8 ms·

Writer's Block, or the Wantrepreneur Blues

88 points by fazkan 9y ago

dev1n 9y ago
> Energy and Time, No Direction I tend to just buy one of the books I have on my list and dive into that. Then I don't need direction, I just keep turning pages and take notes.
pfisch 9y ago
Quit your job. Make it real. Fear is one of the best motivators. Unfortunately this is bad advice for most people, because the truth is most people don't have the full skillset required to own a business. Maybe they could learn it if they apprenticed under an entrepreneur or in an executive role, but I'm honestly not sure. I own a business with studios in New Orleans and Atlanta, but I worked in the real world, went to grad school, and then came out and immediately went out on my own which is easier for a lot of reasons. I also think a series of fortunate and somewhat unreproduceable events led me here, strangely enough involving Gabe Newell, though I'm sure he wouldn't remember. I honestly don't think reading a bunch of books telling you how to be an entrepreneur are helpful or real at all. In fact I would describe them as more of a stalling tactic.
- flachsechs 9y ago
  > most people don't have the full skillset required to own a business i agree with your post but i never miss an opportunity to be pedantic -- reality is nobody has the full skillset to run a business -- in my mind it's really just a bunch of intangibles like vision (goal setting), determination, ability to take staggering amounts of abuse, ability to work insanely hard when it's necessary, and ability to know how to hire an expert in matters you are not skilled or experienced in, which means the ability to clearly communicate and know what to ask for through deductive reasoning. most people have NONE of those skills, because working a normal job doesn't require any of them. zero, zip, nada, zilch. a high functioning professional has like 2 or 3 of those things. i would guess less than 5% of the general US population has those characteristics in the large amounts required to start a business from scratch, and most of the time that talent is channeled into something like e.g. investment banking or corporate law or being a surgeon. on top of all that, the ability to take a financial and social risk is just too much to handle for most people. they just won't do it. period. you might as well ask them to sprout wings and fly. but that's why starting a business has the potential to be so god damn lucrative -- basically, nobody else is doing it relative to the demand the overall economy generates. i also agree that the only way you're really going to get anywhere is if you quit your job, or were fired. the slow drip of a paycheck is the biggest obstacle.
  - crush-n-spread 9y ago
    financial and social risk is just too much to handle for most people. they just won't do it. nobody else is doing it People tend not to try because they cannot embrace the intermediate feeling of "I f*ing suck at this." When you embrace that you are not very good, you become the master. It is a tautology.
    - OtterCoder 9y ago
      I feel like that's the step I'm on, and I really hope you are right.
  - ge96 9y ago
    > Slow drip of a paycheck haha that's brutal Yeah I wish I could quit my day job of working in a restaurant, drives me insane the yelling/ego bs I have to deal with. Granted I'm not "better than them" sucks can't escape reality. Got a "great gig" relatively where I am actually getting paid hourly as a contractor getting paid the same (less actually with regard to taxes) to my restaurant job. I think it's funny as an intermediate developer I have no idea what business to make/run yet there are people that can do these "marketing/subscription" things "call to action button" and they just need some site and some theme/template to do it, some coding Joe like myself to change something and boom they're raking in some monthly recurring revenue haha. Speaking through experience working on UpWork edit: the rates matter and having a product matters, there are fixed amount of hours in a day and even working somewhere "that you like" if the rates aren't great it still doesn't make you a lot of money.
- thwiv 9y ago
  I agree with you. I came close to doing that a few years back. I still hold on to that product idea, because I still think it's great. I took 6 weeks off and told myself I'd work on the project for a while, full time. I got so much done, but honestly, probably not the right work. I wrote a ton of code, got the site up and running, and started working on the real nuts and bolts that would make the thing great. Hit a snag, and realized that I had no income, no partner, no publicity, and 6 digits of student loans to pay back. Golden Handcuffs, as it were. I probably should have started with gauging interest, finding some help, and maybe looking for potential investors. But I'm a software engineer....coder's gonna code. I didn't know how to do any of that other stuff, but I can sure as hell write a program. I'll probably buckle down on my next idea. Or the one after that. But one of these will go well.
- malloreon 9y ago
  That is a tempting idea but health insurance can be cripplingly expensive when not on an employer's plan, and with the uncertainty surrounding the US healthcare system right now, sometimes it just doesn't make sense.
- fazkan 9y ago
  I also disagree with some of the points in the Original Post. We need a balanced risk profile (Adam Grants Original). But I would also say that there is no one size fits all solution to this. There is no checklist, which if followed guarantees success. On the other hand, the same reasoning goes for not following a checklist at all.. Its like balancing intuition vs logic. Atleast thats what I think for now, based on the limited experiences that I have had. I might change my mind later..:)
- a_c_s 9y ago
  This is bad advice for most people because, regardless of business skillsets, these kinds of one-sized-fits-all prescriptions don't take into account human diversity. Fear is a terrible motivator for many people: rather than providing a productive boost of energy as it does for some, for others it provides an unhelpful dose of anxiety and negative stress which is at best counterproductive.
  - pfisch 9y ago
    If you are crippled by fear owning your own business is probably a terrible idea.
