Reader, whatever idea you’ve been mulling over, considering, planning for…just do it.

Now, I know it’s not that simple (in most cases).

Maybe you can’t "just do it” because you don’t have the authority. Or because you need to assess the potential consequences. Or any one of a dozen other perfectly valid reasons.

But there are also many cases when we could "just do it" and we let something stop us. Sometimes it's perfectionism. Sometimes it's fear.

Whatever the reason, it's getting in the way of the magic of just doing it, and then iterating.

As an engineering major in college, I was trained to "fail fast". Now, I don't love thinking about it as failure per se, but it's true that the first attempt is rarely going to be a home run. So just do it. Get it out of the way. Learn as much as you can from the experience and then revise, making it better each time.

Last year, as part of a volunteer team under the umbrella of the Partnership for a Healthier Fairfax, I helped organize the very first Healthy Together Fairfax, a fun, free, interactive community event focused on healthy and active living, with hands-on activities, fitness classes, access to community services and resources, etc.

The event was set to take place at an amazing county park that has a beautiful trail walk, amphitheater, treehouse, playground, carousel, and tons of green space. My co-volunteer who is a whiz at these things put together a thoughtful, color-coded layout for how all our exhibitors would be spread out throughout the park, organized into groups based on the health topics they addressed.

Then Hurricane Ian brought a storm our way and we had to move everything indoors. We were locked out of the ipads we planned to use for exit surveys. Someone whose proposal to participate we had not accepted showed up to exhibit anyway. The list goes on.

But you know what? Despite it all, we had a WONDERFUL event - exhibitors and community members were engaged and learning from one another, we had a number of local agency heads and policymakers come read children’s story books focused on social and emotional health, we had a steady stream of fitness classes and other interactive, community health-focused activities, and everyone - organizers, exhibitors, and attendees alike - expressed excitement about doing it again next year.

But that's not all. We recently held a community meeting to plan for this year's event and we had so many people show up with so many great ideas. When we tried to do something similar last year, we had almost no one show up.

What changed? We've done it once! That means…

• We got a broader coalition on board through partners that participated in the event last year.
• People saw it in action and understood our vision, so they got more excited about it themselves and shared it with others.
• We got some systems and templates built out, meaning we could start our planning earlier and stronger this year, all while putting in fewer hours.
• We learned from last year - this year, we have a rain date set that we’re publicizing from the start, we’ve moved our timeline up so we’ll have exhibitors identified early enough to be actively included in event promotion efforts, we’ll set the exit survey ipads up differently, and so on and so forth.

So my point is - if you can, just do it. Don’t worry about getting it all right or what might go wrong - you won't get everything right, things will go wrong, AND it will still be wonderful (or at the very least, you’ll get your “first pancake” out of the way - as a firstborn child, I feel like I get a pass to share this meme). Most importantly, you’ll learn from it, and be able to do something even better in the next iteration.
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What have you been thinking about or planning for that you're feeling ready to just do? Or, if something's stopping you, what is it? Let me know!​
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Until next time,

Vinu

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