- Vanguard Weekly
- Posts
- "We'll go because it's Thursday"
"We'll go because it's Thursday"
You don't need a reason to just do things
Jamil Vanheyningen
March 09, 2025
Despite all of her faults, Daisy Buchanan is one of my favorite characters from The Great Gatsby.
She’s endearing, and it’s due in large part to her whimsical nature and poetic language.
She throws away the most beautiful phrases and ideas without knowing how profound they are, and in one particular scene toward the beginning of the story, these traits truly shine:
[Daisy] looked at us all radiantly.
“Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it.”
“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.
“All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?” She turned to me helplessly: “What do people plan?”
She’s looking for an excuse — any excuse — to get together with her loved ones and watch for the longest day of the year.
The specifics aren’t important. As long as you’re doing what you want to do, the rest is just details.
Go ahead and set the date and time first and figure out the rest later.
In one of the classic Winnie the Pooh stories, Pooh and Piglet decide to do just that.
“Let’s go and see everybody,” said Pooh…
Piglet thought they ought to have a Reason for going to see everybody, like Looking for Small or Organizing an Expotition, if Pooh could think of something.
Pooh could.
“We’ll go because it’s Thursday,” he said, “and we’ll go to wish everybody a Very Happy Thursday. Come on Piglet”
We’ll go because it’s Thursday.
Translation: You can just do things.
You don’t need to justify why you want to start a project, train for a marathon, or build an app.
You can just do it, and let the meaning or value arise naturally after you do it.
These first few examples are cute, but there are larger (are more lucrative) ones.
My favorite post from last year, from author, entrepreneur, Memelord (and homie) Jason Levin, was on this exact idea. Check it out for a few wild examples.
Jason is an embodiment of the idea that “you can just do things”.
He’s built his career primarily using… memes.
He literally wrote the book on it. (I wrote a Twitter thread on it too)
He makes real money and has accomplished some crazy things using memes as his main marketing, networking, and service tool.
All because he just decided to do it.
This strength of his to just do things and figure out the logistics later is actually how I first connected with Jason.
One day, he tweeted about starting a “Banned Book Club” and I was one of the people who replied showing interest. Within 5 minutes of the tweet gaining momentum, he created a Discord channel for it and I joined.
The book club lost steam after a couple of months, but within the time it ran Jason and I had become friends and I’ve done a ton of ghostwriting work for him since then.
One simple tweet, and more importantly, the decision to just do something, turned into a new friend and collaboration that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Serendipity loves action.
All the people who complain about how hard life is, how little opportunities there are, how they can’t get a date, etc., DON’T DO ANYTHING.
They sit at home or follow their neat schedules from home to work and back again hoping for an opportunity to just fall into their laps.
You can just go for a walk with no goal in particular in mind.
You can just build an app in a day for yourself.
You can just call a friend out of the blue.
You can just do things.
The people who are happiest in life aren’t the most clever or intelligent ones. They are the Winnie the Pooh-like characters, who invent the simplest reasons for doing things and then just go through with it without thinking about how it may fail.
If you can’t make up a reason to go do something, just go because it’s Thursday.