Three thousand ArXiv articles in Pocket. Hundreds of GitHub repos. Countless bookmarked X posts. My "research" folder showed me the truth: I was saving ideas instead of building them.
We blame inertia for keeping us still. But we choose to stay stuck, picking consumption over creation and calling fear "preparation."
We used to blame the tools. That excuse is gone. AI makes building easy. Replit and Bolt let you ship products in hours. ChatGPT writes solid code. Midjourney makes designs. Copilot completes your functions. It's never been easier to build. But now that anyone can make basic things, you need to build something better. AI will beat you to the obvious solutions. You need to build something that lasts.
Yet the old patterns persist. Startups spend months perfecting Notion docs rather than shipping. Teams do endless research instead of talking to a single user. We craft complex frameworks while avoiding feedback. Every perfect doc is just another way to hide.
Building shows you things reading never will. Shipping features exposes blind spots no tutorial covers. Writing code reveals gaps your research missed. Reading feels like work. Building proves whether you understand.
Action beats analysis. Creation creates momentum. Doing hard things isn't about force—it's about taking that first uncomfortable step. You don't need more knowledge or better tools. You need to stop thinking and start building.
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Doesn’t this counteract your sweat the details article? How do you find the balance between building and perfecting?