aster.cloud aster.cloud
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
aster.cloud aster.cloud
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
  • Engineering
  • Programming
  • Software Engineering

An Open Letter To Everybody Having Trouble Getting Started Today

  • root
  • March 18, 2021
  • 4 minute read

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”

No, the second best time was 19 years and 364 days ago… but I get what you mean.


Partner with aster.cloud
for your next big idea.
Let us know here.



From our partners:

CITI.IO :: Business. Institutions. Society. Global Political Economy.
CYBERPOGO.COM :: For the Arts, Sciences, and Technology.
DADAHACKS.COM :: Parenting For The Rest Of Us.
ZEDISTA.COM :: Entertainment. Sports. Culture. Escape.
TAKUMAKU.COM :: For The Hearth And Home.
ASTER.CLOUD :: From The Cloud And Beyond.
LIWAIWAI.COM :: Intelligence, Inside and Outside.
GLOBALCLOUDPLATFORMS.COM :: For The World's Computing Needs.
FIREGULAMAN.COM :: For The Fire In The Belly Of The Coder.
ASTERCASTER.COM :: Supra Astra. Beyond The Stars.
BARTDAY.COM :: Prosperity For Everyone.

You read all these stories of the early investors in bitcoin, racking in their millions today, the tech billionaires who got the jump on the competition.

It’s easy to make yourself believe that you have missed the opportunity for greatness.

In todays climate, that could not be further from the truth.

 

Whatever you want to do in life, the best time to start is now.

Waiting for the perfect opportunity or for confirmation that your idea is good will lead to a paralysing state of inaction. You don’t need validation for your idea to get started. Just get to work, see how you feel about it, and keep going if it feels right.

Take this newsletter for example, my instinct is to feel that I should give readers scientific, solid, evidence-based content. Why would anyone care about me and my opinion? The honest answer is – they probably won’t, but that’s not stopping me. I’m not writing to garner an audience or for profit, I’m writing because I wanted a way to document my journey, so I just started writing.

The Flywheel

This is one of my favourite concepts that I’ve read about recently after reading “Good to Great” by Jim Collins.

Picture a huge, heavy flywheel—a massive metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle, about 30 feet in diameter, 2 feet thick, and weighing about 5,000 pounds….

Now, imagine that your task is to get the flywheel rotating on the axle as fast and long as possible.

Read More  My Favorite Open Source Project Management Tools

Pushing with great effort, you get the flywheel to inch forward, moving almost imperceptibly at first. You keep pushing and, after two or three hours of persistent effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn.

You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster, and with continued great effort, you move it around a second rotation. You keep pushing in a consistent direction.

Three turns … four … five … six … the flywheel builds up speed … seven … eight … you keep pushing … nine … ten … it builds momentum … eleven … twelve … moving faster with each turn … twenty … thirty … fifty … a hundred.

Then, at some point—breakthrough! The momentum of the thing kicks in in your favor, hurling the flywheel forward, turn after turn … whoosh! … its own, heavy weight, working for you.

You’re pushing no harder than during the first rotation, but the flywheel goes faster and faster. Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort.

A thousand times faster, then ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. The huge heavy disk flies forward, with almost unstoppable momentum.

It’s human nature to look at a successful person or business, and think of a thousand ways in which they could grow their audience / revenue, many of which are easy to implement for them.

However – when it comes to going from nothing to something, the idea of growth seems far more aloof.

If you’ve studied chemistry, you’ll know about activation energy – the ‘hump’ of energy required to get a reaction started. It’s the same in real life – if we want to get anything done, we need to first put in a burst of activation energy to begin with, and then things become a lot easier.

Read More  Expand Your Multicloud Resume With New Courses And Skill Badges

To overcome activation energy, you can force yourself to start. Everything takes care of itself after that. I’ve started telling myself that I’ll “only work for 10 minutes”, but by the time thats up, I’m too engrossed in what I’m doing to be able to stop.

