Move Your Feet

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. Move Your Feet by Matt Swanson. Four books, 28 hours of screencasts, 2 online courses.

Result? Zero specs in my Rails project. Old pair of shoes, treadmill, 1 mile and 20 minutes and 23 seconds. Result, 866 miles traveled by foot this year. Why did I fail so hard at one activity and succeed at the other?

With a bit of hindsight, I'm starting to figure out the answer. The first activity suffered from extreme analysis paralysis. After working as a professional developer for 2 years, it is so hard for me to just dive in and start sucking at something. I want to learn the best practices so I don't waste time doing it incorrectly. But in this case, best practices are a poison, a hindrance that prevents us from even writing the first spec in my project until I have perfect vision and road map for achieving some mystical nirvana.

In contrast, I was able to ignore this mental roadblock in the second activity. Like many before me, I started the new year wanting to get into better shape. But instead of finding a book or reading posts on running forums for 2 months, I did something different. I found an old pair of shoes, got on the treadmill, and just started running. And, man, did I really suck at running.

But I didn't care. I could see my improvement every week. The time to run a mile went down, and the speed and distance went up, slowly. In the software domain, I struggled to convince myself that it was okay to regress in an area as I learned and improved. Instead of starting from the beginning, I tried to skip straight to mastery.

With running, my activities were directly related to practicing and improving. Instead of reading guides and spending hours on Amazon trying to find the perfect shoes, I was actually running. A few weeks ago, I finally went to get some proper running shoes. Once I got to the store, I reverted back to full engineer mode, trying to determine which brand of shoe was optimal, how many pairs of wicking socks I would need, etcetera. When the trainer looked over and made a comment that really resonated with me, wanna know the secret to improving your running?

Move your feet. Move your feet is great advice for all of us on every project or every skill that we're trying to learn. Move your feet translates to just get started. I personally have this huge temptation to want to research everything to death before I even get started. I think part of that is a function of the time that we live in where everything is readily available online, and, honestly, part of that is just pride.

I don't wanna undertake something unless I'm gonna be really good at it. And like the author said, it's not fun to suck at things, but it's so much easier to correct when you're actually moving. A car is way easier to steer when it's moving, And you can spend a ton of time reading about the best way to do something and learning all the theory behind it, and then you realize that you haven't actually done it and you haven't gotten better at it. So then you go outside and swing the racket and realize that theory is a lot different from actually practicing. But and I think this is where a lot of us fall.

Reading about theory and reading about how to do something and talking about how you're going to do it when you eventually start is a lot safer. It's a lot easier than actually going out there and being bad at it and learning as you go. But that's the only way that you're really gonna learn. You could spend years getting ready to start and suffer from the analysis paralysis. You're just analyzing the thing from every angle, and you're not actually doing anything.

Before I started this podcast, I didn't know how to podcast. And some people may say that I still don't. But that's okay. I think I'm getting better. And had I tried to make the perfect podcast from episode 1, I guarantee you that I would have never ever started.

I would have been way too scared. So what I did was tried to make it pretty good and then just put it out there. And I recently had a listener email me with some super helpful feedback and some really kind words. Who's giving me some feedback on the audio mix or the audio engineering part of the podcast. And I will be the 1st to admit I am not an audio engineer, and I bet all of y'all already knew that by listening.

But what he was saying was, hey. You're doing a good job. Maybe try doing this a little bit differently. And it was helpful, and it was encouraging, but I never would have gotten that advice if I hadn't already been moving. I'm moving forward, and he said, maybe go a little bit to the left there.

And so now I can adjust just a little bit, But that's something I never woulda learned had I not put some episodes out there. So for me, the real takeaway in this article is get started. Put the thing out there and try to learn as you go. And, man, you gotta just let go of your ego and say, I'm willing to suck for a little while. And maybe if it gives you comfort, say, when you're starting, this is as bad as it's ever gonna be.

It's only gonna get better from here. And I think you'll find that just as you start moving, you'll learn a ton more than you did when you were researching it beforehand. Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. So before you get started, you may think your plan's awesome, but I guarantee you it's gonna change. So close out some of those tabs, stop reading those forums, stop trying to optimize before you even get started, and just move your feet.

Just get going. And if you start moving your feet and you start doing your thing and people say, hey. You're bad at that. Give them a little grace because they may wanna be doing something, but they're too scared about what people think, so they're left to criticize other people. Or maybe they're just a jerk, and so they need grace all the more.

But you should take comfort in the fact that you are moving. You may suck today, but tomorrow, you're gonna suck a little bit less. The Music Makers podcast is released twice weekly on Mondays Thursdays at 10 AM CST. Here's a sneak peek from the next episode. You can be busy or remarkable, but not both.

Terence Tao is one of the world's best mathematicians. He won a Fields medal when he was 31. He is, we can agree, remarkable. He is not, however, busy. You can subscribe in iTunes by searching for the Music Makers, or visit us online by going to musicmakers.fm.

And as always, you can reach me at aaron@musicmakers.fm.