Why You Stall (It's Not Laziness)

Have you recently searched for a quick recipe for dinner or for a seasonal dish? Did you then have to read a convoluted tale about the author's favourite time of year, the colours of fall reminding them of the sprinkle of cinnamon spice or visions of snow at Christmas being associated with a delicious slice of the cake their grandmother used to make? (Recipe below, just scroll until you find it!). There are a bunch of reasons why popular recipe sites do this, Search Engine Optimization, copyright etc but realistically you just want the recipe and to find out how good it is before putting in the effort. Because in fairness, the worst case scenario is that you go buy a bunch of ingredients and spend time and effort making a dish and then nobody will eat it... Except maybe you, because you're willing to still eat the thing because of the sunk cost fallacy - it may not taste as great as you expected but by gum, you made it so you'll eat it...

Anyway. I found a bunch of written recipes that my grandmother used to make all of the time when I was younger. They were cluttering one of the shelves here. Information wants to be free, so I'm sharing them here. If you read them and attempt to make them, you might just find them delicious. If you don't at least the information is recorded somewhere available to more than just the paper sitting on the shelf.

The measurement units from the original recipes were a mix of imperial (Oz = Ounces, lb = pounds) but with Celsius for temperature, I've added the metric and Fahrenheit equivalents as accurately as I can for you. I've made all but one of these successfully in the past. If I can do it, I'd hazard a guess that anyone can. Anywhere that called for Margarine in the recipes I've swapped it for salted butter instead. The 1980s called and they want their horrible crap Margarine back. They can have it too. It may or may not  be better for you but the taste just isn't for me.

And there you have it, that's how a simple post with some recipes turns into a story completely unrelated to them... Sorry. Here's the recipes, I'll try improve the formatting later.

"Light" Christmas Cake

Make this in November and "feed" it with additional whiskey once a week. It'll store well until halfway through January if it hasn't been eaten by then. It's a heavy cake in my opinion.

Ingredients:

• 12oz / 340g Odlums Cream Flour (cream flour contains less raising agents than plain flour but I think either can be used here if you are in a pinch)
• 8oz / 225g butter (use Kerrygold)
• 8oz / 225g  brown sugar
• The Juice & Zest of 1 lemon (the original recipe calls the zest, "rind")
• Half a glass of whiskey (125ml / 4fl oz... ish. See note below in step 10)
• 6 eggs
• 1oz / 28g chopped almonds
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 8oz  / 225g Sultanas
• 8oz  / 225g Raisins
• 8oz  / 225g Currants
• 8oz  / 225g Cherries (I left these out, glace cherries can go live with Margarine)
• 1 tsp almond essence
• 1/2 tsp mixed spice
• A "pinch" of nutmeg
• Additional whiskey to "feed" the cake prior to consumption

Method:

Date Pudding

This is also known as Sticky Toffee Pudding if you add toffee sauce to it. I never knew this growing up. A good thirty years of ignorance! Delicious warmed up and served with custard or toffee sauce. An alternative to the traditional plum pudding.

Ingredients:

Method:

There's a piece of financial advice that gets repeated so often that it may as well have lost its meaning: diversify your portfolio. In other words, don't put all your eggs in one basket. And yet, there is one investment the majority of people never think to make, even those in the financial world, one that compounds more reliably than almost anything else available to them. The investment in themselves.

Who Believes in You?

Here is something most motivational content skips over, because it's not particularly comfortable to say. There will be stretches of your life, sometimes long ones, when nobody is lining up to invest in you. No mentor is seeking you out. No employer is fast-tracking your development. No institution is handing you a scholarship. No investor is backing your idea. No one is pulling you aside to say, "I see something in you."

The people that are there for you now, may not always be there. Opportunities pass. People change. Things happen.

