- October 18, 2010
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“Do or do not; there is no try” – yoda
Yoda was a tough taskmaster, but there is an important concept inside those words. "DO OR DO NOT; THERE IS NO TRY". And I'd like to think it is apparent in the way I approach life and in much of the work I've produced over the years. It is "done." That is, good, bad, or mediocre – I put it out there. (Whether you or others comment or not is less important than that I review it myself.) Not that dabbling in new experiences isn't important. It is. However you'll learn more from doing the thing you're contemplating doing than you'll learn by continuing to contemplate it.
By doing I learn. By failing I learn. By doing bad work I learn. By doing it over I learn. (Notice the theme here?)
Wouldn't you know it, I found some creators that think along similar lines.
This manifesto is a collaboration of Bre Pettis and Kio Stark found around the net but I bring it to you from the Bre Pettis Blog. (An interesting side story is that they completed this manifesto in 20 minutes, because that was how much time they had.) Read through it and contemplate how much more you'll accomplish in your life if you stop trying and "just do it."
The Cult of Done Manifesto
- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
- There is no editing stage.
- Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
- Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
- The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
- Once you're done you can throw it away.
- Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
- People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
- Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
- Destruction is a variant of done.
- If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
- Done is the engine of more.