When in doubt, do
Let's just do!
Amen a hundred times to whatever Alex Imas is saying in that tweet, and to what Terence Tao is saying—the thing Alex is quote-tweeting.
I have a new micro-philosophy. It’s called: When in doubt, do.
I’ve become a bit of a proselytizer for this one. I’ve been peddling it to colleagues, friends who are stuck in a rut, even random acquaintances.
The line came to me recently after spending a lot of time playing around with coding tools. I was able to build small apps and sites I wanted to make within a few hours at most. It was stunning. You can now literally build things at the speed of thought, as long as you have a fair idea of what you want and the general shape of the thing.
And then it dawned on me: people no longer have an excuse to complain that they’re stuck, or that they can’t do this or that because of some obstacle. More importantly, it dawned on me that I no longer have an excuse. Neither I nor a lot of other people really have the right to sit around saying we’re stuck.
I’m not as articulate as Alex, and I also think a lot of this is obvious. I’ve only gotten to where I am in life because of luck, chance, and randomness. I’m basically the ball in a pinball machine, ping-ponged by luck, chance, randomness, and contingency, ending up in places I could never have planned. I can’t think of a single thing in my life that went according to plan. But if I were to give myself a little credit, I think the one right thing I did is that more often than not, given a choice between doing something and not doing something, I chose doing. I’m probably the laziest bum on the planet, and I procrastinate plenty. Nonetheless, I still managed to get a few things done here and there. And here’s the thing: the only reason luck and randomness kept finding me is because I kept putting myself within their reach. Action expands the surface area of possibilities and outcomes. Chance is the thing that finds you when you expand that surface. So the luck and the doing aren’t in tension. The doing is what creates the conditions for luck to land.
Throughout my twenties I kept taking the most random and wild shots. Not many of them worked out. But they got me to where I am today.
The feedback you get from doing random things is invaluable. If you’re doing things, you will put yourself in places where you learn things, meet new people, discover new perspectives, face rejection, enjoy success, receive recognition, suffer heartbreak, go through bouts of depression—countless things happen. And all of these are essential for forming your own worldview, not just about life, but about the thing you want to do in life, the goals you want to pursue.
Without doing things and getting feedback from reality, you will always have flimsy opinions. But the secret to doing good things, things you enjoy and things you’ll be proud of, is to have denser opinions, not just about the things you do, but about life itself. And for that, you need to take shots. Which is why, when in doubt, you have to do.
And by doing, I obviously don’t mean becoming a mass murderer or a serial killer or a sociopath. Not that there’s anything wrong with going on a murderous spree—but who am I to judge? If you want to eliminate a few hundred, a few thousand, or God forbid a few million people for the climate change cause, it seems like a noble thing to do. But it’s not something I would recommend.
What I mean by “do” is this: follow the urge to explore, the urge to try, fully. And there need not be a grand or complicated answer to what doing looks like. It depends on where you are in life, your mental state, your dreams, your fears. But here’s a simple place to start: given a choice between sitting around thinking about the things you want to do and actually starting, pick the smallest possible action. Read a book. Meet somebody new. Write something and share it with the world, even if it’s not up to the standard you’ve set for yourself. Go somewhere new. Talk to someone you admire. Try something random, just on a whim. Microactions lead to more possibilities, one thing leads to another, and before you know it you end up somewhere you could never have imagined. Chase that mental ripple all the way to the edge of its circumference, regardless of whether it works or doesn’t, because you will always learn something. You will discover something about the world, about yourself, about other people. All of these things shape your worldview about reality. That is invaluable. It’s something you cannot get from reading a book or listening to another person. At some point, you have to fall flat on your face and discover that it hurts.
In a sense, we are constantly unmaking and remaking ourselves. And that assembly and disassembly of your mental self, your beliefs, your sense of who you are—is it even possible without feedback from reality? All your big beliefs, your big philosophies, the wonderful things and even the terrifying and ugly things that have happened to you—all of it is downstream of choosing action over inaction.
Now, I’m aware this is all easy to say. So let me try to be honest about why people don’t do things, because I think it deserves more than a wave of the hand.
First: there’s a biological pull toward inaction. Given a choice between doing something and not doing something, most of us will default to not doing it. That’s not a character flaw, it’s just how we’re wired. But I also think there’s something beyond that. A lot of people simply don’t give themselves permission to try. People like predictability. People like stable opinions, stable worldviews. We are wired to hate uncertainty, and what we hate even more is uncertainty about uncertainty itself, which is more or less a fact of life. So we stay put. I want to be clear that I’m not some philosopher of human nature making grand claims here. This is just my observation from my own limited circles, and the plural of anecdote is not data. I’m also as human as it gets. I don’t always choose to do new things either. But to the best of my limited biological and mental capabilities, I’ve tried to keep putting myself in places where I’m learning and trying, and I intend to keep doing that.
