M&Ms: The Avalanche of Doing

How doing leads to more doing in the 94th edition.

Feb 20, 2023

Hey Team,

Early in my public journey, I was fortunate to stumble into the lesson that doing one thing in public provides the courage to do the next thing.

And later, I learned that doing things you enjoy leads you to do even more things you enjoy.

For example, I started writing more consistently on my blog because of a writing course called Write of Passage. That writing led me down a rabbit hole to write this newsletter, of which I have published 94 weekly editions. Thank you for being a reader and being in this with me. In that process, I took many other community-based courses like Small Bets, Ship30, etc., and I learned a ton.

One of those courses, Small Bets, profoundly impacted me and led to two small software projects last year and three content projects. The combination of all those projects and sharing netted me about $100k in internet dollars for 2022, my first year ever making money online and on my own.

For context, in 2021, I made zero internet dollars.

But besides the dollars, I wrote a lot of code. Some of it is being used by real people right now; it's nice to know I still got it even after all these years of managing people. I wrote a lot of words. As a byproduct of those words, I built a decent-sized audience, over 20k on Twitter. Not too shabby for an awkward engineer.

But many other good things happened.

For one, my content consumption habits changed. I read lots of great books, consumed great audiobooks and podcasts, and conversed with amazing people. I mentored and taught live webinars and overcame my fears of public speaking. I showed up on podcasts. I helped at least twenty, maybe more, random stranger engineers get promoted, just over zoom calls. I have at least twenty DMs to prove it. I spent lots of time with my kids, especially with my youngest, who is home with me every day. Before I knew it, I was doing 1-hour daily walks, and the list of good things all this doing got me goes on and on!

I could keep going, but I don't want to bore you with the things I've enjoyed doing.

Instead, I am telling you all this to motivate you.

I am trying to prove to you that the weirdest things happen when you start doing things you enjoy.

It snowballs into so many other parts of your life.

If you are on the fence, jump.

Confidence can be a coward; it tries to run even from perceived trouble. You just need the courage to try and do the first thing you are afraid of that you know you will enjoy. Community helps. And courage will do its thing and reign confidence in.

The craziest things will start happening to you after you do the first thing publicly. You'll end up doing other things too. Instead of trying to pull willpower out of yourself, somehow, someway, the act of doing things you enjoy will start pulling other things out of you in private and public.

It's a strange phenomenon, and I would've never known it without starting. You should start.

Two Articles: The Dance of the Bees, The is in the Mouse

My friend Chris Wong wrote a great piece on the creator economy and how to navigate it, The Dance of the Bees.

Chris is one of the people that snowballed his doing into an avalanche too.

We started around the same time, met in Write of Passage, took small bets together. Then we decided to place a small bet and teach a course on newsletters together.

314 people have consumed that small bet. Trust me when I tell you, just start.

A wonderful article with a lot of warnings.

It shows us more proof of how far Big Tech has fallen.

A small excerpt:

Three Tweets: Architecture Bias, Price’s Law, What Exit

Jet had one of the largest event-sourced architectures I've ever seen or heard of in production.

The truth is that it was incredibly painful to get there. But when we got there, our uptime was 99.9%, and we were going for that last 9; it was a feat to behold.

But truthfully, it took a lot of smart people and a lot of pain to get there.

I'll always speak fondly of that architecture, but few teams would be able to pull it off. We were lucky we had the money and attracted the right talent to do it.

Many people threw shade at Dare for this tweet but Pareto distributions (or Power Laws) can be found all over our world. The workplace is no exception.

No one blinks at the difference in skill level between Messi (the best soccer player in the world) and the average soccer player. And knowledge work is prone to far more messed up distributions than soccer.

But people get mad when you say a few people do the majority of the work in large companies and teams.