Square One: How I Stopped Slacking and Started Writing

It’s 04:30 AM, and I’m writing this because a few hours ago I was doomscrolling and ran straight into a word: mikkabozu.

A mikkabozu (literally “three-day monk”) is a Japanese term for someone who takes something up with great enthusiasm and drops it three days later - a serial starter and a poor finisher. There’s a Turkish idiom for the same thing that my friends keep aiming at me: maymun iştahlı (never satisfied, always reaching for the next thing).

Reading that word was the push I needed. I’d been planning this blog post for a long time, and seeing my whole personality compressed into a few syllables was the moment I finally told myself: write it. So here I am. Believe it or not.

Where it started

Since the age of eight I’ve been working on projects. Sometimes a wooden car, sometimes a paper gun, sometimes a DC-motor-powered plane prototype. If you’re the kind of person who lights up while making something new, you probably already understand me.

Because I have that kind of personality, I went to a technical high school, where I built tons of projects in my hands-on classes and learned a huge amount through them. It carried over when I started my undergraduate degree: I joined a student club focused on unmanned aerial vehicles, and we worked on project after project. At some point I became vice president - and that’s when I started a solo project of my own: precision landing.

Where it started to fall

For a while everything went well. I made steady, continuous progress, and the project reached a point where all it needed was some smoothing out of the rough edges.

But - as a mikkabozu - I kept adding new features. A new system. Mandatory hardware changes. In the end it became a wholly different project, and that was the exact point where everything began to fall apart, without my even noticing.

So here we are today. I have a project that genuinely satisfies my appetite for robotics and control systems - but in the end, all I’m left with is old concept designs and software.

One thing at a time

And today I believe I’ve mostly overcome being a mikkabozu - with one single, basic change: one thing at a time.

Here’s how it plays out in my head now. An idea shows up and I think, “That’s simple - I could do it in a week.” The me from 2022 would immediately pile on: “This is cool, but it’d be even cooler if I also added this and changed that” - and just like that, a one-week idea balloons into something that never ships. The me of today stops right there: “A week? Then do the week. You have nothing to lose. The other ideas aren’t going anywhere - write them down, finish the first part, and add them afterwards.”

The curse and the blessing

That, I think, is where most developers fail. It’s a curse and a blessing at the same time: you will always have new ideas. And if you keep chasing those ideas while never finishing the previous one, then technically you’re working all the time - and going absolutely nowhere. Like a runner on a treadmill.

I can hear you saying, “at least you gain experience.” That’s true. But there’s a big BUT: you have nothing finished. So instead of working 30 days straight and chasing the horizon, work for 15 and at least finish something.

Why does finishing matter? For basic motivational reasons. When you reach a point and look back, you want to be able to say “I did these things” - good or bad - and own them. A finished thing is a marker of where you actually were.

Conclusion

Being a mikkabozu was never about laziness - it was about loving the start too much and respecting the finish too little. The ideas were never the problem; not closing them was. The fix turned out to be embarrassingly small: stop treating “one more feature” as free, pick one thing, and carry it all the way to done before letting the next idea in.

This blog post is my first deliberate attempt at exactly that - and so is finally documenting the precision landing drone project it grew out of. If I can keep finishing things this way, then mikkabozu becomes something I used to be.

We’ll see. Hopefully for more than three days.