Second, and this one I feel more carefully, there are times when people are genuinely neck deep in what life shovels at them. Everything goes numb. You drift like a kite whose string has been cut. You get sucked into the quicksand slowly, the way people do in horror movies, and at some point you’re just stuck, a still object going nowhere. In those moments, it’s very hard to imagine doing anything at all. And I don’t want to be glib about that.
But here’s the irony: the way out of those dark moments is almost always to go and do something. Anything. It doesn’t have to be grand. That act of doing is usually what sets you on a path toward working things out.
There’s a third reason I keep turning over, and I haven’t fully worked it out yet, but I’ll try. I think a lot of people have lost, or forgotten, their exploratory self. That seeking, curious part of you that got buried somewhere under the debris of modern life. We are all, in some sense, the perverse love children of choice, fate, randomness, and contingency. We don’t always get to pick the life we want. There are genuine moments where life puts you in situations you didn’t ask for and wouldn’t choose, and in those moments you lose a piece of yourself. A little like Voldemort splitting off his soul and hiding the pieces in Horcruxes, except less evil and more just, sad. And because of that, a lot of people genuinely lose their sense of awe, wonder, and curiosity. Which is a tragedy.
The other part of this, and this is where it gets even more half-baked, is that the structure of modern life doesn’t help. The way our work and personal lives are designed leaves very little room for stillness and contemplation, and it’s precisely those quiet moments that trigger the flights of curiosity that make you want to go do things. When those moments get squeezed out, so does the impulse to seek. And without that impulse, you end up going through the motions. Alive, but not fully. Not a zombie exactly, but a zombie.
Doing things places you at the threshold of discovery and possibilities, where there are endless branching realities in front of you. Not all of them are visible, but you can see a few things here and there. When you’re standing still, you’re still technically at that threshold, but all you see is a pitch black void. When you’re doing things, life becomes more like a garden of forking paths, and down each path is a reality that is both good and bad, a quantum superposition of all possible futures at the same time (I don’t fully understand quantum physics, but am I really an internet blogger if I don’t invoke it at least once?). You don’t know in advance whether any given action will lead somewhere good or bad. But isn’t life more beautiful when you don’t know things? When you fall flat on your face, or get bitten in the ass by a pelican?
Bad things can happen too, of course. But bad things happen anyway. Don’t lock yourself away from the world because of that. The universe can throw all kinds of horrors at you regardless. Set that aside. The point is: so many amazing things happen when you are doing things.
And in 2026, with the tools and resources available to so many of us, you have even fewer excuses not to.
We can sit under a banyan tree and engage in repeated bouts of mental masturbation, constructing elaborate castles in the sky, grand visions of the life we want to lead. But until and unless you move, until and unless you seize that first impulse toward the life you want, there is no difference between you and the person who reads every self-help book ever written while forgetting that the words self and help are right there in the title, and nobody else is coming to do it for you.
In thinking about action, I’m in very good company. Because William James, the great psychologist and philosopher, was saying essentially the same thing in a series of lectures back in 1899. The lectures were about building good habits and taking action, and they have aged embarrassingly well. I came across them not through any great act of intellectual diligence, but during a doomscrolling session on Substack, where I stumbled onto this wonderful post by Colin Lewis (The One Percent Rule) One quote in particular stuck with me:
“Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.”
James goes on at length from there. I’ll let him speak for himself.
“No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With good intentions, hell proverbially is paved.
When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without bearing practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost: it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility, but never does a concrete manly deed.
Don’t preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass. The strokes of behavior are what give the new set to the character, and work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too soon become an ineffectual bore.”
— William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899)
Now, I want to be clear about something. When in doubt, do doesn’t mean become a doing machine with zero inner life. Contrary to what Werner Herzog says about psychoanalysis, contrary to what Marc Andreessen says about introspection, and contrary to what Žižek says about looking inside yourself and only finding, quote, “a lot of shit”—I think there’s real value in sitting quietly once in a while. Letting your mind wander. Looking inward. That said, being trapped in your own head, constantly looking backward, is a different thing entirely. The point isn’t to never be still. The point is to not let stillness become a prison. Look forward, seek out, do things—and you’ll find that doors and windows and new vistas open up almost on their own. That’s probably where the good life is waiting for you.
So go forth and do.