    - a_c_s 9y ago
      Or one could start a business part-time and only switch to it full-time when/if things are going well... which is what the Warby Parker founders did and now they are either CEOs of or are on the board of a unicorn start-up.
      - pfisch 9y ago
        You have to take risks owning a business. Even when your business is big you have to do scary, risky things. Making almost any product or expanding your business involves large upfront costs and then hoping it is profitable. When you look at CEOs you think its all rainbows but I assure you it is not.
jonny_eh 9y ago
Step 14: Find out in a couple years that someone else took the same idea to fruition and succeeded. When that happens I'm sad that I didn't fully pursue it, but happy that someone did.
- bluetwo 9y ago
  I build things and throw them away all the time. Great to try out an idea or new technology. Often I'll leverage the knowledge into a client project or proposal. I don't get mad because I could never take all the things and build them into their own companies, and someone who made it successful also made 100 decisions along the way that I might have made differently.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- reificator 9y ago
  Back in high school I had an idea for a video game that I really wanted to make, but didn't because I was focusing on learning to program instead. That was probably the right decision, because that time investment I made during those years has really paid off for me. The game was a two-genre mashup between two very different genres, that I thought I could pull off blending together. (I still kind of think it could be done, whether or not I still think I could do it alone is a different story...) A few years ago, someone came up with exactly the same genre mashup, and in fact the main character looked extremely close to what I had in my notes. I was thrilled about it because I didn't just want to make it, I wanted to play it. Someone else did the work and took the risk of making it for me, and I get to fork over a few dollars and play it myself! Sure I wanted to be the one to make it, but if it existed at all that was huge. I'm a millennial, so the first thing I did was go look it up on YouTube. And what I saw was incredibly disappointing, didn't do any of the things I was hoping it would, and frankly I didn't even bother to go buy it and play for myself. It didn't look like it had that fun factor, and it didn't do either genre justice. Still makes me sad, and if I were to go into game development as more than a hobby, doing that game right is top of my list.
  - 9y ago
ak39 9y ago
Forgot to list: "Tell your friends about your brilliant ideas."
- zippergz 9y ago
  I'm at the point where I don't do that any more, to avoid the shame of being asked about it later and having to admit I haven't worked on it in months. Some people say they find having others know about it to be a motivator, but that hasn't been true for me.
  - ehnto 9y ago
    I don't tell others either. Not right away. Telling someone is almost as good as it being finished. You have gotten that sweet social reward and pat on the head for being clever. If I don't show anyone until it's real in some way then I have to make it happen if I want that sweet social head pat. Obviously that's not the reason I do things but I do find telling people can undermine my motiviation a bit.
munificent 9y ago
I like the triad he breaks it down into. Here's the tricks I try to get over missing one leg of the tripod: > Energy and Direction, No Time I have a wife, kids, pets and work full time so this is my default state. Things that help: 1. Get off my damn phone / reddit / twitter / whatever. Consuming media on the Internet is junk food for the attention span. I have had way too many evenings after I get the kids in bed where I think, "I'll just unwind on my phone for a few minutes and then work on something." The next thing I know, it's three hours later, every animated GIF and cute kitten link on Reddit is purple, and I'm filled with regret. I trying now to break my habit of consuming stuff on the web. It's ultimately not satisfying. A little news-reading is important, but any more than fifteen minutes a day or so is wasted. This frees up an astonishing amount of time. 2. Get better at working on things in small pieces. I'm writing a book right now that's projected to be about 200,000 words. It builds up two implementations of the same programming language, and each implementation is spread across multiple chapters, so the book is highly intertwined. You might expect that to require a ton of mental state and lot writing sessions to work on. Nope. I usually work on it less than an hour a day (which, granted, means it's going to take forever to finish). I rely on a test suite, Git, a log, and notes to myself to make it easier to pause and resume work on it and break it down into small pieces. 3. Decide what not to spend time on. Our natural tendency is to want to say yes to things -- new projects, new hobbies, new outings, new toys to play with. But since time is finite, each of those means cutting out something that's already in my life. I try to be more cognizant of that and proactively choose to not invest time in things I don't want to be doing right now even if I would like to. > Direction and Time, No Energy For me, this is usually laziness or analysis paralysis. Some amount of laziness is OK -- nothing wrong with some chilling and self-care. Relaxing feels good, but I find it doesn't feel as good as the satisfaction of accomplishing something, so I try to remember that. Analysis paralysis is my personal demon. I try to remember that anything is generally a more productive path than getting stuck and doing nothing. If I'm stuck because I don't have enough information to pick a path, walking down one path is a great way to get that information, even if it requires some backtracking later. > Energy and Time, No Direction For me, this is usually analysis paralysis at a larger scale. The kids are finally out of the house and I've got four hours of free time. What project should I work on? Oh, God, I can't pick. Again, I try to force myself to pick something because any choice is better than no choice. I don't personally often have the vague "I don't know what I want to do at all" problem I hear a lot from bloggers. I think many of those are coming from people who want to be a certain thing (author, entrepreneur, successful open source project lead, etc.) and don't want to do a certain thing (edit paragraphs, make sales cold calls, reply to bug reports for five hours). They want the reward of the cachet associated with the identity but either don't want to or don't know how to do the work to get that. Personally, I'm generally more motivated by the process than the product, so I don't fall into that trap very often. I don't have enough self-discipline to spend time on things when I don't enjoy the basic mechanical process of it.
