AboutPosts
Diarrhea▾
Change Log
Change language

Cult of done

The Cult of Done Manifesto is a special document. Written by Kio Stark and Bre Pettis in 2009. For Bre Pettis it is a map of his 2009 heart. Its his life, soul and passion for unbridled creativity. Kio and Bre shared writing credit on it, licenced it with Creative Commons and put it out into the world. Immediately a few folks made visual representations of it and it spread like wildfire for people who need a creative jumpstart.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

  1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
  2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
  3. There is no editing stage.
  4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
  5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
  6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
  7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
  8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
  9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
  10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
  11. Destruction is a variant of done.
  12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
  13. Done is the engine of more.

Why am I writing?

During one of the blackest periods of my life, about a month after the covid lockdown was announced, I had thoughts like:

  • What a miserable, helpless piece of shit I am physically, emotionally, psychologically and ultimately what a coward I am.
  • Oh, how I regret all those hours spent playing League Of Legends... How I regret not having more fun when I could have had more fun, not drinking with my new roommates in the barracks, not ... That I didn't hug, I didn't kiss, I didn't read, I didn't listen, I didn't do, and so on and so forth ...

Regret.jpg and ImShitISuck.mp3.

At least now I don't physically feel like a trackless piece of shit. I'm actually in the best physical shape I've ever been in, but those two feelings still don't leave me. Good physical shape? check! What next? This is where my blog comes in. I want to learn how to articulate my thoughts fluently. I want to learn to write. I want to think more and better. I can't think why it might be bad to write?

The idea for the blog came up back in January 2022. I started it with a haskell IHP framework and nix. I only learned haskell up till monads. No matter how many features, no matter how powerful the IHP framework is, for a functional blog, I still had to do everything almost from scratch. I struggled for a long time and then I just dropped it. I didn't do anything until October 2, when I just took hakyll and generated the simplest version of the blog from a markdown file that is probably possible to make. But I did it. It was the first entry. No comments section, no https, no English, with pictures that defy screen limits on mobile devices and of course a blog post with a bunch of grammatical errors. But I did it. Well, now I'll write, now I'll start thinking. The eloquence and wit will be like Užkalnis. Well, you can see how well I'm doing with my eloquence and thinking hehe.

I opened my blog, I looked at it and I am was scared. Is this the western sophistication and attention to detail that I am looking for and that I value so much? I should at least learn Lithuanian punctuation and grammar first, then write. And then there are the various errors of style. Poor sentence structure. Oops. With this attitude, I may write a second post in a year. Shit. We have a probl;em. And then the cult of done manifesto came to my hand.

After discovering cult of done on HackerNews and reading the manifesto for the first time, I was very sceptical. I can't stand all the mindless flow of poor quality content on the internet. I got rid of 9gag a long time ago, and even reddit itself after the reddit meltdown. Now I use Facebook less and less. I spend somewhere around 15min a day. It seems to me that cult of done is leading to those endless low quality memes. But the more I think about it, the more sense I find in cult of done. The cult of done manifesto embodies the value I so regretted not having - the courage. You just go and do. Then you see what happens. You take responsibility for the result, you come to a conclusion and you do it again.

More writing, but poor quality? Or less writing but caressing every piece of your work? I made my blog public so that I would have more responsibility to write with quality. But I am very new now. I am very poorly trained in writing, so it is difficult to write even the simplest sentences. So as a solution, I will try to do both things at the same time, and ill try to write with quality and ill try to write a lot without quality. I will try to generate as much low-quality writing as possible, and it will go to diarrhea. More important posts on more serious topics will go to posts in my opinion. Boom. Problem solved. I hope so. We'll see.

Well, for now, I'm off to do turn up that engine of done.