Saturday, December 03, 2011

Cult of the Done


Two brilliant guys, Bre Pettis and collaborator Kio Stark wrote down everything they knew about bringing "a creative vision to life. They called it The Done Manifesto. Illustrator James Provost then took the extra step of turning their 13 maxims into a poster":
  1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
  2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
  3. There is no editing stage.
  4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
  5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
  6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
  7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
  8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
  9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
  10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
  11. Destruction is a variant of done.
  12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
  13. Done is the engine of more.
from Infographic of the Day

My favorite is #13: Done is the engine of more.  I find I get stuck in "not knowing" a lot, and my other swamp is denying the principle of #2, that everything is a draft.  Perhaps if I memorized these, or posted them somewhere prominent--like my bathroom mirror--I might eventually conquer #5: procrastination.

1 comment:

Judy said...

I can totally go for Maxims #4 and #10. I need to print those up and carry them around.