DesiLurker 9y ago
Serious question for those in software development, Have you ever had a debugger/problem solver's block? how do you get over it?
- snarf21 9y ago
  It happens all the time. Usually, you get past it by taking a break. I can't count the number of times I've solved the problem I've been stuck on all week while showering or driving to work. Sometimes you just need your brain to slow down and stop over thinking everything.
  - jmiserez 9y ago
    I’d just add that enough sleep is paramount. It’s happened that I made no progress on a problem late in the evening, and then easily solved it the next morning. Or worse, that I made some progress in the evening, and then realized in the morning that a much more elegant solution is possible. It’s not the same as what the article is describing though, because debugging and problem solving skills automatically get better with experience, and through the course of normal work.
    - ballenf 9y ago
      I have kind of the reverse reason for not telling people: they just kind of shrug and ask "how is that different from ________?" I explain how it's fundamentally nothing alike and how my approach solves some really hard problem, but it's too late: the second-guessing myself has started. Much better to build an MVP before ever mentioning it. Maybe they'll still shrug, but happens a lot less often. I've also tried to stop buying domain names and instead just putting them all on a personal website. But when I find that awesome name that is still available, I'm powerless to resist buying (I tell myself it's an "investment".)
      - jmiserez 9y ago
        I think you replied to the wrong parent comment?
brian-armstrong 9y ago
There's a really simple gimmick I use to get myself to do work. Set timer on phone for 20 or 30 minutes. Until the timer goes off, I won't intentionally engage in any distractions, just my project. When the time is up, I'm free to go do something else if I want. Sometimes I will stop working. Many times I will have got engaged by whatever I was doing and will keep going for a few more hours. Even if I stop, 20 minutes of undistracted work is actually pretty significant, so it's win/win
- thwiv 9y ago
  The pomodoro technique is very useful. Check out the app Forest, it's kind of a cool app for this technique.
ThomPete 9y ago
I have done a ton of successful side projects, one of them even turned into a great and growing business for me. As a former musician the concept of jamming seemed like a great way to think about side projects. In other words in my experience the best you can do is not even think about your side projects as projects (as the require process) but rather as jam-sessions. Hopefully you have hundreds of little ideas to explore not just one (if you have that one big idea you should probably turn it into a real business, quick your job and maybe get funding) The worst thing you can do is to worry about process (buy domain name, spend time on logo etc)
- jmiserez 9y ago
  Very insightful. Jam session also sounds better, less like work and more like fun. Easier to justify (to yourself and to others) if it doesn’t go anywhere, and less pressure.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    Yes Side projects should normally be measured by you don't want to go to bed because you want to do just one more thing rather than you can't go to bed because you need to finish some thing. It should be purely driven by desire.
    - moretai 9y ago
      Jeez, I wish I could verbalize things like this because they are so insightful. Thanks for that. It makes sense, but I'd never think to phrase it like that, and hence it doesn't seem apparent that's what I want in my side projects. But the abstract gut feeling is essentially that.
- fazkan 9y ago
  This sir, is the ultimate rule for following up side projects. I think this even applies to life in general ( Only in life's case its more like jazz music, you are improvising all the time, enjoying the process)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sjcsjc 9y ago
"3. Buy a domain name (this step is crucial)" Fantastic
- moretai 9y ago
  This part is easy for me. I have a ton of dead domain names. The rule that if you have skin in the game or money in the game, then you'd be motivated to complete the task. That doesn't work for me. Maybe for a little bit. But essentially stuff like this is a sale technique.
  - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
    It's easy for everyone. The "this part is crucial" was sarcasm :)
    - moretai 9y ago
      Ah, I didn't read the article. Probably should have done that.
fiokoden 9y ago
I gotta say, I just bulldoze through and get the damn software built at great personal cost in a whole range of ways. I always complete the project. The hardest thing is not writing the code - although that is extremely hard - the hardest thing is building something people want to use.
dungmourice 9y ago
Take a look also at this awesome helping site https://eduessayhelper.org/ https://eduessayhelper.org/
aregsarkissian 9y ago
The key is to reduce the friction of getting features out on the open web and getting feedback from real users. have just one generic domain that can be repurposed to any idea. Attach it to a static ip on aws do or up cloud as an example. Use a rad framework like rails django or laravel and launch a permanent hello world by pushing to github. Now find a small group of users that have a problem you can solve. Spend an hour a night adding a page to your site and gather feedback. Rinse and repeat. The key is to have a basic ci/cd pipeline setup at the outset. Then iterating on ideas becomes much more easy.

