I was recently listening to Aaron Francis on a podcast — he's a developer, educator, and creator behind High Performance SQLite, Mastering Postgres, and the Mostly Technical podcast. He was talking about how he doesn't calculate the ROI on things before doing them. He doesn't weigh the risks and rewards. He just does stuff and puts it into the world.
And I thought: wait, that's what I've been doing for 20 years.
I just never had a name for it.
"You can just do stuff." — Aaron Francis
Aaron gave a talk at Laracon US called "You Can Just Do Things" and wrote about it on GitHub's ReadME under the title "Publishing Your Work Increases Your Luck." He puts it better than I can: "Almost every professional opportunity I've ever had has come to me because I've had work publicly available."
Same. Exactly the same. And hearing him articulate it so cleanly made me realize I should formalize this into my own operating principle — because it has quietly been the most valuable strategy of my entire career.
The Blog Nobody Reads (That Made Me Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars)
Let's talk about this blog you're reading right now.
I've been blogging for 15+ years. In that time, my readership has hovered around a few hundred people a month. On a good month. Most months it's less. There are no viral posts. No massive spikes in traffic. No newsletter with 50,000 subscribers. Just a guy writing things down and putting them on the internet.
You might ask: why bother?
Because over those 15+ years, this blog — along with posts on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook — has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in business opportunities. Not through ad revenue or affiliate links. Through relationships.
It only takes one person to read something you wrote, get inspired or intrigued, and reach out with an opportunity that changes your trajectory.
And that's exactly what's happened. Repeatedly. Over two decades. The total dollar value that's flowed from "someone read something I put on the internet" is staggering when I add it up. But here's the thing — it came from a handful of relationships. Maybe five or six people, total, across all those years.
Five or six people. Out of thousands of page views. That's an absurdly low conversion rate by any traditional metric.
And it's also the best ROI of anything I've ever done.
The Metrics Trap
If I had been obsessively tracking engagement — page views, bounce rates, time on site, social shares — I would have quit blogging in year two. The numbers never looked good. They still don't look good. By any standard analytics dashboard, this blog is a failure.
But analytics dashboards can't measure the email from a stranger who read your post about a niche topic, realized you think about problems the same way they do, and decided to hire you. They can't measure the conference conversation that started with "Hey, I read your blog." They can't measure the partnership that formed because someone Googled a problem, found your take on it, and thought this person gets it.
What the metrics say
Low traffic, minimal engagement, no viral content, not worth your time.
What actually happened
Hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunities, career-defining relationships, doors that would never have opened otherwise.
The metrics trap is real. If you let page views tell you whether your work matters, you'll stop doing the work long before the payoff arrives. And the payoff always arrives on its own schedule, not yours.
Why "Just Do Stuff" Works
Aaron has a great way of framing this. He says: "I know what will happen if I don't publish anything: absolutely nothing."
That's the baseline. Nothing in, nothing out. But when you consistently put things into the world — blog posts, open source projects, tweets, videos, forum answers, whatever — you're creating surface area for luck to find you. Every piece of content is a tiny lottery ticket. Most won't pay off. But the ones that do can pay off enormously.
Here's why it works:
- It compounds invisibly. You won't see the returns for months or years. But each thing you put out adds to a body of work that collectively says "this person thinks, builds, and shares." That reputation compounds even when individual pieces don't.
- It attracts the right people. The five or six relationships that generated real business for me didn't come from cold outreach or networking events. They came from people who self-selected because they resonated with something I wrote. That's a much higher-quality filter than any sales funnel.
- It forces you to clarify your thinking. Writing a blog post about something you're learning makes you understand it better. Sharing your process publicly makes you more intentional about your process. The act of doing stuff makes you better at doing stuff.
- It's asymmetric. The downside is a few hours of your time. The upside is uncapped. That's a trade you should make every single time.
The Karma Lag
Here's the part nobody warns you about: the karma lag is brutal.
You'll write a blog post and hear nothing. You'll share a project and get two likes. You'll answer someone's question on a forum and feel like you're shouting into the void. You'll do this for months. Maybe years.
And you'll start to wonder if you're wasting your time. You'll see other people with big followings and think the game is rigged. You'll open your analytics and feel a familiar twinge of why do I bother.
I get it. I've felt all of that. Many times.
But then someone emails you out of nowhere with a six-figure opportunity that traces back to a blog post you wrote three years ago. And suddenly the math makes sense. Not in a "I calculated the expected value" way — in a "holy cow, that one post was worth more per hour than anything else I've ever done" way.
The karma doesn't come back on your schedule. But when it comes back, it comes back big.
I can't give you a precise hours-spent-to-revenue-received ratio. But I can tell you that on an hourly basis, the return on "just doing stuff" is the highest-paying work I've ever done. It just doesn't feel like it in the moment.
What Counts as "Stuff"
You don't need a blog. You don't need a YouTube channel. You don't need a podcast. You just need to put something into the world on a somewhat regular basis. Here's what counts:
Share What You're Learning
Write about it. Tweet about it. Record a quick video. The format doesn't matter — the sharing does.
Share What You Know
You have expertise someone else needs. A StackOverflow answer, a blog post, a forum reply — it all counts.
Help One Person
If you can help just one person, do it. The ripple effects of genuine helpfulness are impossible to predict.
Aaron's first programming job came from someone stumbling across a blog post he'd written. Not a viral post. Not a post on a big platform. Just a thing he put into the world that the right person happened to find at the right time.
That's the whole game.
Stop Optimizing, Start Doing
The temptation is always to optimize. To figure out the "best" platform, the "right" posting schedule, the "optimal" content strategy. To run the numbers before you run the experiment.
Don't.
The optimization mindset is a procrastination trap dressed up as productivity. You don't need a content calendar. You don't need an editorial strategy. You need to do stuff and put it out there.
Write the blog post even though nobody will read it. Share the project even though it's rough. Answer the question even though someone else probably already did. Post the tweet even though it won't go viral.
Do it consistently. Do it without expectation. Do it because the alternative — doing nothing — guarantees nothing.
You don't need permission. You don't need a strategy.
You just need to do stuff.
Twenty years from now, when you trace back the best opportunities of your career, I'd bet most of them started with something small you put into the world without thinking too hard about it. A blog post. A tweet. A side project. A comment on a forum.
That's been the story of my career. And I suspect, if you start doing stuff today, it'll be the story of yours too.
