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@ Lyn Alden
2025-03-31 17:24:10
“You can just do things” is one of my favorite meme phrases that I see out there.
Back around my senior year of high school, I consciously decided to shift to that mindset. I went from kind of operating within rules, and trying to leave a light touch around me, to being more assertive and creative about what I want to do. It was kind of a quiet “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me” vibe shift.
At the time I think the terminology I filtered it through was Sagan’s pale blue dot. Like, everything that has ever been done is on this crazy little ball spinning through space. So it’s okay to just do things, to take chances, to think outside of the box. Because the box itself is already actually kind of crazy.
And then in the mid-2010s, like around 2016, I did kind of a checkup on how I’m doing, and felt that while I had used that strategy well, I wasn’t thinking big enough. I had primarily used that strategy to climb up the ranks in the engineering world, with the goal of making things better for myself and my colleagues/division; I would just do things and be the person who pushed to say “yes” a lot and it had worked out really well.
But for my next phase, I felt I needed to “just do things” outside of an organizational structure as well.
So I started my namesake website. I previously had a small anon website on stock investing which I was able to sell to some publisher and that gave me experience, but this one would be different. It would have my face on it.
Any sort of content creator starts by being a little crazy. It starts with the improbable concept that you could create written or audio or visual content that thousands or millions of people will actually want to see and get value out of, in the sea of endless content that already exists.
But it starts somewhere. With just doing things. My view was that I would do my best, leverage the experience that I had, and give it my honest shot.
Never looked back since. It’s been a wild journey.