One Friday afternoon in either late 2018 or early 2019 I was sitting at my desk, finishing up a few things, looking forward to the weekend. It was a bright day. I recall the sun shining through the window, a warming feeling even though the weather would have been cold for that time of year. My phone rang. The first line that came out of the small speaker by my ear, the reply to my greeting, caused my stomach to drop. Across the other side of the world, my manager and mentor had been let go. I got on incredibly well with him. He was knowledgeable, patient and invested in his staff. Was there for us. With that one sentence, that was now gone. I don’t know if he knew that it was coming or not but he had gone to work that morning, likely looking to round out the week. I’d hope they let him collect his things but maybe he never even made it past the front door. In the grand scheme of things, maybe not a biggie. Nobody died. Life went on. He found success elsewhere in time. But it goes to show, things change and not always how you would expect.

You might say that this is simply the nature of the world. Attention and resources follow existing signals of success, accumulating around people who are already compounding, people who have already made an investment in themselves.

If you are at the beginning, or starting over, operating without a network or coming from a background that didn't hand you connections and credentials, you need to be your own first investor. You may be your only investor for a while. Even more worryingly, if you’ve been written off by your peers, perhaps made a mistake that they are not willing to forget you’ll be travelling a redemption arc while being that solo investor. Grim, isn’t it?

However! However, this tragedy is actually an opportunity in disguise. One that most people miss because they're too busy waiting for someone else to go first. For someone to hand something to them. For Lady Luck to shine on them. Luck is not arbitrary. You have to place yourself in a position to be able to receive it.

What It Means to Invest in Yourself

It Compounds. All Of It.

When Nobody Else Will

In any given month in the year I can look out my window and there’s a good chance that it will be raining. Some days it feels like it’s been raining for months on end. This is the price we pay for living in a country so lush and green.I’ll sit there and think, “I could be doing something in the garden right now” or maybe I’ll have a short day dream about a little project I could take care of. As someone who sits behind a desk for a living, I catch myself doing this and know exactly what it means. Ask anyone in the trades what they do when it’s raining and they’ll tell you that they get on with it, because they have to and because it’s just a part of the job. And ultimately, this isn’t about being soft or a wizened, gnarled, burly worker who doesn’t care what nature throws at them. This is about whether or not you wait for motivation to strike or whether you have the discipline to start something. This isn’t about the weather, is it? It’s about action, not a line about meteorology.

Stop Waiting for Perfect Conditions. Most Success Happens in the Rain.

Maybe you have a great idea, a side project or a career change you've been turning over in your mind for months. You're almost ready. You're just waiting for the right time. For things to settle down at work. For the kids to be a bit older, better able to look after themselves. For the economy to stabilise. For the stars to align.

While you're waiting though, someone else ships the product, takes the job, starts the company. The one you were going to. They didn't have it any better than you. They probably didn’t even have the same resources or knowledge as you do. They just decided that good enough conditions were sufficient and went for it. They showed an indifference to getting wet. An impatience for perfection to manifest. A moment where they said “F*** this noise” and did it anyway.

There's a name for what stops you from doing the same. Call it “precondition thinking.” The belief that something has to be solved or just right or true before something else can begin. It feels like it’s the work itself. It's not. 

I understand the impulse to wait for things to be favourable. Chasing the perfect moment can be like getting the perfect bite of food. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does… However, when it comes to perfection, you will tell yourself little lies. These lies masquerade as diligence, preparation, professionalism. You're not ready yet. You're doing more research. Waiting until you have more confidence, more money, more time, more clarity. The details need to be sorted before the bigger stuff can come together.

This precondition thinking attempts to get everything right before you do something. You’re identifying requirements. Constraints have to be considered. You need to understand the bare minimum that you need before the problem can really be solved.

Everything that is blocking your progress is a preference that’s pretending to be a requirement.

Waiting for perfection doesn't just delay success. It actually degrades your capacity to succeed when conditions do improve. If you had shipped in the rain, clumsily, with a substandard setup, you’d have ten months of real experience. What do you get from waiting, ten months of readiness?

