The Cult of Done Manifesto

Bre Pettis

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Aug 2, 2016

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The Cult of Done Manifesto is a special document. Written from bed with Kio Stark in our first few months of dating. It was one of those magic writing moments where I had the laptop open and our ideas flew onto the page. For me, it is a map of my 2009 heart. Getting it on paper was a cathartic documentation of my life, my soul, and my passion for unbridled creativity. Kio and I shared writing credit on it, licenced it Creative Commons and put it out into the world. Immediately a few folks made visual representations of it and it spread like wildfire for people who need a creative jumpstart.

The Cult of Done Manifesto marks a critical turning point in my life. For the few years previous, I had been making a video every week about making things for a few years and more recent to the writing of the manifesto, I had been making a video every day. I had been in the zone of creativy. MakerBot was just in it’s infancy and I didn’t know it, but I was in the shift from doing a different project every week to doing one project for the next 6.5 years.

Here’s the original post.

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Dear Members of the Cult of Done,

I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.