88 points by fazkan 9y ago

> Energy and Time, No Direction I tend to just buy one of the books I have on my list and dive into that. Then I don't need direction, I just keep turning pages and take notes.

pfisch 9y ago

Quit your job. Make it real. Fear is one of the best motivators. Unfortunately this is bad advice for most people, because the truth is most people don't have the full skillset required to own a business. Maybe they could learn it if they apprenticed under an entrepreneur or in an executive role, but I'm honestly not sure. I own a business with studios in New Orleans and Atlanta, but I worked in the real world, went to grad school, and then came out and immediately went out on my own which is easier for a lot of reasons. I also think a series of fortunate and somewhat unreproduceable events led me here, strangely enough involving Gabe Newell, though I'm sure he wouldn't remember. I honestly don't think reading a bunch of books telling you how to be an entrepreneur are helpful or real at all. In fact I would describe them as more of a stalling tactic.

flachsechs 9y ago
> most people don't have the full skillset required to own a business i agree with your post but i never miss an opportunity to be pedantic -- reality is nobody has the full skillset to run a business -- in my mind it's really just a bunch of intangibles like vision (goal setting), determination, ability to take staggering amounts of abuse, ability to work insanely hard when it's necessary, and ability to know how to hire an expert in matters you are not skilled or experienced in, which means the ability to clearly communicate and know what to ask for through deductive reasoning. most people have NONE of those skills, because working a normal job doesn't require any of them. zero, zip, nada, zilch. a high functioning professional has like 2 or 3 of those things. i would guess less than 5% of the general US population has those characteristics in the large amounts required to start a business from scratch, and most of the time that talent is channeled into something like e.g. investment banking or corporate law or being a surgeon. on top of all that, the ability to take a financial and social risk is just too much to handle for most people. they just won't do it. period. you might as well ask them to sprout wings and fly. but that's why starting a business has the potential to be so god damn lucrative -- basically, nobody else is doing it relative to the demand the overall economy generates. i also agree that the only way you're really going to get anywhere is if you quit your job, or were fired. the slow drip of a paycheck is the biggest obstacle.
- crush-n-spread 9y ago
  financial and social risk is just too much to handle for most people. they just won't do it. nobody else is doing it People tend not to try because they cannot embrace the intermediate feeling of "I f*ing suck at this." When you embrace that you are not very good, you become the master. It is a tautology.
  - OtterCoder 9y ago
    I feel like that's the step I'm on, and I really hope you are right.
- ge96 9y ago
  > Slow drip of a paycheck haha that's brutal Yeah I wish I could quit my day job of working in a restaurant, drives me insane the yelling/ego bs I have to deal with. Granted I'm not "better than them" sucks can't escape reality. Got a "great gig" relatively where I am actually getting paid hourly as a contractor getting paid the same (less actually with regard to taxes) to my restaurant job. I think it's funny as an intermediate developer I have no idea what business to make/run yet there are people that can do these "marketing/subscription" things "call to action button" and they just need some site and some theme/template to do it, some coding Joe like myself to change something and boom they're raking in some monthly recurring revenue haha. Speaking through experience working on UpWork edit: the rates matter and having a product matters, there are fixed amount of hours in a day and even working somewhere "that you like" if the rates aren't great it still doesn't make you a lot of money.
thwiv 9y ago
