There’s one friend in my friend group whom everyone hates.
Let’s call him Dave. In his 20s, he saw this guy Vishen Lakhiani blow up online. He moved from Australia to Malaysia to work directly for him. Because he had no skills he took a sh*t kicker job right at the bottom.
He was a workhorse.
While working for Vishen he met an American. They became friends. They worked stupid hours. They had no s*x for years while they worked their unconventional jobs. They knew nothing about digital marketing but were forced to learn on the job.
Vishen had no idea about their true inexperience.
They ran multi-million-dollar campaigns to an enormous audience and learned the coolest insights. Eventually, they quit their jobs and went out on their own.
They reached out to successful influencers and best-selling authors. Because they had zero clients, they used their success with Vishen as proof they could market anything. And it worked. They landed multiple 6-figure clients within months.
Bastards.
To get clients they hand-wrote short pitches to powerful people. They got good at getting around famous people’s assistants. At the height of their success they decided to part ways. Dave moved back to Australia. The other moved back to America.
Dave now had no money coming in. He had to start again. He had no audience of his own. So within a week, he found a friend running a big email list and worked out a deal where he could use her list to promote his new business. He skipped audience building altogether.
This little venture now supports his wife and two kids. They’ve done extremely well financially.
The other friends in my friend group are pissed off with Dave. They hate that he makes doing things look so easy. Recently, Dave wanted to lose weight. Within a day he got ChatGPT to write him a meal plan and found a personal trainer who agreed to train him for free.
The others in my friend group wait for the right time, overeducate with too many degrees, procrastinate, and have dreams instead of habits. They mistake just doing things for privilege or some other factor that must explain Dave’s results.
Dave and I bond because we’re alike.
At 19, I launched businesses. We raised money without knowing how to pitch investors or write up a pitch deck. I then got into banking with no finance degree or connections, and rose to (arguably) one of the coolest jobs in history.
That job required no job interview. And I met 0% of the job description (no joke). Then I permissionlessly became one of the most shared writers on the internet for the last 11 years with no published books or writing talent.
This phenomenon is known as “You can just do things.” The idea was popularised by writer Jay Yang who also works directly for Alex Hormozi.
He recently posted this odd cartoon (about just doing things) that went insanely viral:
The idea is picking up more traction each day. It seems obvious. But the meme of “you can just do things” hides a deeper truth few talk about.
Let me break it down so you can use it to your advantage.
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The deeper truth that might just change your life is that “you can just do things” works because it prioritizes momentum.
When you start small on a goal it’s easier to get moving. Then once you’re moving you have real data on what works and what doesn’t work through doing things. This is why even people with low to average IQ can achieve extraordinary results.
They don’t have time to overthink things. They just take action and expect they’ll figure it out along the way. And guess what? They do!
There’s an even deeper level to why just doing things works. Let me explain.
Every day I get sent random emails and DMs from strangers. There’s no message. Just a link to a Substack newsletter they wrote. It’s strange. I asked a writer friend of mine, Todd Brison, why this is happening.
“People are sending you links to their Substack because they’re hoping you’ll read it, then promote it for free to your millions of followers.”
What these people are subconsciously saying to me in their DM is “Look, my writing is f*cking brilliant and this one idea I wrote about will change your life.”
Of course, 99.9% of these unsolicited DMs with Substack links never get opened. They just get deleted.
Here’s what they misunderstand:
Great writing with perfect sentences doesn’t matter. And whatever idea they’re writing about has already been written about before.
What matters is what’s behind the writing. It’s the story. That story is built when you just do things for long periods of time. That’s the novelty.
The story is crucial because of what writer George Mack says:
Normal behavior is forgotten. Only weird behavior survives.
When someone says they just did things every day for 11 years and didn’t ask questions… that’s not common. That’s a lot of work, a lot of stories, a lot of data.
People respect the reps, not the idea.
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“If you get in your head, you’re dead” said a wise man centuries ago.
What he means is if you let overthinking, perfectionism, or “I’m not qualified enough” infect your brain, you’ll never get anywhere in life.
The human brain is wired for survival. At the first sign of friction or discomfort the brain will do its job and talk you out of whatever crazy task you’re asking it to do.
Your brain wants you to stay the same.
Just doing things is the antidote that overrides your human programming. Once you understand every goal in life is just YOU versus YOU + self-improvement in disguise… you can literally achieve any goal.
The conversation shouldn’t be “How do I get started?”
It should be “How would I have to think to make this goal happen? What would I have to believe?”
Now you have the mindset. If you adopt the mindset, you get results and just do things. If you don’t, then you stay where you are.
