The Dishes in My Sink Know the Truth

I avoid doing the dishes. Not because I don't know how. Not because I'm too busy. I avoid them because they're tedious and I don't want to do them.

So they pile up. One becomes three becomes a sink full of evidence that avoidance doesn't make things go away — it just makes them bigger and harder to ignore.

The dishes are a metaphor, but they're also just dishes. And they're sitting there right now while I write this.

Motion vs. Action (And Why I Confuse Them on Purpose)

Motion is planning the project. Reading articles about the best framework. Reorganizing my task board. Sketching out the architecture. Writing the perfect README before a single line of code exists.

Action is opening the damn editor and writing the first shitty function.

Motion feels productive. It generates artifacts — docs, diagrams, Notion pages with beautiful emoji headers. It's comfortable because motion doesn't risk failure. You can't ship a bad product if you never start building it.

Action puts something real into the world where people can see it, judge it, break it, or ignore it entirely.

Guess which one I naturally gravitate toward when I'm scared?

The Trade I Keep Making

Avoidance gives me relief right now. The dishes can wait. The hard conversation can be tomorrow. The project can marinate in planning for another week.

In the moment, that feels like a win. I dodge discomfort. I stay in control.

But the cost shows up later. The sink fills up. The resentment builds. The gap between where I am and where I want to be gets wider. The idea gets cold and dies in a Notion doc I'll never open again.

I trade immediate relief for compounding dread. Every single time. And I keep making that trade because my brain is terrible at valuing future consequences over present comfort.

Planning Is Where Good Ideas Go to Die

I've talked myself out of more projects in the planning phase than I've ever abandoned after starting them.

"Let me just figure out the architecture first." "I should probably research the best approach." "What if I prototype a few different solutions before committing?"

These sound reasonable. They're not. They're stalling.

What I'm really saying is: "What if I do this wrong and people think I'm an idiot?"

So I plan. And I research. And I refactor the plan. And somewhere in that loop, the energy dies. The idea gets cold. The moment passes. And I never ship a damn thing.

The best is the enemy of the good. — Voltaire

I've Never Regretted Taking Action

I have regrets. Plenty of them. But when I trace them back, almost none of them come from doing something and failing. They come from not doing something at all.

I regret the projects I didn't start. The conversations I didn't have. The risks I didn't take.

I don't regret the time I shipped a feature that broke in production and had to scramble to fix it. I learned something. I got better.

I don't regret the blog post I published that got zero engagement. At least I wrote the damn thing.

The failures I've had? They taught me things. They made me better. They gave me stories.

The things I avoided? They just haunt me. Quiet little ghosts of "what if."

Public Failure Is the Only Failure That Matters (To My Lizard Brain)

Private failure is fine. I can fuck up in my text editor all day long. No one sees it. No one judges me. I can rewrite it, delete it, pretend it never happened.

Public failure? That's different. That's risky.

If I put something out there and it sucks, people will know. They'll see that I'm not as good as I pretend to be. They'll judge me. They'll think less of me.

And so I plan. Because planning doesn't have that risk. I can plan forever and never look stupid.

But here's the kicker: avoiding public failure means avoiding public success too. If I never ship, I never fail — but I also never win. I never learn. I never improve.

I stay safe, and I stay stuck.

Avoidance Is a Signal

The sneakiest thing about avoidance is that it doesn't look like avoidance. It looks like preparation. Like being thorough. Like not being reckless.

I can spend a whole day "working" on a project without ever touching the hard part:

• Refactor the folder structure
• Update dependencies
• Write tests for code that doesn't exist yet
• Bike-shed the naming convention
• Set up CI/CD for a project with zero commits

All of that is motion. None of it is the thing I'm avoiding.

But here's what I'm starting to understand: avoidance is a signal. The thing I'm avoiding is usually the thing that matters most.

The conversation I'm dreading? That's the one that will move things forward.

The feature I keep putting off? That's the one users actually need.

The blog post I'm scared to publish? That's the one people will actually connect with.

Discomfort isn't a stop sign. It's a compass pointing at the work that matters.

What I'm Trying (Badly) to Do About This

I don't have a framework or a system. I'm not going to sell you a course. I'm just trying to notice when I'm trading present comfort for future dread, and stop myself before the sink overflows.

Set a planning budget. One hour. One page. One conversation. Then start. If I need more clarity, I'll get it by doing, not by thinking harder.

Ship the smallest real thing. Not the prettiest. Not the most complete. The smallest thing that's real enough to get feedback on. A function that works. A draft that exists. A conversation that happened.

Name the fear out loud. When I catch myself planning instead of starting, I stop and ask: "What am I actually afraid of?" Most of the time it's embarrassment. Once I name it, it loses some of its grip.

Track action, not motion. Did I ship something? Did I have the hard conversation? Did I start the thing I've been avoiding? Yes or no. Motion doesn't count.

The Dishes Are Still Sitting There

I'm going to finish writing this, and then I'm going to do the damn dishes.

Not because I want to. Not because I've planned the optimal dish-washing strategy. Because they're there, and avoiding them just makes it worse.

Stop planning. Start doing. Fail fast. Learn faster.