I agree with you. I came close to doing that a few years back. I still hold on to that product idea, because I still think it's great. I took 6 weeks off and told myself I'd work on the project for a while, full time. I got so much done, but honestly, probably not the right work. I wrote a ton of code, got the site up and running, and started working on the real nuts and bolts that would make the thing great. Hit a snag, and realized that I had no income, no partner, no publicity, and 6 digits of student loans to pay back. Golden Handcuffs, as it were. I probably should have started with gauging interest, finding some help, and maybe looking for potential investors. But I'm a software engineer....coder's gonna code. I didn't know how to do any of that other stuff, but I can sure as hell write a program. I'll probably buckle down on my next idea. Or the one after that. But one of these will go well.
malloreon 9y ago
That is a tempting idea but health insurance can be cripplingly expensive when not on an employer's plan, and with the uncertainty surrounding the US healthcare system right now, sometimes it just doesn't make sense.
fazkan 9y ago
I also disagree with some of the points in the Original Post. We need a balanced risk profile (Adam Grants Original). But I would also say that there is no one size fits all solution to this. There is no checklist, which if followed guarantees success. On the other hand, the same reasoning goes for not following a checklist at all.. Its like balancing intuition vs logic. Atleast thats what I think for now, based on the limited experiences that I have had. I might change my mind later..:)
a_c_s 9y ago
This is bad advice for most people because, regardless of business skillsets, these kinds of one-sized-fits-all prescriptions don't take into account human diversity. Fear is a terrible motivator for many people: rather than providing a productive boost of energy as it does for some, for others it provides an unhelpful dose of anxiety and negative stress which is at best counterproductive.
- pfisch 9y ago
  If you are crippled by fear owning your own business is probably a terrible idea.
  - a_c_s 9y ago
    Or one could start a business part-time and only switch to it full-time when/if things are going well... which is what the Warby Parker founders did and now they are either CEOs of or are on the board of a unicorn start-up.
    - pfisch 9y ago
      You have to take risks owning a business. Even when your business is big you have to do scary, risky things. Making almost any product or expanding your business involves large upfront costs and then hoping it is profitable. When you look at CEOs you think its all rainbows but I assure you it is not.

jonny_eh 9y ago

Step 14: Find out in a couple years that someone else took the same idea to fruition and succeeded. When that happens I'm sad that I didn't fully pursue it, but happy that someone did.

bluetwo 9y ago
I build things and throw them away all the time. Great to try out an idea or new technology. Often I'll leverage the knowledge into a client project or proposal. I don't get mad because I could never take all the things and build them into their own companies, and someone who made it successful also made 100 decisions along the way that I might have made differently.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
reificator 9y ago
Back in high school I had an idea for a video game that I really wanted to make, but didn't because I was focusing on learning to program instead. That was probably the right decision, because that time investment I made during those years has really paid off for me. The game was a two-genre mashup between two very different genres, that I thought I could pull off blending together. (I still kind of think it could be done, whether or not I still think I could do it alone is a different story...) A few years ago, someone came up with exactly the same genre mashup, and in fact the main character looked extremely close to what I had in my notes. I was thrilled about it because I didn't just want to make it, I wanted to play it. Someone else did the work and took the risk of making it for me, and I get to fork over a few dollars and play it myself! Sure I wanted to be the one to make it, but if it existed at all that was huge. I'm a millennial, so the first thing I did was go look it up on YouTube. And what I saw was incredibly disappointing, didn't do any of the things I was hoping it would, and frankly I didn't even bother to go buy it and play for myself. It didn't look like it had that fun factor, and it didn't do either genre justice. Still makes me sad, and if I were to go into game development as more than a hobby, doing that game right is top of my list.
- 9y ago

