Done begets done

Absolutely love The Cult of Done Manifesto from @drodol’s post:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

This is like the indie hacker’s manifesto.

9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

More and more I can relate to this wisdom of trusting people who had done the hard work more than armchair commentators. Well, it’s not a 100% thing for sure… not all with dirty hands are right, as context varies. But for something as hands-on and practice-based as entrepreneurship, I’d listen to those in the arena more.

10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.

Didn’t get featured on Product Hunt. Launch failed. No customers. It’s easy to think all these are failures. And that you have to re-do things, it’s not done, it doesn’t ‘count’. But without a few wrongs, you can’t iterate your way to a right. Didn’t Edison say something about “I didn’t fail 1000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps.”? So failures, mistakes, plain human errors, and destruction should all be considered done, because we need them done to get to a bigger done. Which bring us to the final point:

13. Done is the engine of more.

Momentum begets momentum. Done begets done. But this tends to be easy to misunderstand. It’s not always about quantity, working long hours, or generating a large volume of work, even if those help. You can commit once a day. You can spend 10 min a day on something. It’s more about tapping into that state of flow, and knowing how to adapt and respond, what to do, where to push things to move the needle most. You can’t achieve all that if you’re not doing, if it’s not done.