The doers are the major thinkers
jasonleow • 8 Jan 2023 •
This tweet by @jakobgreenfeld got me thinking about my Twitter feed and who and what kind of influence I’m letting into my head:
Unfollow: content creators, coaches, thinkers, framework guys, writers.
Follow: doers, founders, people actually building and doing interesting things.
So now my 2023 mood for Twitter:
Follow more doers who are the deep thinkers, who had not just done the concrete work but wrestled through the hard intellectual problems too.
Why? Because the best doers are often the major thinkers.
I didn’t say that. Steve Jobs did:
"The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker-doer in one person. And if we really go back and we examine, you know did Leonardo [Da Vinci] have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the future what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it, of course not.
Leonardo was the artist but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. Knew about pigments. Knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result.
And there is no difference in our industry. The people that’ve really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers. And a lot of people of course, it’s very easy to take credit for the thinking.
The doing is more concrete. But somebody, it’s very easy to say, oh I thought of this three years ago.
But usually when you dig a little deeper, you find that the people that really did it were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems as well."
That’s why I’ve always enjoyed following folks who build in public and write about it.
Not just tweet about it, mind you, but write looong form.
Not just build, but build and launched products out into the wild.
Not just launched, but had wins and many more fails than wins.
Not just successful products but also helped others succeed with their products.
Not just helped others but also thought deeper and broader about the actionable, transferrable lessons from his experience and observations of other’s people’s experience, and translated that into frameworks, ideas and stories that others can benefit from.
The best doers think deeply. The best thinkers are the doers.
Theory and practice – the twin wings that makes true flight possible.
Know anyone like this?
Comments
I’m one that is generally too busy “doing”, but leaning too far on the product side.
Where I’m trying to improve is to talk about the process more, as a means to both make friends and market, but also think through things more thoroughly. Writing has a way of ensuring you actually know what you’re saying/thinking. And it helps you plan ahead, which I think is the key to working efficiently.
In the past I’ve viewed the real work as working on the product but obviously marketing is just as important, and sharing and thinking things through in public can be part of that. With my last SaaS most of the customer acquisition came from direct outreach, so a sort of quiet grind. But that works too. So I’m trying to view building and writing in public as such; as an important part of the whole process. I do enjoy it, but there’s only so much time in a day and working on product sometimes feels like a quicker win even if that’s not necessarily true.
Balance. Balance. Balance!
@tao I think most of us do. Not easy, takes too much effort to do the due diligence on the background check of the account all the time
@macmartine Yes very true! Tough balance indeed. I often struggle too. And yeah, sharing only makes sense if it impacts your bottomline, or you want to build a personal brand/audience, isn’t it? Maybe that’s why a lot of doer-thinkers don’t write because there’s not much real benefit to their biz!
I think I fall into the trap of following people who are just telling people stuff, not really doing it themselves. Too many fake gurus out there.