(original thread) friendly subtweet: sometimes when someone has an idea to do something, the best thing you can do is not to suggest ways to expand and broaden the idea into something more complex than they can handle, but to cheerfully tell them to just fucken do the thing they said they wanted.

(If I took my own advice on this I would have shipped my book a year ago.)

and the resulting feedback I would have gotten from the readers in the 6 months afterwards, would make the next iteration 6 months later (ie right now) better than the draft I currently have. look, i’m smarter than I am courageous, ok, self-awareness isn’t as useful as ppl think…

anyway, circling back – there’s a sort of friendly nerd hug of doom, where everyone thinks they are helping by offering suggestions, because that’s the nerd love language, all these hints and ideas etc. end result? poor OP is intimidated into procrastination bc it will never live up to their now-inflated expectations

So what do you do? Encourage your nerd friends to Just Fucken Ship It. You learn more from a moment’s after shipping it than from a year of overthinking it. It’s ok to poast a little cringe, to host an awkward meetup, whatever. you only need to avoid catastrophic mistakes, minor ones are survivable.

It’s quite normal for the mind to conflate minor awkwardness with catastrophic failure. Minor awkwardness is when your best man’s speech joke drew a few forced chuckles, but people still applauded when it ended. Catastrophic: your speech called off the wedding.

another way of framing this whole thing: nudge your friends up the pyramid (towards shipping), not sideways (adding detail, resolution, etc that distracts them from shipping):

✱

25 August 2021, iOS note (thread originally?)

been tweeting a lot tonight but i just got a lot on my mind man

probably final thought of the night: i’ve been doing this thing I’m doing [gestures vaguely] and I’ve been trying to articulate it for like a good 15 years and I still find that I’m making progress

a thing that critter helped me clarify for myself is a big part of what I am here to do – part of the FAN ethos – is to relentlessly encourage and support other people to do the work they know they want to do, but aren’t quite sure about

I started my youtube channel in 2005, but I didn’t have the guts to make any talky videos then. or to even conceive of the possibility for myself. I sort of shyly made my bid to the universe by making a few videos of myself playing guitar, which didn’t go anywhere, bc mediocre

what I would do, if I met 15 year old visa today, would be to say, “you are a smart, thoughtful, passionate kid with a great voice. you should totally make youtube/tiktok videos. make short little videos every single day about what you’re thinking about. do it. it’s worth doing.”

I can’t exactly go back in time and do it for myself retroactively, but I can do it for all of you. That thing you want to do, that you’re kinda scared and nervous to do? Do it!! Do a small version of the thing. Baby steps. I believe in you, I love & support you, even if you fail

whatever you do, you should ideally do it for its own sake

but if it helps to think “visa is rooting for me and he would love to see me do the thing I know in my heart that I want to do”, you are absolutely welcome to think that, because you would be absolutely correct