LifeEntrepreneurship | 5 Min Read
#17 - Indecisiveness Kills Dreams
The quickest way to kill a dream is to be indecisive about it. In this week's edition, I grapple with my own indecisiveness and the impact it's having.
Hey Friends 👋
This week has been a struggle for me. Not because I've been working too much or been stretching myself beyond my limits but instead because I had to name my first SaaS.
Now, I'll be honest, I've been putting off this task for as long as possible. I've been naming my GitHub repositories things like "twitter-analytics-saas" and then in the designs and development of the site using placeholders like "Product name". All of this was to avoid the need to name the product as I know I struggle with naming things.
If this is a good thing or not I'll let you be the judge of...
But, I am curious do you struggle naming things? If so, do you push it off like me? Or, get it done nice and early so you don't need to worry about it and can push on?
But, anyway why did naming a product make the week so hard for me?
It really should be an easy process, pick a name and move on. How hard can that be?
Well, it turns out if you're anything like me and struggle from chronic indecisiveness it can make it very hard.
After two entire papes of A4 being filled with words, talking with four different people about ideas and four whole days of time! I finally managed to pick a name and commit to it.
Then after I committed to it, I still needed to buy a domain name...
Luckily, this was a fairly quick process and only took me a couple of hours before deciding on .io like pretty much every other tech product and service out there.
But, don't worry it doesn't end there, that would be too simple.
Within a few hours of buying the new domain name and changing over my placeholders, I tweeted out the tweet below.
This led to a lot of interesting responses and made me start to double guess and doubt my decision on my domain name, making me think I should go back and buy another one with a different Top-Level Domain (TLD).
In the end, I decided against this and stuck with my gut on .io but this took a few hours of talking myself out of believing I made the wrong decision...
Now, why have I shared this story with you?
I shared this story with the hope of showing how debilitating indecisiveness can be and how if we're not careful it can completely derail and stop us from making progress towards our goals.
What if after four days I still doubted my choices and wasn't sure? What if I kept thinking it's not good enough? How long would I go on for before finally committing to a name?
In theory, it could go on forever. It's not unheard of people to abandon projects, ideas and dreams because they can't commit to a decision and carry on making progress.
This is why I then tweeted out this soon after finally committing to a name and talking myself out of making the wrong decision.
And, I truly believe this.
If we let indecisiveness control us and our work then our dreams and hopes will be killed by it. Very few things are irreversible or unchangeable in this world. Things like branding, names and domains can all be changed so don't stress about picking one now. If you don't like it in a year or two, you can always rebrand. You're not stuck with it forever.
Instead, pick one, commit to it for the time being and move on to more pressing and important tasks like building the thing your naming.
I wish I didn't spend four days umming and arring about a name I came up with on the first day but I can't do anything about that now. Instead, I can now look forward and make the product a reality.
So, if you're like me and suffer from indecisiveness, I hope me sharing my story has helped in some way and let me say, you're not alone in this, more people suffer from it than they'd like to admit.
I know going forward I'm going to try to be more decisive in my work and life to ensure things like this don't roadblock me unnecessarily again. I know I won't be perfect but that is part of the self-improvement process.
On that note, I want to wish you a very productive and happy next week and February overall. And, I'd love to hear how your January has gone so make sure to reply to this email and let me know.
I look forward to talking with you again next Sunday.
Coner x
🏃♂️ What I've Up To
As mentioned above, this week I've been working on my new Twitter analytics SaaS which now has a name. It will be called StatBase and be available at statbase.io. (Once the website is launched that is. 😅)
In news outside of the name being decided, the initial UI on the project is nearly complete and I'm now adding authentication to allow people to log in using Twitter.
I'm hoping to have an MVP out for people to trial in beta by the end of February/the start of March but we will see how this goes and what issues I hit along the way.
🎤 DevSpace
This week, we interviewed the amazing Eddie Jaoude on DevSpace talking about all things Open Source, Freelancing and Digital Nomad. Eddie was an amazing guest and we look forward to welcoming him back for future spaces/episodes. 😊
Check out the recording on Twitter below 👇
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