

Is "Just Get Started" a Flawed Idea? - skotzko
http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/06/27/dangerous-ideas-getting-started-is-overrated/

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kkowalczyk
The article shows fundamental misunderstanding of why "just get started" is,
indeed, a good advice.

It boils down to: majority of people under-start, not over-start.

Let's assume the following numbers:

10% start at the right time

10% start too early

80% don't start at all

Those are, obviously, arbitrary numbers, but I do believe them to be "in the
ballpark".

When you're giving generic advice on the internet, that you cannot customize
to an individual, the message clearly should be "just get started", because it
targets the problem majority of people have. Yes, it's a crude approximation
of truth, which is always more nuanced, but a blanket contradiction is
certainly not the right answer.

What the article is saying is that it's better to start at the right time than
to start too early. It is also an obvious statement and a shallow one because
it fails to consider that there are more states to analyze: starting too
early, starting at the right time and starting too late and not at all.
Starting at the right time is clearly the best choice but if you are to choose
between starting too early or not at all, starting too early is a better
choice and most people make a mistake of not starting at all and not starting
too early.

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wccrawford
Seems to me the blogger is saying that if you can't get started without the
'just get started!' advice, don't pollute the pool.

If someone is setting out to make a career and betting their whole life on it,
then 'just get started' is really bad advice. If someone is testing the waters
and wants to find out if a career is for them, then 'just get started' is the
perfect advice. There's no quicker way to find out what you're getting into
than to get into it.

Yes, you'll likely choke on your first time. We learn from failure better than
success. "What doesn't kill you will make you stronger."

I start new hobbies all the time. I just jump in and start playing with it.
I've found some that are really nice, and some that I apparently just don't
have any innate skill for. (That hasn't actually stopped me on some of them!)
And at one point, my current career was just a hobby.

Just get started.

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edanm
Interesting post.

The way I see it, what this post is saying is that "Just starting" isn't good
enough, since you have to stick with it, sometimes for a long time, before
reaching any measure of success. I completely agree with this idea. But I
think you'll find that most of the people saying "just get started" are
_already_ following it up with "you have to stick to it for a long time to
succeed".

In fact, the origin of the common "just start" lesson is the fact that many
successful people look at their achievements and think (rightly or not) that
they're something anyone can do. The most common reason other people don't do
it is because they don't believe they can, hence the "just get started and
stick to it, you can succeed too" advice.

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arn
I don't know about this interpretation of "just start". My take on the "just
start" thing is to avoid procrastinating forever, and feeling like it's not
the right time, or your idea isn't good enough, or you aren't ready.

The point is nothing will get your idea honed and your skills improved than
just starting. Maybe it won't succeed... but that's actually not the point. I
don't think anyone is saying "just start" is the key to success (though
clearly a prerequisite). I think they are saying that trying and not
succeeding is better than never doing anything. The startup's take on "better
to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all"

~~~
j_baker
"I don't know about this interpretation of "just start". My take on the "just
start" thing is to avoid procrastinating forever, and feeling like it's not
the right time, or your idea isn't good enough, or you aren't ready."

My experience has been that if I can't resist procrastinating to begin with,
then I likely won't be able to resist procrastination once I've started
either. If you need to do "productivity hacks" to get started, is the project
really worth doing at all? I mean getting started is the _easy_ part.

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drblast
The survivor bias is the most important point here. Many, many, business books
fail on this important misunderstanding.

I went to a military school where we had monthly mandatory lectures by
inspirational and successful people. In hindsight, the most startling thing
about all of them was that they had nothing in common that you could point to
and say, "that's what made them a success." If they did, it wasn't something
that many other unsuccessful people didn't also have.

There were a few who admitted that their success was mostly due to other
people and luck. Now that I'm older, this rings more true than anything else.

That's not to say that you shouldn't work hard, start your project, and do all
the things you think you should to succeed. But realize, despite your best
efforts, it just might not work out.

~~~
arn
"There were a few who admitted that their success was mostly due to other
people and luck. Now that I'm older, this rings more true than anything else."

While luck and circumstance tends to be a factor, I believe that a different
person given the same circumstances might not have succeeded. So, you can't
just throw up your hands and suggest that it's out of your control.

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eogas
Strangely enough, I am reminded of Jerry Seinfeld's documentary, _Comedian_.
Throughout the movie, while not following Jerry's plight, the story is focused
on Orny Adams, a struggling comedian who dreams of Seinfeld-like fame.

