Why You Should Stop Thinking And Start Doing

A while ago, I decided to take an EMT course. I wanted to be better prepared for possible medical emergencies. After I finished the course, however, it took some time before I could actually start to work as an EMT.

Since I didn’t want to forget what I’d learned, I decided to keep studying while I was waiting to work. I wanted to get better. And I wanted to be well-prepared for when I would get the chance to put my knowledge into practice.

So, when my first shift finally came around, I was pretty excited. I was a little nervous, but I was also grateful to finally be able to get some real-life experience.

Which I got. And it turns out there is a big difference between theory and practice. (Who would have guessed?)

I thought I had been well-prepared. I had memorized what to do in the most dangerous situations (critical bleeding, cardiac arrest, etc.). After all, that’s when it matters most, right?

Yes. But I hadn’t taken into account that you don’t have to give CPR every five minutes.

What I did end up dealing with were headaches, people feeling dizzy or nauseous, and a broken ankle. Those things I hadn’t spent so much time studying because I thought that wouldn’t be so important.

Which is why I was quite glad there were other EMTs around. Ones that did know what to do with a headache because they deal with them all the time.

The second thing I found out was that situations are a lot messier when you’re actually in them. It’s one thing to sit back, read some words in a book, see whether you can still recall what you just read, drink a sip of tea, and then maybe read some more.

It’s a very different thing to deal with a patient while her friends are trying to talk to you, and the police want an update, and you can’t find the damn blood glucose monitor, and you’re also hungry.

So, yes, after my first shift, I had quite a shifted perspective on what I should expect and what I should focus on learning.

Another example of me doing too much thinking and too little doing/testing

When I decided to start my website (flowgrounds.org) I thought I knew what mattered and what didn’t. (I don’t know why I thought that because I never started a website before, but for some reason I did.)

So, I spent weeks and months creating, optimizing, and designing a website. Only to find out that somehow people didn’t magically start visiting it.

“Hm, okay, I see what I did there. Lesson learned. I got to do more than that, got it.”

Then, I started posting articles on it (once or twice a week). I didn’t do no SEO, I didn’t do social media marketing, nor did I tell anybody I just posted something.

I guess I must have thought writing a bunch of words on a site no one is visiting would change that. I was wrong again.

What I learned from it

And even though it didn’t always turn out the way I thought it would, over time, two important things did improve:

1. I keep testing a little quicker and analyzing a little less.

2. I learned a little more about how much work and patience things take.

Final thoughts

It makes me think of the start-up concept of creating an MVP (minimal viable product). It basically aims at getting as much feedback as quickly as possible. If you want to do something big, you’ll figure out what the smallest version of it is that you can test. Then you test that to see if people actually want it. This reduces the chance of investing a ton in something only to find out nobody wants it.

So if you want to start a company that sells socks for cats, you don’t start by hiring a graphic designer for your logo. You also don’t start by setting up a legal team or start ordering little socks like crazy.

You start by creating a simple, one-page website and showing it to some friends, asking them whether they’d buy.