On Getting Started

Daniel Jalkut and Manton Reece co-host a podcast called Core Intuition where they hold casual conversations about Mac Development and other ephemera. It’s a terrific podcast, and I highly recommend it if you enjoy podcasts, Apple, and the indie Mac developer community.

A few episodes ago, they started answering questions from users. This past episode, Episode 15: The Extra Long Episode, Mr. Reece answered a question about getting started. And I thought I should chime in since this journal is all about getting started. I mean, what better way to start a journal about starting new things than a post about getting started!?

The question posed to Mr. Jalkut and Mr. Reece was,

How do you get or stay motivated to work on your personal projects? Do you just wait for the mood to strike before putting more hours into, say, Wii Transfer? Or do you have a fixed work schedule? Or do you have something in between?

Mr. Reece paraphrases a quote—around 39:32 in the podcast—from the inimitable Ollie Johnston about thinking, thinking, thinking and then doing, doing, doing. I’m not sure if he was referring to his quote on splitting time between planning and animating or a more popular quote from his animating cohort, Frank Thomas, Observe Everything. Communicate Well. Draw, Draw, Draw. I like to think he was referring to the latter.

I like numbers, and I like words. I like to think that people appreciate both in conjunction, so let’s take a deeper, more mathematical, look at Mr. Thomas’s excellent advice. The quote is composed of seven words: five verbs, one pronoun, and one adverb. To reiterate, there are five verbs, you know, action words. That’s a little over seventy percent of the sentence focused on doing something, and sixty percent of that is in actually implementing the final product, drawing. It seems Mr. Thomas was an advocate for practicing your craft, for actually doing whatever it is that you do, for getting started.

A lot of people seem to have a fear of getting started. Maybe it’s a fear of failure brought on by perfectionism. I don’t know, but I see it all the time. People have great ideas, but they’re afraid of getting started. I have a different thought: maybe, just maybe, they’re not really all that serious about it. Maybe they’re just lazy. It really boils down to what Gary Vaynerchuk talked about at Web 2.0 Expo in New York: patience and passion. Mr. Vaynerchuk has a few priceless quotes in his talk. The first relates to passion, There is [sic] way too many people in this room doing stuff they hate. Please stop doing that. The second relates to getting started by working in your spare time, Everybody has time. Stop watching fucking Lost.

Being passionate about something is priceless. There is no barrier to entry for someone who is passionate. Mr. Vaynerchuk is dead on, stop doing what you hate and stop wasting your time. The great thing about this is that one breeds the other. You’ll sacrifice all the free time in the world when you’re passionate about something. The barrier to entry dissolves in the face of passion.

So, how would I answer the question posed to Mr. Jalkut and Mr. Reece? Be passionate. You’ll do amazing things when you’re passionate about them. Getting started won’t be a problem at all.

I’ll leave you with this: Use your free time wisely. You may have to forfeit spending time with friends. You may lose a lot of sleep. You may have to miss an episode or two of Lost. I promise it’ll be well worth the sacrifice when your product comes to fruition. So, why are you wasting time reading this journal entry? Get started, now.