Do it yourself.

Do it yourself.

I don’t mean that as a descriptive phrase. It’s a complete sentence, in the imperative. Do it yourself. Pick up the pencil, pen, stylus, paintbrush, airbrush, mouse, keyboard, scissors, rolling  pin, hammer, drill, wrench, saw, welding torch, sewing needle, instrument, guitar pick, pickaxe, shovel, dumbbell, jump rope, paddle, piton, hiking pole. Do that thing, your thing, the one you love, or the one you’ve been putting off, the one you’re afraid of, the one that you were told you couldn’t do, the one you’ve always dreamed of doing.

Don’t wait for things to be perfect. Perfect isn’t coming. The world isn’t going to be perfect, conditions won’t be perfect, you won’t be perfect. We don’t get perfect here. Every baby is a few hours away from a dirty diaper and every sunset is tinged with wildfire smoke and cow farts. We get the perfection of things found in the dirt. You have to go find them. Dig them up, dust them off, learn to see the perfection in them, let them be perfect for you.

Don’t wait for inspiration. Go find it. The only reliable map to inspiration is the one on your hands, written in graphite, ink, paint, talc, grease, plaster, soil, flour, sap, chalk, oil, clay, sawdust, or sweat, punctuated with paper cuts, blisters, callouses, scrapes, welts, torn nails, and skinned knuckles. The Muses value sacrifice. Get to work on your own, and maybe you’ll tempt them to show up. And maybe not – they’re fickle, half feral and a quarter trickster – but at least you’ll have been working.

Someone told you that you couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it, don’t have what it takes? That it was too hard, too time-consuming, too important, too frivolous? Where are those words now? Gone. They vibrated in the air for a few seconds, bounced around inaudibly for a few seconds more, and then got diluted to nothingness in the random movement of air molecules. If you’re still hearing them, still carrying them, still worrying at them or worrying about them, let them go. Feed them into the furnace of your action, and watch them curl to ash.

No one knows what you’re capable of. Even you don’t know what you’re capable of. Not yet. Start running, and you can run a little farther every day. Start climbing, and you’ll build muscle on the way up. Start making, and the things you make will get better. Start learning, start teaching yourself, and become unstoppable. Push past the end of comfort, and you’ll find that your real limits are a lot farther out than you – or anyone else – suspected. If you find your limits at all, it will be out there. Get going.

Be a fox – omnivorous, clever, crafty, relentless. Find people who do the thing better than you can, yet, and learn from them. Your next teacher might be down the street, across the planet, or dead for millennia. Study their practice, their tools, their techniques. Hunt for new points of view and new angles of attack. Lots of animals sharpen their teeth against each other. Find someone who sharpens you – a mentor, a partner, an accountabilibuddy, a friendly rival. Can’t do the thing right now? Get ready. Hit the books, hit the gym, study the masters, make a plan. Build that sled now, so you’ll be ready when the snow falls.

Be humble. The universe is complex, life is complex, people are complex. You’re complex. But you’re also your own worst enemy. You can’t learn from someone you’ve decided has nothing to teach you. You won’t ask a question when you think you already know the answer. “Question everything” is only good advice if you apply it to your own certainties first. Hold your certainties loosely, but cherish good questions. Pamper them, like pandas. See if you can get them to breed.

Be proud. Own your inner gold. Maybe jogging makes you feel like you’re going to die – at least you’re out here jogging. Maybe all your drawings look flat – but you’re putting in the pencil miles to get better. Maybe you haven’t found a good ending for Chapter 4 – but Chapters 1-3 are in the rearview. Measure your success by the footstep, by the rep, the line of ink or the line of text, and not only at the finish line. Almost everything you might make or do is iterative. So iterate, and own your progress.

You can be proud of your thing. Not because it’s perfect, but because you did it. You invested in yourself, and became a person who can do that thing. Just remember that even better things are out there, waiting for you to sweat them into existence.

Don’t duck the struggle, or outsource it. Steer into it. The hard lifting, at the edge of your capacity, builds the most muscle. A lot of people won’t make their things. They’ll buy someone else’s, find something close enough, or do without. They’ll never find out how good it might have been, and how strong they might have become, if they’d done it themselves. Or they’ll prompt a machine, and it will grind up a bunch of other people’s things and feed it back to them, shoplifted ingredients puréed into baby food. In time those people may forget how to chew, if they ever learn at all. Their choice. Not yours. You’ll already be up in the foothills, maybe a little winded, but breathing clear air and climbing steadily.

The thing is not the point. It never was. You are the point. Just as you spend graphite to make drawings and flour to make cakes, you spend drawings and cakes and practice sessions, mornings in the classroom, afternoons in the garage, and evenings in the gym, to become someone who can draw or bake, run a 10k, play a concerto, give CPR, rebuild an engine, speak a new language, get an orchid to bloom, write a sonnet, climb an ice wall, let go of an old hurt, find a new passion. The things you make or do are just leaves. You are the tree. Making leaves is what you do. The next batch will be better, and making them will make you better.

Start now. Set an achievable goal, based on practice, not product. Celebrate showing up, especially if it helps you keep showing up. Go a little farther each time – one more push-up, one more paragraph, one more stitch, one more swing. Build momentum. Get some early wins on the board. Hold yourself accountable. Don’t expect perfection; expect the opposite. Stumbling and falling short doesn’t make you a failure, it makes you human. Useful failures are symptoms of trying. Keep trying. Get back up, and check the tape. Study the fall, learn from it, try not to let it happen the same way next time. Recognize the off-ramps that distract you, and barricade them. You are the original neural network – learn from your inputs.

The inner critic, the one that tells you to stop, you suck, you can’t do it, you’ll never get there, why even start – like any voice, it needs air. Take up your tool of choice, and you choke it. Use up all the oxygen when you practice, and leave the inner critic gasping on the floor. You may end up gasping on the floor, too. That’s okay. The critic thinks life is about staying down. You know it’s about getting back up. Prove it.

You’re thinking about your thing right now. It’s been taking shape in your mind the whole time you’ve been reading this. It’s out there, in the future, waiting for you to grab your tools, plant your feet, set your shoulders, and chisel it free. Don’t listen to the voice that’s telling you not to, the one that right this second wants you to switch to another window, check your socials, watch one more video. Close this window, close this device (even if you’ll need it again in 10 minutes to make your thing), get up, stretch, shake out the lethargy, get the blood flowing, get a drink of water. Look in the mirror – that person is your greatest resource, and the only one who can stop you. Show them who you choose to be. Go find your tools, go find your passion, go find your possibilities. Go now. Do it.

Do it yourself.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Many thanks to London Wedel and Jenny Adams for helpful edits. I got the term “pencil miles” from John Muir Laws.

Happy New Year from SV-POW!

Source: https://svpow.com/2026/01/01/do-it-yourself/