This isn’t a blog post about the origin of “Hello World,” “Lorem Ipsum,” or why everyone who has held a guitar for more than 30 minutes can play “Smoke on The Water.” I’ve linked those boring blog posts for you to open in other tabs and forget about. This blog post is garbage. And in being garbage, it proves my point that “if you want to start a business, a YouTube Channel, a novel, or anything that requires creativity and willpower (like a website), you must start by producing something you consider to be garbage.”
What do I mean by garbage? Something that takes < a few hours, a derivative or clone of something already done by someone else (so you have an example to follow), and not very impressive. You must start producing garbage to eventually make something you’re proud of.
Are there papers in psychology and business journals to prove my point? Probably [^fn1], [^fn2]. But this blog post is sufficient enough because I’ve been wanting to make a website for about 6 years now. However, the reason it has taken me until today to actually make something is because I was too caught up in doing things the “perfect” or “optimal” way instead of just making something. I spent years taking online courses and teaching myself HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. I became president of my high school’s computer tech club, took programming courses in college, and taught myself bits of graphic design. I looked at my peer’s websites and scoffed if I saw that they used a template or if their site didn’t look good on mobile or worse – used google sites because my website would be clean, minimalist, responsive, and with satisfying animations. I was (and still am) a perfectionist.
But turns out doing anything optimally at first for a beginner who hasn’t done anything is both very challenging and will kill your motivation 99/100 times before you’ve even started. That’s why after following the first YouTube video I found titled “How to Build a WordPress Website,” I had a website within an hour. Could I have used a better hosting service such as BlueHost.com instead of host gator? Yes. Could I have bought my own domain name on NameSilo, hosted my website for free on Github, used a template from https://html5up.net/, and avoided the irritation that is the random paywalls for Elementor and the various plugins and templates within WordPress? Yes. But at the end of the day, I have a website and you don’t, nerd. People can now see the type of person I am online and judge me for it, when yesterday they couldn’t because I had no online presence. I can always switch my hosting service, transfer my content from WordPress, or do a thousand other things in the future. But you can only start once. And if it takes you more than a couple of hours to start something you’ve been thinking about for a while, chances are you probably aren’t going to do that thing ever, given our ever-shortening attention spans, more people working long hours, and wage stagnation [^fn3] [^fn4] [^fn5].
To further prove my point, I’ll link some of the first artwork I’ve produced and a more recent drawing, one of my first YouTube videos (I’ve deleted most of the early ones out of embarrassment) and one of my more recent videos, etc.
My Avatar: GalacticNinga (I didn’t know how to spell Ninja) circa 8/4/2012
A picture of my hand after reading “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” circa 2/25/2014
Additionally, some tips I have are:
- if it’s a big task, what’s an extremely simple first step?
- Set a deadline – I’ll do this by today at 5:00PM (and write it down)
- Be reasonable: I’m a fairly productive person, but it’s impossible to work for a few hours and then do Duo Lingo during breaktimes. If you find yourself missing all your goals, start small and build.
References
- (yeah these are all ted talks and blogs – I said this post was garbage after all):
CHARTS https://termadiary.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/wage-stagnation-in-nine-charts.pdf