The "doing it badly" principle changed everything for me. I spent weeks planning the perfect architecture for some automation tools I was building. Then I just... stopped planning and built the ugly version that solved my own pain point.
What surprised me was how much the ugly first version taught me that planning never could. You learn what users actually care about (often not what you expected), which edge cases matter in practice, and what "good enough" looks like in context.
The hardest part is giving yourself permission to ship something you know is flawed. But the feedback loop from real usage is worth more than weeks of hypothetical architecture debates.
"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.
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.*
I miss Harmontown dearly. He was always dropping solid-gold wisdom like this in the middle of otherwise borderline-incoherent rants.
"Everything worth doing is worth doing badly."
Got me through many a rough spot.
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
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
^^^ THIS ... If what you're building is useful, showing someone a prototype too early can cause the whole company to rush you to deploy.
Everyone's threshold is different. I aspire to "move fast and break things", but more often than not, I obsess over the rough edges.
"When in doubt, use brute force."
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.
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".
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.
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.
That’s not a zero-sum game.
Pivoting to zero-planning, would also have a basket of flaws.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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-...
The discussion is going to be so similar, this really ought to be marked as a [dupe].
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.
On the other hand.. planning, preparation and mise-en-place can help with doing the thing.
I think the point is people mistaking planning, preparation, talking about the thing... for doing the thing.
But only if you end up doing the thing (and avoid analysis paralysis)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
As a person with ADHD, I feel personally attacked.
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.
What about doing the thing intently for a week and then realizing later you haven't touched the project in 6 months?
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.
I'm talking about having completely different, unstarted, overall projects in mind.
that sounds like paralysis by analysis. just pick a project and go.
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.
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.
I'm going to consider this with the same weight I would if my future grey-bearded self popped out of a portal to say it, thank you. I've had a sticky note on my monitor for a few years that just says "SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP"; it might be time for that to go before it becomes much more depressing.
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
Coming up with excuses is not doing the thing.
Am I crazy or have I read this or a very similar post before?
https://www.anquotes.com/charles-bukowski-quotes/ has some similar themes.
“Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all.”
I thought the same thing. From a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45939431
Is telling AI to do thing, doing the thing?
The more I use AI to do the thing, the more it feels like I didn't do the thing.
Idk, depends. Is going to office-hours in order to pass an exam "doing the thing?" Help seems fine.
Ironically people who fall in not doing the thing category of this article are valued more than those who do the thing.
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.
Selling the thing isn't doing the thing, but it pays more!
Life is tough like that
in short learn by doing.
Is planning, like deciding how to position your troops in battle, doing the thing?
Planning is doing the planning thing, but it is not doing the battle thing.
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".
There are some things that you just can't do without preparation. But never mistake the preparation for doing the thing. You can be "getting in shape for a marathon" forever without ever running a marathon.
It depends on your thing. If the marathon was just the motivation, your thing is running... if the marathon was the bucketlist item, it is the thing.
No matter how much preparation and training one does, if they haven’t run the marathon, they haven’t run the marathon.
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.
I don't know anything about planning and battle.
But as a metaphor for other creative pursuits, my experience is that most of the time when people are "planning" or working on other things that they like to believe will help them do the thing... they are really just avoiding doing the thing.
People spend years doing "world-building" and writing character backgrounds and never write the damn book. Aspiring musicians spend thousands collecting instruments and never make a song.
As you say, if it's just for fun, that's all fine. But if the satisfaction you want comes from the result of the thing, you have to do the thing.
"Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder but nobody wants to lift no heavy ass weights!"
"Ain't nuttin but a peanut"
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> 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.
People sometimes do things because they enjoy doing them, even if they aren’t particularly good at them.
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.
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
Yeah the dude should have stopped doing what he liked
Just let people be.
Well you are pretty bad at comments. Hang up the keyboard bud
Maybe people did tell him he sucked, but he was having fun