The frustrating thing is that the more you do this, the more you feel like you’re making headway. You’re building in stealth. Once this thing gets to market, once the project is started, it’s going to be amazing. This process, however, is really you attaching action to something that will never arrive. It’s a waste of time. Procrastination in disguise. Every week you wait, or every new risk you try to mitigate, the imagined optimal moment becomes further away. It’s like saying “I was going to…” in response to your parents asking why your room wasn’t tidied. It’s not much use to you, or them, and the room still isn’t tidy.

To be fair, sometimes you do need dry weather. There are genuinely weather-dependent tasks. Pouring concrete in a downpour is counterproductive for one thing. But truly figuring out whether a task needs dry weather or not requires you to stop, take a step back and assess the lies, half-truths and truths you have told yourself. Most of these are part of the first two categories and not the last.

The Two Categories of Work

Simplifying everything into a binary dry weather vs who cares is an oversimplification. Generally things exist on a spectrum rather than one or the other. But you’re trying to get things done. So bear with me. If you want to get moving and take action you have to make it that simple. Either you start or you don’t. Not, you’ve started but you’re really just pretending.

You can use the 80/20 rule as verification. If you have 10 tasks and more than 2 of them require dry weather, you’re either actually pouring concrete or you’re convincing yourself the task is harder than it actually is.

Perhaps, even, it’s not the work that is actually holding you back. Maybe it’s just getting started. There’s a lovely phrase in Irish that goes “Tús maith, leath na hoibre.” It means “a good start is half the work.” I think this ageless piece of wisdom talks to the inertia of starting a task. The first five minutes. The getting up off the couch bit. Once you’re past that initial hump, you will often find that the motion required to overcome the inertia keeps you going for longer than you expected.

20% - Work That Genuinely Requires Dry Weather

Dry weather work may be less than 20% but is highly unlikely to be more than that. These are tasks with hard technical dependencies. A sterile environment, regulations to adhere to, safety measures, specific legal filings that come with stringent deadlines etc

If you proceed with this work without addressing these dependencies, the outcome will be objectively worse or even downright dangerous. Not uncomfortable or awkward or harder. Materially lesser.

80% - Work That Just Requires Getting A Bit Wet

Almost everything else the weather is aside from the point. Writing, selling, building, designing, managing, teaching, creating. The quality of your outputs in these tasks are not set by conditions. They’re held back by a lack of sustained effort and iteration. The false desire for perfection before starting gives you an excuse to not put in effort or put in the wrong effort. From there it doesn’t matter if you iterate. Working on the wrong thing brings you further away from your goal instead of closer to it. So, pick the right thing, even if you suck at it. Try get a little less sucky at it over time, until eventually you aren’t.

Your first draft written down is better than the draft never written. A sales call made when you're not feeling 100% can still close a deal. Even if it doesn’t close the deal, it can progress it. And if that deal was going to be lost, trust me, waiting or ignoring it would have lost the deal for you anyway. Even a business launched in a difficult economic climate can still find its footing. History is crammed with evidence to support this assertion. JK Rowling drafted Harry Potter as a single mother on benefits. Disney survived a war, a studio split, and a near-bankruptcy before it made Cinderella. It wasn’t a little bit of rain hindering these examples, was it? The work got done anyway.

There are some easy steps to get started and begin to make progress.

Without knowing how big your task is, setting a completion date will not help you. It might just discourage you. Set a start date. Tomorrow is good, today is better. The start date is when you will start regardless of anything else. Ask someone you know to hold you accountable. If you don’t know anyone, set a calendar reminder.

Start with one small step. Make one call, write one page, send one email.

If you’re still struggling you spend one hour defining the problem. Some requirements are real. The rest are not. Know the difference. If, at the end of the hour, you don’t have a solid grasp on the topic, put it aside and come back to it the next day. Your subconscious will work on the problem for you overnight.

