Careless confidence

Trailhead: Paul Graham. "A Project of One's Own". paulgraham.com (2021-06-xx).

The most important phase in a project of one's own is at the beginning: when you go from thinking it might be cool to do x to actually doing x. And at that point high standards are not merely useless but positively harmful. There are a few people who start too many new projects, but far more, I suspect, who are deterred by fear of failure from starting projects that would have succeeded if they had. [...] Remember that careless confidence you had as a kid when starting something new? That would be a powerful thing to recapture.

Adults know too much, even when they know nothing at all. I don't have much trouble starting (some) projects, but I am familiar with the slide show from hell in my head that plays all the disasters that I'm familiar with, and some that aren't real but plausible enough to haunt me anyway. Gather enough of these real and unreal memories over time and it's amazing anyone would ever start anything. It would be nice to just have a short memory about these things. The alternative, I guess, is to just learn to give it a go, whatever "it" is.

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