over it?

~~~
gricardo99
I've been stumped countless times. It can be demoralizing at times, but I've
always found a way through. Some things that help:

\- Break the problem down into smaller pieces. Analyze/Attack each piece.

\- Try to attack the problem from a different angle.

\- Step back, explain the problem to someone. Sometimes just explaining
yourself helps highlight your assumptions, and can help you re-arrange your
approach.

\- Keep at it. Keep trying different things.

~~~
fazkan
I totally agree with this, the bug catching block, occurs because we are not
sure if catching this bug will solve our problem at all.

Also this helped me a lot in making things dirtier, use some form of version
control system (must). I cannot emphasize more on this. this is to bring you
back to the original problem state, which is most cases is simpler than you
think.

------
munificent
I like the triad he breaks it down into. Here's the tricks I try to get over
missing one leg of the tripod:

    
    
        > Energy and Direction, No Time
    

I have a wife, kids, pets and work full time so this is my default state.
Things that help:

1\. Get off my damn phone / reddit / twitter / whatever. Consuming media on
the Internet is junk food for the attention span. I have had way too many
evenings after I get the kids in bed where I think, "I'll just unwind on my
phone for a few minutes and then work on something." The next thing I know,
it's three hours later, every animated GIF and cute kitten link on Reddit is
purple, and I'm filled with regret.

I trying now to break my habit of consuming stuff on the web. It's ultimately
not satisfying. A little news-reading is important, but any more than fifteen
minutes a day or so is wasted.

This frees up an astonishing amount of time.

2\. Get better at working on things in small pieces. I'm writing a book right
now that's projected to be about 200,000 words. It builds up two
implementations of the same programming language, and each implementation is
spread across multiple chapters, so the book is _highly_ intertwined.

You might expect that to require a ton of mental state and lot writing
sessions to work on. Nope. I usually work on it less than an hour a day
(which, granted, means it's going to take forever to finish). I rely on a test
suite, Git, a log, and notes to myself to make it easier to pause and resume
work on it and break it down into small pieces.

3\. Decide what _not_ to spend time on. Our natural tendency is to want to say
yes to things -- new projects, new hobbies, new outings, new toys to play
with. But since time is finite, each of those means cutting out something
that's already in my life. I try to be more cognizant of that and proactively
choose to _not_ invest time in things I don't want to be doing right now even
if I would like to.

    
    
        > Direction and Time, No Energy
    

For me, this is usually laziness or analysis paralysis. Some amount of
laziness is OK -- nothing wrong with some chilling and self-care. Relaxing
feels good, but I find it doesn't feel as good as the satisfaction of
accomplishing something, so I try to remember that.

Analysis paralysis is my personal demon. I try to remember that anything is
generally a more productive path than getting stuck and doing nothing. If I'm
stuck because I don't have enough information to pick a path, walking down one
path is a great way to get that information, even if it requires some
backtracking later.

    
    
        > Energy and Time, No Direction
    

For me, this is usually analysis paralysis at a larger scale. The kids are
finally out of the house and I've got four hours of free time. What project
should I work on? Oh, God, I can't pick. Again, I try to force myself to pick
_something_ because any choice is better than no choice.

I don't personally often have the vague "I don't know what I want to do at
all" problem I hear a lot from bloggers. I think many of those are coming from
people who want to _be_ a certain thing (author, entrepreneur, successful open
source project lead, etc.) and don't want to _do_ a certain thing (edit
paragraphs, make sales cold calls, reply to bug reports for five hours).

They want the reward of the cachet associated with the identity but either
don't want to or don't know how to do the work to get that. Personally, I'm
generally more motivated by the process than the product, so I don't fall into
that trap very often. I don't have enough self-discipline to spend time on
things when I don't enjoy the basic mechanical process of it.

~~~
eddy_chan
> I have had way too many evenings after I get the kids in bed where I think,
> "I'll just unwind on my phone for a few minutes and then work on something."

There's a hack for this which I find works, just go to sleep at 8pm or 8:30pm
instead right after the kids. Wake up at 4pm-4:30pm (yes I need a full 8 hours
every night, not negotiable), you'll have much more willpower to tackle your
side project in the morning before your kids wake up.

Given the choice between reddit and side project, reddit will win. Given the
choice between reddit and sleep...it's much easier to pick sleep even if
reddit is more tempting.

In the morning you have 2 choices, reddit vs side project but you just
invested effort in waking up at 4:30am, side project it is...

Edit: I actually see sleep as a precondition of productivity so sleeping is a
'productive activity' for me.

~~~
tisdy
> eddy_chan 1 hour ago | parent | on: Writer's Block, or the Wantrepreneur
> Blues

> I have had way too many evenings after I get the kids in bed where I think,
> "I'll just unwind on my phone for a few minutes and then work on something."
> There's a hack for this which I find works, just go to sleep at 8pm or
> 8:30pm instead right after the kids. Wake up at 4pm-4:30pm (yes I need a
> full 8 hours every night, not negotiable), you'll have much more willpower
> to tackle your side project in the morning before your kids wake up. Given
> the choice between reddit and side project, reddit will win. Given the
> choice between reddit and sleep...it's much easier to pick sleep even if
> reddit is more tempting.

That's a great way of thinking about it.

p.s I think you mean 4am.

~~~
jansho
> Wake up at 4pm-4:30pm (yes I need a full 8 hours every night, not
> negotiable), you'll have much more willpower to tackle your side project in
> the morning before your kids wake up.

This is the exact tactic used by a friend studying PhD with five young kids.
She got the PhD in four years.

Also if you do a lot of manual labour - gardening, stacking shelves whatever -
sleep becomes the obvious choice.

------
sjcsjc
"3\. Buy a domain name (this step is crucial)"

Fantastic

~~~
moretai
This part is easy for me. I have a ton of dead domain names. The rule that if
you have skin in the game or money in the game, then you'd be motivated to
complete the task. That doesn't work for me. Maybe for a little bit. But
essentially stuff like this is a sale technique.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
It's easy for everyone. The "this part is crucial" was sarcasm :)

~~~
moretai
Ah, I didn't read the article. Probably should have done that.

------
dev1n
> _Energy and Time, No Direction_

I tend to just buy one of the books I have on my list and dive into that. Then
I don't need direction, I just keep turning pages and take notes.

------
fiokoden
I gotta say, I just bulldoze through and get the damn software built at great
personal cost in a whole range of ways. I always complete the project.

The hardest thing is not writing the code - although that is extremely hard -
the hardest thing is building something people want to use.