ak39 9y ago

Forgot to list: "Tell your friends about your brilliant ideas."

zippergz 9y ago
I'm at the point where I don't do that any more, to avoid the shame of being asked about it later and having to admit I haven't worked on it in months. Some people say they find having others know about it to be a motivator, but that hasn't been true for me.
- ehnto 9y ago
  I don't tell others either. Not right away. Telling someone is almost as good as it being finished. You have gotten that sweet social reward and pat on the head for being clever. If I don't show anyone until it's real in some way then I have to make it happen if I want that sweet social head pat. Obviously that's not the reason I do things but I do find telling people can undermine my motiviation a bit.

munificent 9y ago

I like the triad he breaks it down into. Here's the tricks I try to get over missing one leg of the tripod: > Energy and Direction, No Time I have a wife, kids, pets and work full time so this is my default state. Things that help: 1. Get off my damn phone / reddit / twitter / whatever. Consuming media on the Internet is junk food for the attention span. I have had way too many evenings after I get the kids in bed where I think, "I'll just unwind on my phone for a few minutes and then work on something." The next thing I know, it's three hours later, every animated GIF and cute kitten link on Reddit is purple, and I'm filled with regret. I trying now to break my habit of consuming stuff on the web. It's ultimately not satisfying. A little news-reading is important, but any more than fifteen minutes a day or so is wasted. This frees up an astonishing amount of time. 2. Get better at working on things in small pieces. I'm writing a book right now that's projected to be about 200,000 words. It builds up two implementations of the same programming language, and each implementation is spread across multiple chapters, so the book is highly intertwined. You might expect that to require a ton of mental state and lot writing sessions to work on. Nope. I usually work on it less than an hour a day (which, granted, means it's going to take forever to finish). I rely on a test suite, Git, a log, and notes to myself to make it easier to pause and resume work on it and break it down into small pieces. 3. Decide what not to spend time on. Our natural tendency is to want to say yes to things -- new projects, new hobbies, new outings, new toys to play with. But since time is finite, each of those means cutting out something that's already in my life. I try to be more cognizant of that and proactively choose to not invest time in things I don't want to be doing right now even if I would like to. > Direction and Time, No Energy For me, this is usually laziness or analysis paralysis. Some amount of laziness is OK -- nothing wrong with some chilling and self-care. Relaxing feels good, but I find it doesn't feel as good as the satisfaction of accomplishing something, so I try to remember that. Analysis paralysis is my personal demon. I try to remember that anything is generally a more productive path than getting stuck and doing nothing. If I'm stuck because I don't have enough information to pick a path, walking down one path is a great way to get that information, even if it requires some backtracking later. > Energy and Time, No Direction For me, this is usually analysis paralysis at a larger scale. The kids are finally out of the house and I've got four hours of free time. What project should I work on? Oh, God, I can't pick. Again, I try to force myself to pick something because any choice is better than no choice. I don't personally often have the vague "I don't know what I want to do at all" problem I hear a lot from bloggers. I think many of those are coming from people who want to be a certain thing (author, entrepreneur, successful open source project lead, etc.) and don't want to do a certain thing (edit paragraphs, make sales cold calls, reply to bug reports for five hours). They want the reward of the cachet associated with the identity but either don't want to or don't know how to do the work to get that. Personally, I'm generally more motivated by the process than the product, so I don't fall into that trap very often. I don't have enough self-discipline to spend time on things when I don't enjoy the basic mechanical process of it.