Life is now stupidly simple. No more guessing.
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What works for me is…
I act when I’m inspired. If I have a good idea or get a spark of courage, I act right away on it. While writing this essay I thought of Jay Yang. So I instantly sent him a DM to say hi because I felt inspired to.
Tomorrow I won’t have that same inspiration. I’ll be in my head and think to myself “When I get time” or “Jay probably doesn’t like me.”
But right now my mind is inspired and isn’t thinking in survival mode. So now is the best time for me to message Jay. And so I did.
Same applies to writing. I often have ideas about what to write about. But when I sleep on a writing idea, it doesn’t feel as special or as good the following day. This is why I don’t sleep on essay ideas.
I write an outline of an essay, or ideally the whole thing, the moment it pops into my head. That’s when the idea has the most energy & I have the most energy to act on it.
I also move fast. I have a psychopathic sense of urgency caused by a near-miss with cancer in 2015. I’m not interested in tomorrow or next year. When people talk in those terms, I just politely switch off. Self-talk: “I might be dead then.”
Moving fast is coupled with the fact I’m impatient. My wife always complains about it. I always want everything done now. My brain thinks “When would now be a good time to do it.”
I used to think being impatient was bad.
Now I see it as crucial. Impatience forces you to use tighter deadlines and forget about being perfect. The people I admire are impatient. They act faster than normal and learn faster because of it.
When you act fast things break. I love it when that happens. I recently launched a new booking system for my business. The tech is imperfect. I had no clue if it would work. Instead of terrorising my brain, I just launched it. Within a day three people reported major bugs and I fixed it. Now it’s perfect.
You don’t learn unless you break things.
And whatever worst-case scenario you’re thinking of, it’s almost never going to happen. People are forgiving. And the people who aren’t forgiving are often rude a**holes hiding in plain sight, virtue signalling their butts off to fit in.
Rudeness is a huge red flag.
If you want to test anyone, take them to a cafe. Purposely get the waiter to stuff up the order. Notice how they treat the waiter. Now you know everything about them.
As we keep moving through the just do things framework, we get to the need for certainty. Just doing things makes the world very uncertain.
You end up acting with less than ideal facts or data. You back yourself when no one else will. And more chaos may happen as a result of imperfection and fewer plans. Most people can’t deal with uncertainty.
They label uncertainty as “this feels bad.”
So they do everything they can to avoid uncertainty and choose paths full of certainty. It’s why college degrees used to be a popular path. The outcome was certain. You study an MBA and you end up as a titan of a business. All you have to do is follow the 12 steps the professor lays out and comply with them.
Anyone with high agency knows that certainty is a myth. The predictable career path of a degree or a working a safe job can blow up in seconds.
One death in the family. One health diagnosis. One layoff. One recession. One foreign war. That’s all it takes for your perfect plans and certainty to get f*cked in the butt by entropy.
Certainty is an illusion. It never existed.
From here, once you accept certainty is harming you, it leads you to know that there’s never the right time to do anything. I feel that right now. I have a second baby daughter coming in 4 weeks. Now is the worst time for me to do anything. I must act knowing in 4 weeks my life will be utter chaos.
A 3 year old and a newborn baby under one roof while I’m trying to work from home is a formula for disaster. I can either:
Shut down my life (the option most will take)
Admit there’s never a right time to do anything and just keep doing things.
I’ve chosen option one. It’s been a fun ride guys. Thanks for reading. I’ll see you in 5 years when the chaos has subsided. Have a nice life. Just freaking joking!!!
There’s literally never a time in life when you won’t be busy. Just ask my parents. They’re retired and have never been busier. They have back-to-back social appointments, funerals to attend, and elderly family to take care of.
The only time life isn’t busy is when you’re dead. If you get good at just doing things when the timing isn’t right, you’ll be a f*cking superstar with perfect titties when the timing is bang on. Hubba hubba.
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The deepest truth about just doing things is it creates momentum, which means you end up acting with momentum on your side. That’s a powerful place to be.
It can make a lot of rejections, failures, and problems vanish.
The visual I’ll give you is that most people try and plan out the entire 10,000 steps to their goal in advance and want to know what every step will look like. The just doing things crowd doesn’t do that. Nope.
They focus on putting one foot in front of the other. They take small steps in a power walking fashion. They stay alert. They expect hills. They know the directions may change. And most of all, they love the journey because that’s what writes cool stories they can one day tell their grandkids.
“You can just do things” is an idea that I promise will change your life. Use it.
When did “waiting until you’re ready” become the socially acceptable way to procrastinate?