Building habits and routine is fundamental to productivity and success – in essence; don’t think, just do.

All this isn’t to say that planning isn’t paramount. Don’t make a mistake that hundreds have made before you, but there comes a point where no amount of planning will be enough, you’ll paralyse yourself.

I recently learned about AI and deep learning, and with so many options for frameworks, I was overwhelmed and frustrated that no one could give me the answer to which was the “best”. Eventually, I just said fuck it and picked PyTorch and ran with it, so when it came time to try out another, I had the fundamentals and it was easy to learn!

 

No amount of planning is a substitute for action.

Get an idea of what you want to do, write down how you will get there, and figure the rest out on the way!

At the start, stop worrying about the outcome, and just enjoy the journey. After all, “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

This article is republished from hackernoon by Guy Torbet.


For enquiries, product placements, sponsorships, and collaborations, connect with us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you!

Our humans need coffee too! Your support is highly appreciated, thank you!

root

Related Topics
  • Flywheel
  • Momentum
  • Software programming
  • Start
You May Also Like
View Post
  • Engineering
  • Technology

Apple supercharges its tools and technologies for developers to foster creativity, innovation, and design

  • June 9, 2025
View Post
  • Engineering

Just make it scale: An Aurora DSQL story

  • May 29, 2025
View Post
  • Engineering
  • Technology

Guide: Our top four AI Hypercomputer use cases, reference architectures and tutorials

  • March 9, 2025
View Post
  • Software Engineering
  • Technology

Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code

  • February 25, 2025
View Post
  • Computing
  • Engineering

Why a decades old architecture decision is impeding the power of AI computing

  • February 19, 2025
View Post
  • Engineering
  • Software Engineering

This Month in Julia World

  • January 17, 2025
View Post
  • Engineering
  • Software Engineering

Google Summer of Code 2025 is here!

  • January 17, 2025
View Post
  • Data
  • Engineering

Hiding in Plain Site: Attackers Sneaking Malware into Images on Websites

  • January 16, 2025

Stay Connected!
LATEST
  • 1
    Pure Accelerate 2025: All the news and updates live from Las Vegas
    • June 18, 2025
  • 2
    ‘This was a very purposeful strategy’: Pure Storage unveils Enterprise Data Cloud in bid to unify data storage, management
    • June 18, 2025
  • What is cloud bursting?
    • June 18, 2025
  • 4
    There’s a ‘cloud reset’ underway, and VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is a chance for Broadcom to pounce on it
    • June 17, 2025
  • What is confidential computing?
    • June 17, 2025
  • Oracle adds xAI Grok models to OCI
    • June 17, 2025
  • Fine-tune your storage-as-a-service approach
    • June 16, 2025
  • 8
    Advanced audio dialog and generation with Gemini 2.5
    • June 15, 2025
  • 9
    A Father’s Day Gift for Every Pop and Papa
    • June 13, 2025
  • 10
    Global cloud spending might be booming, but AWS is trailing Microsoft and Google
    • June 13, 2025
about
Hello World!

We are aster.cloud. We’re created by programmers for programmers.

Our site aims to provide guides, programming tips, reviews, and interesting materials for tech people and those who want to learn in general.

We would like to hear from you.

If you have any feedback, enquiries, or sponsorship request, kindly reach out to us at:

[email protected]
Most Popular
  • Google Cloud, Cloudflare struck by widespread outages
    • June 12, 2025
  • What is PC as a service (PCaaS)?
    • June 12, 2025
  • 3
    Crayon targets mid-market gains with expanded Google Cloud partnership
    • June 10, 2025
  • By the numbers: Use AI to fill the IT skills gap
    • June 11, 2025
  • 5
    Apple services deliver powerful features and intelligent updates to users this autumn
    • June 11, 2025
  • /
  • Technology
  • Tools
  • About
  • Contact Us

Input your search keywords and press Enter.