Just Do It

For many years, I never understood this Nike slogan - Just do it. It seems straightforward. What else would you do if you don’t “just do it”? Only very recently, I realized these three simple words are the answer to many hard challenges in personal growth, business development, and anything involving execution.

I made a new year’s resolution in 2023 to write an essay every week. Writing has always been hard for me. I’ve made this resolution in the past, but I never was able to execute it fully. Sometimes, I caught up on having the perfect title figured out. Other times, I kept baking the structure of the essay in my head, writing it again and again in my head, but never felt it was good enough. Last time, I tried, I was never happy about my WordPress themes so I tweak it again and again, to the point I felt burned out. This time around, I told myself, why don’t I just get started with writing anything, every week. My goal is not to write perfect, or good essays. My goal is to simply write. I avoided finding the best blogging platform. I had very little planning in my head, and I just told myself to write it out within an hour. It has been working out great.

In fact, the best tip I got from a friend who is really good at writing is that, spend little time writing the first version, and spend a lot of time modifying it. It turns out, most of the great authors admit that their first version of a great work are often very very bad, but they just kept working on it to make it better and better. So, the best advice for start writing, is to just do it.

I had another personal example where I was trying to start a Youtube channel on career development and personal growth. I tried everything to make my lighting right. I polished my script. I shoot one clip for many many times. Each time there is something I don’t like. You know what, I eventually came to the conclusion that this is not for me. I just can’t produce good video content.

I think there is something to be generalized here. We often think too much. We often plan too much. We become the biggest obstacle of ourselves. There is often a deep sense of fear. A fear of not being perfect; A fear of failure. We fear the judgement from others. Often times that judgement comes from ourselves. So, a simple tool to overcome all that is to tell ourselves, to just do it. It means removing that judgement from our inner voice about any potential outcomes.

In habit building, there is a good tool which is to set really achievable goals at the beginning. For example, if you want to start working out everyday for 30 minutes, set your first goal to be 1 minute everyday. I think the extreme of that is to not set any goals at the beginning. This might be counter-intuitive because goal setting is often said to be a good tool to achieve success. I think that’s true, but that comes in at a later stage. Goal setting is meaningful once you have the thing going in some momentum. So back to the working out example, my advice is to start doing any form of workout activity, however long you want.

The just-do-it mentality helps us overcome our destructive perfectionism and the tendency to overthink. In some other times, overthinking and overplanning simply won’t work, because there are too many unpredictable factors, that it’s impossible to plan for every possibilities.

Building an innovative product often falls into that category. The build-measure-iterate model works under the same mental model. It’s too hard and ineffective to predict and plan. So the best approach is to just do it. Build out your first version and start iterating from there.

Next time when you have trouble getting something started. When you have a chatter in your head that fears and judges, read silently that simple 3 words slogan to yourself - Just…Do it.