You Don't Need to Know Everything to Start

Hey there! 👋

I hope you have been well! Thank you for being patient for this newsletter. I have been a lot busier than usual, and my down time was for me to rest and recharge. At the same time, I have been speaking to a few of you with regards to your career or your progression in life.

One of the things that I had been hearing quite often during these conversations was that they were stuck—they haven’t began, but they were already stuck. It was mostly this scenario where they were either exploring an idea, encountered something, they didn’t know what to do, so they got stuck, and remained there. My question to them was… “But why…?” because to me, it’s more of a mindset when you don’t move past the phase of not knowing how to start.

Uncertainties… um… Now What?

At any point in life when you do something new, you face a lot of uncertainties. How you handle this uncertainty, is what makes you different from the rest—do you not follow through because you don’t know? Or do you continue to do so and find out how instead of letting it stop you?

Steve Jobs didn’t know everything when he started Apple

Jeff Bezos didn’t know everything when he started Amazon

Mark Zuckerberg didn’t know everything when he started Facebook.

Sure, some of these individuals had co-founders, but you get the point. None of these wildly successful individuals knew everything. Sure, they were passionate about what they did. But the mindset that they had, was to try things out, pivot if needed, and follow through—that is key.

Getting Started with Starting

Don’t stifle yourself with the pressure of knowing it all before you start. Instead of telling yourself that you need to find out everything first, why not just start with the things you know? If you want to create a YouTube channel, the first easy thing to do, is not to film a video—it is to set up the YouTube account. Telling yourself that you can’t even film or edit video, so setting up an account is a waste of time is fundamentally a bad mentality. However, just by starting, you could add a little bit more momentum for the next thing you do. And that could just be recording yourself on your mobile phone or any video camera. It’s that plain and simple. That was how MKBHD first started—using a webcam to record his first videos. Actually he record using the webcam for his first 400 videos.

Now, with the knowledge and ability that you have learnt from habit stacking from Atomic Habits, you expand upon the feeling of satisfaction, and at the same time, increasing your ability to understand things better. Once you’ve registered for a YouTube account, decorate it with a banner, add you information—all these simple task build on top of the feeling of satisfaction, that you have completed these tasks and bringing you closer to launching your own YouTube channel.

My Process

What I do, whenever I don’t know about anything, is that I start first. This helps me set an anchor for myself that I could use to help me take action for other things. For example, before Marvel was acquired by Disney, I approached them to get licensing for some apparel merch that I wanted to create and sell. And because I was reaching out to them regarding that, I had to reach out to an apparel supplier too, hence, I reached out to American Apparel.

Of course, since I was only 20 years old back then, they did not take me seriously. The fact was that I did not know where to start either. So I bumped my way through my negotiations with them and American Apparel. Just for fun, I’ve put the picture of my idea below to share with you guys—the arc reactor shirt from Iron Man. It was only later on that I found out during my conversation with another fellow comic book geek that they released a similar looking shirt during Comic Con, so my idea wasn’t original anyway. However, being the comic book nerd that I am, I could safely say I was the only one in Singapore doing that at that time—with people texting me on deviantART (A website for you to post all kinds of artwork) that they wanted one too. During my discussions with Marvel, I even reached out to someone who was doing the light strips for TRON: Legacy and wanted to see if there was anyway I could implement that. All negotiations fell through.

However, even though negotiations fell through, that really helped pave the way for my future projects. The fundamentals of that was now my fundamental basis of learning how to design and build physical products. This is why I could design and manufacture products like watches and leather bags.

Being uncertain is only natural as it is part of the process where we learn and grow. As part of my attempt to build these two products, I learnt how to source for factories that provided quality leather, I learnt about freight services, taxes that I had to pay for these goods, registering for intellectual property and so on. I even learnt about different types of YKK zippers. There were so many things that I learnt just from starting even when I did not know what to do.

Enjoy Benefits of the Process

The process of these things are not easy, however, what they could do is to set a baseline and stepping stone for the next thing that you do. When I was at the leather factory inspecting the workmanship and quality, it was such an enjoyable process (albeit tiring). Seeing your work from a drawing on a piece of paper, turned into a reality is frankly, quite unreal. The benefits of starting first has allowed me to go into most things where I know others won’t venture—not because I already know how, but because I know, by starting, I get to kickstart an adventure that could open my eyes to new things.

Reflect: If there’s anything you’re taking away from this newsletter, get rid of the mentality that you need to know fully before you act on your idea. At the same time, what you are building here is the knowledge of yourself that you could do things that you never thought you could.

Mentor’s Notes

This is the reason why I keep advocating for everyone to read Atomic Habits because it helps with almost everything and anything that you do.

After doing all that, what’s my advantage over the other designers? I have successfully designed and shipped both physical and digital products—which now gives me the knowledge to bridge the gap between these two, should any organisation that I work for, requires me to do so. Of course—I won’t know everything, but I definitely know I can find out how.

P.S. Yes, as always, please share it with your friends if you think it’s useful.