stopped thinking
Talking about plans gave me a fake hit of accomplishment. So I stopped.
So the theme of this one is : I have stopped thinking.
Sounds funny but bear with me.
I used to talk to people about what I was going to do. I'd describe the plan, get nods, walk away feeling like I had moved forward. I had not moved forward. The talking just gave me a fake hit of accomplishment. There's a scientific term for this somewhere, I'm too lazy to look it up.
So now if I want to do something, I just start it. Treat it as an experiment. Doesn't matter if it flops.
Most recent example. I have been wanting to start a hacker house style thing in Hyderabad, where people show up, build for a few hours, and demo what they've been working on. This used to be a recurring thing in Bangalore that I really liked. I thought about it for months.
Finally just put a date down and did it.
First edition, 5 people came. Was actually fun. Friends helped a bit on distribution, that was my main blocker.
Currently writing this from edition 2. There are 10 people in the room around me right now.
There's this thing going around Twitter recently : a moving man always meets his match. I think that's what's happening. The first edition I had a distribution problem. The second edition I have a filtering problem (many registrations, gotta pick the right people). I'll take that trade every day.
From now on I'm gonna treat everything like this. Experiments. Probably gonna fail. Doing it anyway.
Some things on my mind right now. Not gonna think about them. Just gonna do them ✅
Now, some updates since my last blog where I almost questioned Bill Gates about some spicy stuff 👀 (clickbait).
EIGEN
Saw a video that's been stuck in my head. The algorithm pushed something genuinely worth it.
It was about Eigen skills and the Lindy index.
Eigen skills are the core, invariant skills that stay valuable across changing technologies. One skill, like writing, produces a hundred others downstream. Get good at writing and you get better at thinking, at selling, at coding, at almost everything.
Lindy means a thing has already stood the test of time. The longer it has been around, the longer it's probably gonna stick around.
So the move is to learn the ones that are both. The skills that already won.
PREREQUISITES
Have been trying to understand OAuth 2.0 for a while. Watched maybe 5 videos. None of them stuck. Was getting frustrated.
This time I asked AI to find me a video that actually starts from the prerequisites and builds up. It gave me this one. 20 minutes, clicked. Gold.
If you're struggling at anything, it's probably because you're unaware of the prerequisites.
CAREER COACH
Had a few career coaching sessions recently. Won't dump everything here, but the meta-process was actually more useful to me than any single piece of advice. Sharing in case it's useful to anyone reading.
Session 1. Pure thought dump. Just say everything you're thinking about, no structure.
Before session 2. He asked me to evaluate my own thinking and my own answers from session 1. Basically meta-thinking on what I had said. Very powerful exercise btw, would recommend trying it solo if you don't have a coach.
Before session 3. He asked me to pick which aspects of my life I actually want to track and improve, vs which ones are just for fun. And for the ones I want to improve, define a very specific A → B for the next 3 months. Measurable.
Example I gave him: I want to go from 25% body fat to 20% body fat in 3 months. That kind of specific.
REST OF THE WEEK
Went to Bangalore for an event a close friend was hosting. It blew up on Twitter, was wild to watch.
Built a small site to track my GitHub commits. Subdomain hosted, like everything else now.
github.ritavdas.com Played some tennis
SWEET SPOT
To be clear, the opposite of overthinking isn’t no-thinking either.
The sweet spot lives somewhere between planning and doing. Talk forever and never ship, that’s one failure mode. Do random stuff with no plan, that’s the other.
I’m not telling you to live reactively. Live proactively. Plan, then go. Beats both “looking back and feeling good about what you said you’d do” and “looking back and feeling good about whatever happened.”
Find your sweet spot. Hopefully not so sweet it rots your teeth.
Not sure of the scientific term but Instagram calls it mental masturbation and I’m also tryna work around this. This is so practical. It will help :)
Thanks, you're gonna get through it 👏🏻