I've noticed something about myself. It's become much harder to get things done. I see less movement compared to my previous self. And sometimes, when I see people get so much done, tasks, projects, anything, I wonder why I can't make progress like that. Now I'm not comparing myself to Elon Musk here, I'm just wondering if I'm doing my best.
For the longest time, I've wanted to build a portfolio website. But for some reason or another, I never actually ended up making it, or should I say, starting it. Whenever I had a free block of time, I wouldn't know where to start. I also have this side project I've been wanting to work on. I started it, then never made any more progress beyond the initial feasibility analysis. Why did I never allocate time to either?
The Overthinking Starts Early
I wanted the portfolio website to be really good. I wanted cool additions, beyond the usual "about me" and "projects" sections, I wanted things like "songs I'm obsessed with right now" and "last night I slept at." I was also looking if my fitbit has an API to show my live heart-rate on my portfolio (why would someone do that?). I was obsessed with the features, and with using the right tech to make it as efficient as possible. What stack should I even use for a portfolio?
Same story with this very blog. Before writing a single word, I was wondering what stack to use. I looked into a ton of existing blogs for inspiration, how do I track views, what about comments, how do I stop a DDoS from flooding my DB if I'm storing comments, should I require auth just to leave a comment, should I support font and background color changes, themes, what's the best tool to do all of that?
I've noticed this pattern with almost everything I do. I'm so obsessed with doing things right on the first attempt that I never actually make the first attempt, because "doing it right" is just too demanding. Or a related trap, when I want to do something perfectly, I discover prerequisites, and those prerequisites chain into more prerequisites. Let me show you what I mean.
Circus Maximus
My task was simple, apply for jobs.
Let me head over to LinkedIn and apply to jobs.
Wait. Manually search and click through job after job, only to realize half of them want 7 years of experience? I'd have to read every single description just to know if it's worth applying to. Hell nah. I should automate this.
Let me figure out how to automate this with AI. Oh, there's this tool, n8n, I can build a workflow and hook it up to an LLM. Let me set that up.
All set. Now I just need to scrape the jobs from LinkedIn.
Crap. LinkedIn has strict bot filtering and rate limiting. It doesn't allow scraping. What's a reliable way to get LinkedIn job data?
Five hours of searching later... fine, let me just pay Apify to pull the listings.
Five minutes of being ready to pay later... wait, WHAT, no. I'm an engineer. How am I about to pay someone to scrape an API that already exists? What a failure that would be.
Fast forward 10x. The workflow is finally set up. But wait, I can't run this on my Mac Mini forever. I need to host it. Let's grab Oracle's free VPS tier.
The free tier is in high demand, I can't get one. Only option is to upgrade to pay-as-you-go. Fine, I'll do it, I won't actually get charged anyway. My card gets declined. Let me raise a support ticket.
Fast forward 15x. (International transaction issue, fixed.) Yay, VPS is live. Now let's host n8n on it. Three hours of configuring a reverse proxy, grabbing a free domain, and setting up ingress rules later, voilà, n8n is hosted and the workflow is running.
But wait, I was using free open-weight models, and they have brutal rate limits too. What's a model with generous limits? Screw it, let's use Gemini Pro. Quota exhausts almost instantly. Screw it, let's get a Claude subscription. Okay, that finally works.
Finally. Let me apply to these jobs now.
...Wait. Are these LinkedIn job links even any good?
(they were not)
I learned a lot on that adventure. I also realised I might be doing something deeply wrong.
Enter the Yak
Then I came across the blog [Don't Shave the Yak](https://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_the.html)_, whose idea is simple. The example given goes something like this.
"I want to wax the car today."
"Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I'll need to buy a new one at Home Depot."
"But Home Depot is on the other side of the bridge, and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls."
"Wait! I could borrow my neighbor's EZPass..."
"Bob won't lend me his EZPass until I return the pillow my son borrowed, though."
"And we haven't returned it because some of the stuffing fell out, and we need yak hair to restuff it."
And the next thing you know, you're at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.
Sounded painfully familiar. One line from it has stuck with me since.
Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later.
And maybe one more line to sum up the whole tendency.
"Only limitations you'll ever have, are those that you place upon yourself." ~ some Kendrick song
Realising I'm a Perfectionist (Surprise)
This made me notice the pattern everywhere, and made me aware of my own tendency to want things done as perfectly as possible. I was familiar with the word "perfectionist," I just never thought it applied to me, because my results are never actually perfect. (I'm aware that assessment is, itself, a very perfectionist thing to think.)
Looking back, I realise how ridiculous I was being. For this blog, I was genuinely debating Astro versus other frameworks, agonising over rendering MDX just right, and researching how to DDoS-proof a comments database, for a blog with zero readers. No, scratch that, for a blog that didn't even exist yet.
I started to fear something. What if my perfectionism is just fancy procrastination? Is this all an elaborate excuse my monkey mind (shoutout Wait But Why) invented to talk me into doing something easier?
But then again, is wanting to do things correctly (or, fine, perfectly) actually a bad thing? Maybe wanting to do things well isn't the problem. So which is it, strive for perfection on the first try, or just raw-dog it and see what happens?
The Quantity Group Wins
In Atomic Habits, James Clear tells a story about photography professor Jerry Uelsmann. Uelsmann split his class into two groups on day one. Half were in the quantity group, half in the quality group.
The quantity group would be graded purely on volume. On the last day, Uelsmann would simply count how many photos each student turned in. More photos, higher grade. The quality group would be graded purely on excellence. One photo, submitted at the end of the semester, could earn an A, but it had to be nearly flawless.
The result was surprising, and also not surprising at all. Every single one of the best photos came from the quantity group.
Makes sense once you sit with it. The quantity students were out shooting constantly, experimenting, failing, adjusting, learning. The quality students spent the semester theorizing about the perfect photo, and most of them had exactly one mediocre print to show for it by the end.
So Maybe...
Maybe the first version of my portfolio doesn't need the perfect stack. Maybe the blog doesn't need comments on day one. Cutting the ambition down for the first attempt might be exactly what gets me started, and having something real, even something small, might give me the dopamine hit to keep going, instead of stalling out chasing one perfect, mythical final version.
Maybe my project never becomes "perfect" and just settles at "good enough." That's still infinitely better than the project that never existed at all, right?
Good enough is good enough.
There's also a nagging voice that says, if I have to go back and change something later, because I made a bad call early on, isn't that just repeated work? Partially true. But going back to fix something isn't repetition, it's iteration. You don't build something, learn nothing, and rebuild it identically. There's feedback each time. Each pass gets better because of the last one.
Every time I get cautious about making a mistake and freeze up in analysis paralysis, maybe the actual move is to just accept that mistakes are coming, and iterate through them. Maybe that's where the real learning happens anyway.
Just Do It
So if you're thinking about doing or building something, don't wait until you have all the knowledge, and don't wait until you know exactly how to do it best.
Just do it. (shoutout Nike)
And I absolutely did not send this draft to Gemini, Claude, and GPT at the same time asking them to spellcheck and critique it, even though I know damn well only two of my friends are ever going to read this. (I did.)
I wanted to throw in a dozen more examples to really convince you and myself, to stop chasing perfection. But I'm going to follow my own advice for once and end it here.
Until next time, my fellow fancy procrastinators.
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