I have an idea about a revolutionary recipe website. Yeah, you read it right, a recipe website. Being a software engineer, you would think that it should be easy for me to build it and launch it, basically it's something I do every day for my employer. But as you might have found out, shipping is not that simple.
I had this idea for several years now and I started to make it happen, I think, about 4 or 5 times. I liked spending time preparing, I bought a domain and I started thinking about a logo for the website. But making a logo was not as simple as I thought, at least not one that I liked. I needed to find the right software to make it and find the right moment to do it. After some time I ended up with a logo I was pretty much happy with, but I was pretty discouraged about how much time it took to get there. So I abandoned it for a while.
After that, whenever I wanted to learn a new technology I used my idea as an excuse to play with that technology. So that is the reason why I have one version started in Rails, one in Javascript and one in Grails and all abandoned more or less in the beginning. And thinking back, I was pretty much always stuck in preparation, finding different excuses to not work on the important and difficult things, the ones that mattered the most.
Few months later after the last try, I sort of gave up on the idea of building it, but I felt like writing, so I said, hey, why not write about a fictional company which is busy building this revolutionary recipe website of mine. I get to write about things related to software development and about my idea. So what do you think I did first?
Correct! I bought a domain for the fictional company to use it for the book I was about to write. Afterwards I decided I need to choose the right fonts and find the right platform to make sure I can easily generate the book in any format I could think of. And that took a while. I got pretty well informed about the tools I would need to write the book, but I didn't get to write anything. __
After another break and some time later, I restarted the thing, did some character sheets and wrote one small chapter.
You're probably wondering by now, what is the point with this story, have you found Nirvana or something?
The point I wanted to make is that not even when you have an idea that you believe is worth pursuing, things won't be easy. Some go chasing for ideas their whole life and maybe do not find them and others think they have an idea but get stuck in preparation.
And that's why challenges like YourTurnChallenge make a difference, because they help us prove to ourselves that we can ship, that we can deliver, but we have to start working with the important things and not with the cherry on top.