Advice I’m Not Following — #1

Advice I’m not following, but you should… I should too, I’m just not.

The advice: “JUST DO IT.”

This is my first post. FIRST!!1!!1!one!! With that said let’s begin…

My love of tech keeps me glued to my laptop browsing, programming, and now posting (after JUST DOING IT). Following a lot of blogs, occasionally I come across my favorite type of post, the advice post. These posts are usually lists and titled, “38 Life Lessons I’ve Learned in 38 Years” or “10 ways to improve your programming skills.” After reading several of these posts I found the most common piece of advice to be, “Just do it.” Simple, excellent advice. If you look at “successful” people, they are usually “just doing it”. Mr.Zuckerburg didn’t sit around wondering if Facebook was a good idea or a good use of time, he just went for it. Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google as a doctoral project, right? Now look what it has become.

So, in trying to follow this advice, I cracked open one of my notebooks and started sketching a bunch of different ideas. One in particular had some potential, I called it “Mustachio.” It was basically an app that would allow you to take a picture and put a big, hipster mustache anywhere in the photo. While deciding whether this was a good idea (and NOT JUST DOING IT) I searched the Apple App Store and not too surprisingly found plenty of apps just like it. Having several other projects, I put this one aside for a while (NOT JUST DOING IT). Several weeks later (today) I turn on Hacker News, on the front page what do I see? An HN Show article on a Chrome App called “Mustachio” that puts a mustache on every face on any given web page. Same exact name. Same basic (awesome) idea. Different execution. Either way, the developer thought this up and just did it and now they’re on the front of Hacker News. If you have an idea and it’ll only take a weekend (or other short amount of time) to whip together JUST DO IT (and you’ll get on the front of HN!). Lesson of the day/Advice to follow:

JUST DO IT.

and listen to people’s advice. haha