Many people have heard of Tutorial Hell, the pattern of behavior where you get stuck following tutorial after tutorial instead of going off and building something of your own. It’s typically geared towards beginners. The comfort of having your hand held can make it difficult to go off on your own. You can only escape Tutorial Hell by committing to working on your own project.
The Thoroughness Trap is when you over-prepare for a project that you’ve committed to. It’s about studying things so deeply for your project that you never end up doing your project. This is fine if you want to learn, but our goal was to build our own project!
Like Tutorial Hell, it stems from fear, but a fear of getting things wrong because you don’t know enough. A fear of wasting time because you should’ve known more before you started on the project. Perhaps it is the same thing as Tutorial Hell, just tutorials swapped with textbooks.
It’s a trap I have a tendency to fall into, especially when I’m wanting to work on new, more advanced projects. For example, I wanted to get into machine learning (who doesn’t). I would read textbooks on the topic (got a thread here for some good ones). Then papers, then some tutorials and videos on the topic. By the end, you forget most of what you read in the textbook, and you’ve not built anything of note.
The antidote, like Tutorial Hell, is to just bite the bullet and build. You won’t know if you know enough until you try. You won’t know what you don’t know until you try. Sometimes as engineers we think ahead and anticipate problems we encounter. It’s instinctive to work to prevent those problems, but sometimes you just have to run into them. Run into them and then learn how to solve it when you get to it. There will always be an endless stream of problems to solve. If you don’t move, you’ll be paralyzed where you are: stuck in the Thoroughness Trap.