I wrote “Do Things, Tell People” all the way back in 2012. It was a bit of a hit on Hacker News and sometimes still gets reposted there. Surprisingly, the comments are generally positive, even though it was written by me. The original post is at the bottom of this page.
Back in 2022 it was reposted again and gained some traction, and I posted the following comment:
122 points by hebejebelus on Feb 5, 2022
Wow, I thought I would resurrect my HN account for this.
I wrote this article a little over a decade ago, when I was still in college, and I knew almost nothing about the world. (I still don’t, but I didn’t then, either) It’s fun to see that it still resonates with people despite the naivety and the slight sense of “I am headed for success” that makes it hard for me to re-read.
My initial reflection on the article was that I had fallen off the “do things, tell people” wagon a little bit, having let go of my twitter account and with it much of the easiest path to doing things and telling people. I still work in tech but I haven’t created anything I’m particularly excited about in a good while, so I felt that I was failing my own ideal.
Then, of course, I remembered that I hiked all of Ireland’s long-distance trails (toughsoles.ie) and have a reasonably successful, if niche, youtube channel (youtube.com/toughsoles). Funny that my mindset, especially regarding this article, is so tech-focused that I automatically discount something I’ve been doing for five years.
All that said, I’m starting to look for new opportunities in the larger-than-startup space. Shoot me an email at carl@redfloatplane.lol and let’s chat.
I still often forget that I walked every trail in Ireland. It’s strangely easy to forget the biggest thing you’ve ever done. Note to self: stop forgetting about that.
Here’s the original post.
Do things, tell people.
These are the only things you need to do to be successful*. You can get away with just doing one of the two, but that’s rare, and usually someone else is doing the other part for you.
If you don’t have any marketable skills, learn some. It’s the future. We have Khan Academy and Wikipedia and Codecademy and almost the entire world’s collective knowledge at your fingertips. Use it.
Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. Something interesting. Spend time on it. Go crazy. Even if it’s the least useful thing you’ve ever made, if you can talk about it, make it. This part is easy, because you’re doing something you think is cool, and interesting, and if it’s useless, great, because you won’t need to support it much either!
Next, find events where the people you want to work with are. Then get a drink into you (or don’t) and talk to them about it. Relax. It’s probably interesting to them too. Even if it’s not, because you’ve made it, you sound like you know what the hell you’re talking about. That’s the important part. This is easy, too, because you’re talking about something you’ve made that you think is cool and interesting. As an added bonus, many people go to these events just to talk about cool and interesting things, so you’ll fit right in.
You would not believe how much opportunity is out there for those who do things and tell people. It’s how you travel the entrepreneurial landscape. You do something interesting and you tell everyone about it. Then you get contacts, business cards, email addresses. Then you get contracts, job offers, investors, whatever. You make friends who think what you do is cool. You make a name for yourself as “the person who did that cool thing.” Then, the next time someone wants to do something in any way related to that cool thing, they come to you first.
Ciarán McCann and I (mostly him) started working on a HTML5 game engine and blog when we were in first year of college. We never even finished it, but because of Flax, we landed internships at Ericsson in the summer of our second year. Now I’m on my way to Game Closure, and Ciarán is going to Demonware. We just did things and told people.
*I define successful as “taking advantage of personally interesting opportunities,” but I think that this mantra works for success in terms of money also. I don’t really mean success in a life-fulfillment way, although that depends on what exactly it is that you want to do. Also, I’m fully aware that this doesn’t extend to people in many situations.