I’ve spent most of my life living in my own head.
I’ve analyzed market trends, deconstructed business models, and mentally optimized my morning routine down to the second. I’ve thought about writing books, starting a dozen different businesses, and learning to play the piano. For a long time, thinking was the finish line. A well-reasoned thought felt like an accomplishment in itself.
It’s not.
Thinking is the warm-up. It’s stretching before the race. The crowd doesn’t cheer for the guy who did the most dynamic stretches. They cheer for the guy who crosses the finish line.
The gap between thinking and doing is where dreams go to die. It’s a swamp of “someday,” “what if,” and “I need to research a little more.” It’s comfortable there. It’s safe. There’s no risk of failure in the swamp. Just the slow, quiet decay of potential.
I got tired of the swamp. Here’s how I started building bridges out of it. It’s not complicated, because action is, by its nature, simple.
You will never be ready. You will never have perfect information. The market will change, your skills will have gaps, and unexpected problems will arise. This is a feature of life, not a bug. “Ready” is a myth peddled by people who don’t want to see you succeed. The goal isn’t to be ready. It’s to be resourceful. Start before you think you are.
It’s easy to confuse mental effort with real progress. Thinking for ten hours about a business plan feels productive. Writing one page of that plan is actual productivity. Did you do the thing, or did you just think about doing the thing? The scoreboard of life only cares about the former.
You don’t need to write a book. You need to write one paragraph. You don’t need to build a multi-million dollar SaaS company. You need to write one line of code. You don’t need to get ripped. You need to do five push-ups. The MVA is the smallest possible step that proves you are a person who does things. Momentum is a physical force. A small, completed action creates more of it than any grand, unfinished plan.
A thinker believes they need all the skills now. A doer trusts that they will figure it out along the way. You don’t need to know how to do the whole thing. You just need to know the next step. Your future self is smarter, more capable, and has more information than your current self. Do them a favor and get the project started. They’ll handle the hard parts when they get here.
Thinking is valuable. Strategy matters. But it must be in service of action.
Stop optimizing. Stop preparing. Stop deliberating.
Just go. Do the thing. The thinking can catch up later.
—Yaz