At one point, Seinfeld and Adams have a conversation. Adams mentions that it
would be great to be able to make a lot of money for doing what he loves. That
he'd like to be like Jerry one day. And Jerry is flabbergasted. Basically he
says that if you're doing it for the money, you're in it for the wrong
reasons. You do it because you love it. You'd be doing it if you lived on the
street eating out of a garbage can because a few times a week, you get to go
out and tell jokes, and people laugh at them.

The author of this article is saying the same thing. Unless you're completely
dedicated to an idea, unless you can't stop thinking about it, you may fail.
The closer you are to being completely encompassed by an idea, the more likely
it is to succeed.

I read it as more of a caution than a guideline. If you aren't really in love
with an idea, but you still want to go along with it because you think it
might make money, or bring you fame, or whatever, you're in it for the wrong
reasons. You will be a terrible comedian.

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danilocampos
The importance of getting started in anything boils down to this:

Until you start, you only have other people's knowledge to work with. You're
always going to value firsthand information more than what you can read in a
book, or on HN, or whatever.

Until you start, your skills won't improve because there's nothing to sharpen
them.

Of course, you should look before you leap. You don't want to "just start" by
quitting your job with only two weeks of living expenses saved and nothing
more than a "Learn Ruby!" book tucked under your arm.

But you can decide that, tonight, and every night, you're going to put at
least 60 minutes into making progress on whatever you want to do, whether it's
learning programming, starting your project, planning your business or
anything in between.

~~~
aaronmoodie
"Of course, you should look before you leap"

True, but there is something to be said for throwing yourself in the deep end.
Totally agree that until you do start, you've only got other peoples
experiences and knowledge to go off, which is never going to be exactly the
same as your own.

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dasil003
Seems to me the author is conflating "just get started" with being flighty and
unfocused. If there is an attempt at real insight here it's that once you get
started you need to avoid distractions. But that is orthogonal to "getting
started".

In fact, now that I think about it, what does "getting started" mean? The
author seems to think that you can prepare before "getting started", but in my
mind, once you have set your goal and are actively working towards it—whether
that be research, coding, networking or whatever—you _have_ started.

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zaidf
Treat these ideas like medicine: before you take a dose of it, take a minute
to see if you've the right symptoms.

ie. If you've no problem getting started but have issues finishing, that idea
won't help much. You need a different pill.

I do agree that so much is focused on newbies who have a tough time getting
started. There is now a significant number of folks who have no problem
getting started. They do have a problem finishing. Hopefully we'll see more
stuff focused on the later stage.

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chipsy
I would discuss not the action of starting, but the motivations and
preferences that inform your strategy. Things like the kinds of problems you
can engage with and the solutions for them, the ways in which you connect with
people, etc.

Since business works over periods of months and years, it's important for me
to engage in projects that play to as many of those preferences as possible.
Starting at anything new is its own skill; you have to accept an early period
of flailing around and making wrong turns, before you can reach the
comfortable, confident stages. But it's not really the make-or-break thing
here. Common wisdom says that it's the last 1-10% of the project that is the
hardest part; you need to line things up so that even those stages are
tolerable, or else you'll burn out somewhere in the middle once you see how
far you still have to go. If your preferences are misaligned against the
project goals, you're also likely to drift off target(e.g. I get caught in
building technology quite often) and it helps to have people with other
preferences involved so that they can bring you back in line.

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credo
Getting started is a prerequisite. A lot of people procrastinate and never get
started. So from that perspective, getting started should be the most
important thing for procrastinators

However, getting started -in itself- is obviously not sufficient. Getting
started on the _wrong_ project is obviously not good (though sometimes, you
won't know it is _wrong_ until you do some work on it). Getting started on too
many things will result in a lack of focus. Most of this is common-sense. As
long as you're aware of all this, I think the "just get started" idea does
make a lot of sense.

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dfgjhklt
Whoosh. X% of people who want to be entrepreneurs will never be, and X% of
them won't be because they did nothing but prepare, never noticing or
overcoming fear of failure. Subjectively, those proportions are huge - they're
the targets of the "just start" advice.

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healthyhippo
If you're dedicated to being an entrepreneur for "love of the game", there's
value in doing diligence on the vertical/idea that you might spend your next
1-4 years in

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extension
How to be successful:

possible_actions.max_by(&:utility).execute while !successful

Meanwhile, all platitudes and generalizations should be obeyed, except when
they shouldn't

