They reckon they’ve caught a very common spending disease: Buy-Before-You-Do syndrome.
Back when they first took up running, the first thing they did was not lace up and head for the lake. It was to spend a whole evening hunting down a proper pair of shoes and breathable clothes, the kind actual runners wear.
When the idea of making YouTube videos struck, they decided this phone is junk, it can’t shoot anything, and went straight to Shopee to order an iPhone 17 Pro Max for the unboxing.
And on the days their productivity sagged, instead of sitting down at the desk and focusing, they went off installing every to-do app under the sun.
They always talked themselves into it with a line that sounds great: “Good gear is what gives you the motivation to do the work properly.”
Reality is a good deal harsher. All that checking out did was hand them a watered-down hit of dopamine, the kind you get when your crush smiles at you, and push them into the illusion that they had “started something”. A few weeks later the nice shoes were shoved in a corner of the wardrobe, there were two spare phones, and the pile of apps had gone untouched for ages. The work, naturally, hadn’t moved an inch.
It took a bad stretch at work and a credit card balance that gave them a fright before it clicked. What did they drag all this expensive stuff home for, if the work never got done and the debt piled up instead? And after weeks of living under that particular money-shaped pressure, they finally landed on something that became their rule from then on: hold off on buying, start with whatever you already have (do it first before buy).
That time, instead of buying GoodNotes to write on the iPad, they pulled up the phone’s stock Notes app and typed rough drafts whenever an idea showed up. Instead of getting a fussy stabilised tripod, they propped the phone against a stack of books and shot the video guerrilla style.
And it was in the middle of gritting their teeth and working with the crudest tools available that they dimly worked out three truths, bitter but worth a great deal:
1. They found out whether they actually wanted it
Very often they realised they only liked the fantasy of being a cool vlogger, and not at all the grind of sitting there babbling at a lens and then cutting audio clip by clip. Diving in with crude gear let them test the limits of their own patience very quickly. The way they came to see it: if I still find this exciting under the worst possible conditions, then I’ve earned the right to buy the gear.
2. They understood what they ACTUALLY needed
Before, they bought things based on imagination, or on the shameless coaxing of some reviewer. But once their hands were properly dirty, they knew exactly which step they were stuck at or short on. An app might have a hundred brilliant features, and they’d suddenly notice they needed precisely one of them.
3. Sometimes going without is where the magic comes from
This is probably the one that gave them the most to think about. Forced to work with crude tools, they started inventing little tricks, or dug up manual ways of doing things that turned out to be strangely smooth.
They found that a ballpoint pen moving carefully across a notebook fed their brain more ideas than an app with an interface that was easy on the eyes but, well, for what exactly? Or that a slightly shaky phone shot carried a raw, honest, close-up feeling that beat a clean production setup outright. They laughed: all this time they’d assumed throwing money at gear was the smart move, when in fact it was often expensive, bulky, and a way of strangling their own flexibility and creativity with their own hands.
Sipping green tea after fumbling their way through a pile of work with the jankiest tools going, they reached their own conclusion. A tool, in the end, exists only to clear the bottlenecks that show up while you’re executing an idea. But you will never know where the real bottleneck in a project is until you roll up your sleeves and go clear it yourself. Don’t let a shortage of equipment become the excuse for putting off the start, and don’t let the pleasant little click of “Buy now” blur out the actual effort.
Their rule from here on fits in one line: do it first before buy!