When you still need to be convinced… write down the condition(s) you think you need. If this perfect state never arrived, would it make the work impossible or just uncomfortable? Answer this honestly. If you’re afraid of a bit of discomfort then abandon the idea entirely. Close your browser and don’t finish this article. It isn’t for you.

The Waiting Game Will Kill Things

Waiting is not a neutral act. It feels passive, but it has an active cost. Forget your imagined competitor building their skills - that is another excuse. Forget the shifting market. Without being on the market you cannot possibly know it. The gap between "now" and "later" is not empty. 

The biggest thing you are breeding by waiting is a psychological toll. Chronic waiting builds anxiety instead of readiness. It’s the Sunday night dread. The feeling that nothing will work, everything is wrong and incomplete is the best your project will ever be. The longer the gap, the heavier the imagined task becomes.

Skill, confidence, and momentum are all built through action. Some say perfect practice makes perfect. Maybe, maybe not. You and I both know that any practice with good intention and a little help from time to time will get you to good. Perfect isn’t where you are going nor where you need to be. Strive for perfection and you’ll convince yourself to give up before you've started.

Indifference to getting wet is not indifference to quality. It is the understanding that quality emerges from iteration, and to iterate you first need to start.

So Pick Up Your Tools

You remember the effort you put in more than that of others, take a moment to reflect and appreciate the effort that others put in once in a while. Be thankful.

That's ok, because you can.

I wrote this down after the phrase appearing as a shower thought one morning. I've been meaning to write about it for a while. I'm not sure I even scratch the surface of this thought let alone doing it justice. This post isn't really about motorcycles so if you've never ridden a motorcycle don't worry. If you have you will hopefully understand exactly what I mean when I say that riding a bike for fun is a completely different way of travelling than a car or other ground based transport. Even with a helmet on (ATGATT!) you're more connected to the outside world, more vulnerable. It takes physical effort to change the direction of the bike. Over low speeds you have to countersteer and ignore what your brain knows, that left is left and right is right. After a while on two wheels your body understands this principle and you are unconsciously competent in turning right but pushing left.

There's a lot of people throwing around phrases like "AI won't replace people. But people who use AI will replace those who don't." and "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes." After a while of all this AI stuff, I get tired of it, anxious, worried for the future of humanity. You know what though, a bot that talks (sometimes talks nonsense while projecting that it's genuine and true) isn't going to ride the bike. Not properly. Maybe one day it can power the "Mind" that makes two wheels go in a certain direction but it will likely never experience what it's like to ride the bike. Not like you can.

AI doesn't experience visceral feelings. It doesn't really tell right from wrong. It doesn't bring clarity after a long ride out either solo or with friends. It doesn't share a story with you about how you dropped your bike at low speed on a gravel car park. It won't nod understandingly when you talk about a moment on the motorway when you wished you had brought your brown trousers or when you felt something was off with the engine and it turned out that feeling was a mechanical problem.

AI, like a motorcycle, may leave you stranded on the side of a road. Unintentionally or otherwise.

I'm still on the fence about what the current most popular AI models actually do for us as a civilisation. There are applications of AI that are decades old that actually make a difference, catch things that humans can't, provide indicators that things aren't quite right that a real person could miss. Actual, objective good. On the flip side recently there has been a darkness as to how AI has been put to use. An excuse to cut a workforce. Generate untold amounts of revenue for a small number of people. Burn up massive amounts of energy for little actual good. AI doesn't reduce poverty or clean up our environment right now.

LLMs are all the rage. They can be incredibly useful if you know what to do with them. Just like being good at using a search engine used to be a thing. They can be damaging too though. Provide you with incorrect information that you don't pick up on. Be built within a framework that uses dark patterns to keep you engaged and "chatting" but not really getting anything done. I won't get into the insanity that is people befriending AIs. Get a pet rock or a stuffed animal. They'll give you the same levels of genuine emotion.

I don't doubt that AI is here to stay. I don't doubt that it can be harnessed and used for the common good but ultimately I doubt that it will ever know the feeling of riding a motorcycle.