Nothing New

sometimes you just have to start

I’ll lead off this week’s post with a secret (that’s not so secret). But - like all good secrets, it starts with a story. Way back in June of 2004, I wrote my very first blog post, where I proclaimed that I wasn’t a blogger. That blog series moved to angryweasel.com a few years later, but then and life and work got in the way, and eventually my blogging slowed to a trickle…until of course, inspired by Tim Ferris’s Five Bullet Friday, angryweasel.com became a weekly repository of interesting links I found, but didn’t have time to write about. Along the way, I wrote a lot. I wrote most of a book, chapters for a few others, and more print and online articles than I can count. I like writing - in fact the reason I began blogging in the first place was to get better at writing. But after not really writing that much recently, I decided I wanted (needed?) more practice, so I spun up yet-another-blog (or is it a newsletter?) where I’ve been posting weekly for the last five months. On that note, let me shove a subscribe now button in here for those who may have stumbled across this post via some other means than your inbox.

The not-so-secret secret is that every week, I sit on the couch with my dog to write, and every week, she and I stare at each other and wonder what to write about. There are times when I have a topic in mind - and I have a few outlines of potential posts in my drafts, but for the most part (including days like today), I don’t know what the hell I’m going to write about. Until I start.

Just Start

I can vividly recall a time when I was seven, and my mom demanded that I clean my room. I remember it because I just sat in the middle of my horribly cluttered room paralyzed because I didn’t know where to start. After some stern nudging from mom, I started by picking up my laundry, then my books and toys and games (and trash) until it looked like a bedroom again. All I had to do was start.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, gives a direct and solid piece of advice to this end.

The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.

The first time I read this book, I was in college, where, because I was a music major, my “homework” often involved sitting in a practice room for six hours a day. I read it again years later, and I found it relevant to writing, but over the years, I’ve realized this advice is good for just about everyone. One of Pressfield’s main points in the book is the concept of "Resistance" - the force that prevents people from realizing their creative potential and achieving their goals. Like the quote I pulled above, I think this concept applies far beyond the arts.

I found more reinforcement in the “just start” approach to doing things in Atomic Habits, by James Clear. Clear focuses on the power of small habits and incremental progress to achieve big goals, and argues that by focusing on making small improvements consistently over time, people can achieve big things. While Clear focuses on the power of habits and incremental improvement, both he and Pressfield stress the importance of consistency and getting started.

Five Hundred Bugs

I was an early adopter of static analysis tools during my time at msft. I built a lot of partnerships with our research department (who built the tools), and knew enough about how the tools worked to know how to fix the bugs they reported fairly quickly. When I was on the Xbox One team, we outsourced the driver development for the network driver and blur ray decoder. The drivers worked fine, but our static analysis tools reported about 500 bugs between them. I volunteered to take a quick look, and there was a healthy split between bugs that could happen, probable security issues, and things that would probably never work. For reasons I don’t remember (and probably wouldn’t repeat), I volunteered to “help” fix them. And I did - one at a time mostly (often, one fix or annotation will fix several analysis bugs). Fix some bugs, run the tests, re-run the analysis - again and again and I was done. All I had to do was start.

Working on platform and infrastructure teams over the last decade or so means that I’m almost always involved in some sort of migration. They’re huge projects, but you just need to start.

Just Start

The world is full of these examples. Whether it’s the Wright brothers starting with model gliders, or Jimmy Wales kicking of Wikipedia with just a few pages, the key is to just start.

Fifty years later, my room is (relatively) clean, I’m still overwhelmed sometimes with projects that seem too huge to ever get done. But being overwhelmed is OK. I’ve solved these sorts of problems before. All I can do is start.