It was late on a Saturday night or early on a Sunday morning when my friend told me about his idea. We were both working on the university newspaper, and the weekends were when everyone could all get together, work like maniacs for 48 hours, then put an edition to bed. There were always a lot of pretty-sideways conversations, however this one was different. 

My friend said he wanted to start a business.

“Ham and Cheese toastie stand. You set up late at night near a nightclub and you sell ham and cheese toasties to people. Everyone loves ham and cheese toasties.”

“What about ham, cheese, and tomato?”

“NO! Ham and cheese. Ham and cheese only. It’s perfect. Simple, easy to make, and everyone loves them.”

I started trying to suggest that more choices might mean more customers. He wasn’t having a bar of it.

“See, everyone says this. Everyone says ‘what about if you added something’. No. It’s ham and cheese. Anything else isn’t a ham and cheese.”

It was late at night, and we were loopy from staying awake for far too long, but it was pretty evident that either the world accepted a ham and cheese toastie stand or the world would get nothing.

The world got nothing. I got the idea of the ham and cheese toastie hurdle.

The ham and cheese toastie hurdle is the period after you reveal either an idea or a completed project and you receive feedback that asks that the thing you’re doing be something other than the thing that it is. A lot of the time this feedback is unsolicited — given with the best of intent, sure, but distracting nonetheless. When you tell someone about your ham and cheese toastie idea and they tell you that they prefer it with a little mayonnaise, you can get sidetracked. “What if I’ve gotten it wrong? What if mayo is the way of the future?”

It can become hard to remember that you can still make the cheese toastie — do the thing you want to do — if you don’t let other people’s riffs on your idea stop you from doing anything at all. The thing about the well-intentioned additions that people have about your idea is that they can feel like pre-emptive criticism. You start to wonder if you should even do the thing at all if people are saying that you could be doing something else. This is the hurdle, and you have to be able to jump over it if your goal is to actually get something done.

Now, I’m not saying go out there, never listen to feedback, and build the highly-efficient puppy-mincer you always knew the world needed. Let’s be sensible here. What I am saying is don’t let people asking for more than what you want to do be doing be the thing from stops you doing anything at all. 

Just make the damned toastie. Once you’ve made it you can go on and do something else, but then the world at least has a delicious toastie and a ham and cheese toastie is a lot better than nothing.