Stop yapping

Sunday evening reality check for you :)

We're the results of our actions, not our aspirations.

And I mean this quite literally - your current position is the mathematical sum of every action you've taken (or avoided taking) over the past months and years.

All the manifesting in the world won't save you if you never move.

  • You can vision board until your walls look like a crime scene

  • You can buy every productivity course on the internet

  • You can tell everyone about your big plans and get that sweet validation hit

But if you're not taking action?

You're just really good at creative procrastination.

I know for a fact that most people love to talk.

They yap endlessly.

They may have big dreams that they love to tell people about.

But they rarely act upon them.

Day after day. Week after week. Month after month.

And guess what?

They're never any closer to achieving what they want.

Because they're too afraid to get going.

But - action is the only mechanism that creates feedback loops with reality.

When you think about your idea, you're operating in a closed system where all variables are theoretical.

When you act on your idea, you're immediately introduced to market forces, user behaviour, resource constraints, and a thousand other factors that no amount of planning could have predicted.

The cognitive bias at play here is called "planning fallacy."

We underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions while overestimating their benefits.

But arguably worse, we mistake the mental effort of planning for actual progress toward our goals.

Your brain releases the same dopamine hit from detailed planning that it does from achievement.

So you get the psychological reward without any of the advancement.

Not a great deal imo.

I think people enjoy the idea more than they enjoy progress.

Because progress is genuinely uncomfortable.

It’s not fun.

It forces you to confront the gap between your self-perception and your actual capabilities.

It requires you to fail publicly, iterate messily, and admit when your assumptions were wrong.

Planning lets you maintain the fantasy that your idea is perfect and you're just one perfect execution away from success.

Real progress happens in what I call "the compound middle" - that long, unglamorous period where tiny improvements stack up but don't feel significant day-to-day.

But the compound effect of these micro-actions is exponential over time.

See - information asymmetry only gets resolved through market interaction.

You cannot predict customer behaviour from your desk.

You cannot optimise for problems you haven't encountered yet.

And you cannot build for an audience you haven't engaged with.

Markets reward speed of learning, not perfection of execution.

Customers don't know what they want until they see it, use it, and experience it in context.

The market will teach you things no amount of theoretical analysis could predict.

Starting tomorrow:

Pick one thing you've been "thinking about" for too long.

And do the smallest possible version of it.

Not the complete version.

The smallest version that creates a feedback loop with reality.

Don't research it to death because over-research is a form of resistance.

Don't ask 16 people for their opinions because opinions are not data.

Just get it out there.

Six months from now, you'll either be:

A) Still talking about that thing you're going to do someday

B) Six months further along because you got going

The choice is genuinely that simple.

Now go get after it :)

Jordan

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

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