DesiLurker 9y ago

Serious question for those in software development, Have you ever had a debugger/problem solver's block? how do you get over it?

snarf21 9y ago
It happens all the time. Usually, you get past it by taking a break. I can't count the number of times I've solved the problem I've been stuck on all week while showering or driving to work. Sometimes you just need your brain to slow down and stop over thinking everything.
- jmiserez 9y ago
  I’d just add that enough sleep is paramount. It’s happened that I made no progress on a problem late in the evening, and then easily solved it the next morning. Or worse, that I made some progress in the evening, and then realized in the morning that a much more elegant solution is possible. It’s not the same as what the article is describing though, because debugging and problem solving skills automatically get better with experience, and through the course of normal work.
  - ballenf 9y ago
    I have kind of the reverse reason for not telling people: they just kind of shrug and ask "how is that different from ________?" I explain how it's fundamentally nothing alike and how my approach solves some really hard problem, but it's too late: the second-guessing myself has started. Much better to build an MVP before ever mentioning it. Maybe they'll still shrug, but happens a lot less often. I've also tried to stop buying domain names and instead just putting them all on a personal website. But when I find that awesome name that is still available, I'm powerless to resist buying (I tell myself it's an "investment".)
    - jmiserez 9y ago
      I think you replied to the wrong parent comment?

brian-armstrong 9y ago

There's a really simple gimmick I use to get myself to do work. Set timer on phone for 20 or 30 minutes. Until the timer goes off, I won't intentionally engage in any distractions, just my project. When the time is up, I'm free to go do something else if I want. Sometimes I will stop working. Many times I will have got engaged by whatever I was doing and will keep going for a few more hours. Even if I stop, 20 minutes of undistracted work is actually pretty significant, so it's win/win

thwiv 9y ago
The pomodoro technique is very useful. Check out the app Forest, it's kind of a cool app for this technique.

ThomPete 9y ago

I have done a ton of successful side projects, one of them even turned into a great and growing business for me. As a former musician the concept of jamming seemed like a great way to think about side projects. In other words in my experience the best you can do is not even think about your side projects as projects (as the require process) but rather as jam-sessions. Hopefully you have hundreds of little ideas to explore not just one (if you have that one big idea you should probably turn it into a real business, quick your job and maybe get funding) The worst thing you can do is to worry about process (buy domain name, spend time on logo etc)

jmiserez 9y ago
Very insightful. Jam session also sounds better, less like work and more like fun. Easier to justify (to yourself and to others) if it doesn’t go anywhere, and less pressure.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Yes Side projects should normally be measured by you don't want to go to bed because you want to do just one more thing rather than you can't go to bed because you need to finish some thing. It should be purely driven by desire.
  - moretai 9y ago
    Jeez, I wish I could verbalize things like this because they are so insightful. Thanks for that. It makes sense, but I'd never think to phrase it like that, and hence it doesn't seem apparent that's what I want in my side projects. But the abstract gut feeling is essentially that.
fazkan 9y ago
This sir, is the ultimate rule for following up side projects. I think this even applies to life in general ( Only in life's case its more like jazz music, you are improvising all the time, enjoying the process)

deleted 9y ago

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sjcsjc 9y ago

"3. Buy a domain name (this step is crucial)" Fantastic

moretai 9y ago
This part is easy for me. I have a ton of dead domain names. The rule that if you have skin in the game or money in the game, then you'd be motivated to complete the task. That doesn't work for me. Maybe for a little bit. But essentially stuff like this is a sale technique.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  It's easy for everyone. The "this part is crucial" was sarcasm :)
  - moretai 9y ago
    Ah, I didn't read the article. Probably should have done that.

fiokoden 9y ago

I gotta say, I just bulldoze through and get the damn software built at great personal cost in a whole range of ways. I always complete the project. The hardest thing is not writing the code - although that is extremely hard - the hardest thing is building something people want to use.

dungmourice 9y ago

Take a look also at this awesome helping site https://eduessayhelper.org/ https://eduessayhelper.org/

aregsarkissian 9y ago

The key is to reduce the friction of getting features out on the open web and getting feedback from real users. have just one generic domain that can be repurposed to any idea. Attach it to a static ip on aws do or up cloud as an example. Use a rad framework like rails django or laravel and launch a permanent hello world by pushing to github. Now find a small group of users that have a problem you can solve. Spend an hour a night adding a page to your site and gather feedback. Rinse and repeat. The key is to have a basic ci/cd pipeline setup at the outset. Then iterating on ideas becomes much more easy.