JUST START

Do you have an idea for a company, book, or anything else you can’t stop thinking about?

I’ll give you the only advice that matters: JUST START! NOW!

Don’t wait until conditions are ideal because they never will be. If you go looking for excuses, you’ll always find one.

Successful film directors embody this philosophy better than anyone else.

Christopher Nolan made his first film on the weekends with his friends for a year while working a day job to cover all the expenses. He was director, producer, transportation, camera, makeup, and every other role you can think of!

James Cameron got the money to make his first film from a dentist he knew. It was only $20K and he learned how to direct as he was making it. He compared the experience to “a doctor doing his first surgical procedure”.

Quentin Tarantino made Reservoir Dogs with a $1.5 million budget that was barely enough to cover the cast’s salaries. His quote about filmmaking applies to any passion:

“You don't have to know how to make a movie. If you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can't help but make a good movie.”

He doesn’t mean that you have to be completely deficient technically, but that you don’t need to know every single thing to start something. You will learn all the relevant information as the need arises. If you don’t, your project will fail.

It’s easy to overlook these humble beginnings now because when you think of these directors, you think of big-budget films like Oppenheimer, Django, and Avatar. But the only reason they have been able to make these films is because they got started early, and gave themselves more chances to learn from their mistakes than their contemporaries who wasted time getting to their first iteration.

This underscores a harsh truth about ideas: your ideas aren’t special.

Your ideas are only as good as your ability to act on them quickly and with intention. If you let ideas stay in your mind, you will lose them.

Successful companies always emphasize building a “minimum viable product"(MVP). You need to build the most simple yet functional version of your idea. This can be a simplified version of a website, a prototype for your invention, or a book outline/draft.

Whatever it is, it should answer the question: “Could this work?”

The worst case scenario is you do the work to build an MVP and you find out it just doesn’t work. The idea sounds nice but is completely impractical.

That’s great! You just saved yourself a ton of time — time making your project and time you would have spent daydreaming about your project.

Either way, the benefit of getting started right away is clear: it allows you to move on so you can begin building toward your next big idea.

P.S. There are no such things as absolutes. For example, Christopher Nolan had the idea for Inception in high school, but it wasn’t fully realized as a film until a decade and a half later. But what is important is what he did during that time: he put Inception aside and worked on other films.

If you really believe you have an idea that just won’t work now, put it aside and work on the next one, but don’t use it as an excuse to do nothing. Build up your skills so that you will be ready to execute the idea when it is ready for you.

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