I have absolutely adored The Cult of Done Manifesto since I was first introduced to it from an excellent programming Youtube channel. It’s been something that’s stuck with me, that I’ve kept bits of on sticky notes at work, and something which I wanted to physically get printed to hang on a wall in my house.

However for as much as I love it, I don’t agree with all of it. It has 13 rules as written, but three of them I don’t agree with. Not bad for something which was quote, “written in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done”, but my own changes are:

Dropped rules

Rule 4. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

This absolutely doesn’t work for me. Life is busy, things get in the way, and unfortunately a week isn’t always a reasonable timeframe for a creative idea. I have ideas from years ago that I keep neatly filed away in my Obsidian. They’re still solid ideas, I hope to some day have the time to see them to fruition, but my process much more lends itself to chipping away at ideas when I can carve out the time, and occasionally getting lost in flow state past midnight. Or maybe that’s ADHD. Either way, while I agree that forcing progress on an idea clicking is a waste, it’s a different concept than abandoning it on a timeframe.

Rule 11. Destruction is a variant of done.

I understand what this is going for, destruction lets you move on to more things in the same way done does. However, I see little distinction here against the rule that came before it, 10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes., and like the wording of this better.

Rule 12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

This outright does not work for me, and I’m aware of the irony of writing this on a personal blog. I barely keep a social media presence and have no desire to do so, and made my own version of this manifesto long before I had my singular outlet with this little blog. Counting a post to the internet as anything close to done would be nothing more than a crutch to justify to myself that I accomplished something by making a Twitter post.

Practising what I preach

An excellent illustration for The Cult of Done Manifesto using Rubik’s cubes exists for all of the rules, illustrated by James Provost. Unfortunately, this post is 14 years old and his graphic is available in a maximum size of 1000x1300. I tossed up with making my own and decided I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t change something to my liking. With mediocre Photoshop ability, I got it done and made a high resolution copy with my own subset of the rules.

James’ Rubik’s cube graphic is also covered by Creative Commons, which in honesty I only even learnt when writing this page. A quick search for his original graphic shows both uncredited reposts verbatim and “reinterpretations” with painfully obviously AI plagiarism-as-a-service machine generated. While remixing and recreating his work is in violation of Creative Commons, at least I’m a human who can respond if it turns into a problem. So we proceed asking for forgiveness instead of permission, and if the respective copyright holder has an issue with this I’m happy to remove this page. Otherwise, here it is:

Yes, before you ask, of course it’s using the Gruvbox colour scheme. Were you expecting anything less from me?

As an aside, it’s really bloody hard to make this image with accurate Rubik’s cubes. I tried my best flipping around a real 3x3 on my desk to ensure that every image is a valid cube permutation, but this breaks down with graphics like rule 7. Let it be known that I tried my best, and if you see something impossible like white and yellow faces joined, no you didn’t, gaslighting isn’t real, you’re just crazy.

The QR code in the bottom right encodes only text. It comes from a segment in the book Do the F*cking Work (or at least I think it does), which has such a cringe¹ forced presentation gimmick, it makes me feel like I’m trapped at a party with a Hazbin Hotel fan. I saw the message reposted somewhere and liked it, but it was far too verbose to include in the poster, so a QR code felt an easy solution to the empty space anyway. If you can’t scan it easily yourself, it reads as follows:

Start over. You don’t need to cling to your accomplishments. Everything you did before was just practice. It’s already used up. It’ll never grow beyond what it already is. It’s static. It doesn’t define you. The best you ever did is holding you back. Let go of the past. You create the future. Everything you need is right inside of you. You choose how to use it. You’re always getting better. You’re never the same. You’re dynamic. The best you’ll ever do is still out there ahead of you, waiting for you to catch up.