Fighting Fear

I've been trying to fight fear for years, and I will likely keep up that fight until I die. Fear can be healthy and even often helpful, but more often it is just an impediment.

A number of years ago, I picked up 3 old PCs from a local recycling/refurbishing organization. At the time, I meant for them to be compute nodes in a local homelab cluster. They were that, and still are. But because they all had functional optical drives, I always wanted to use them to rip CDs. This is relevant because almost a decade ago, we obtained 5 or 6 boxes of CDs from a garage sale. These boxes sat in our house for a number of years before being hauled across the country where they sat in my basement for the past 7 years.

The reason this project stalled so long was that I made some kind of personal decree that everything I put on the machines would be managed appropriately with config management, and nothing but proxmox would run on the physical machines. I wanted to do this right(tm). At one point, I tried passing through the CD drive to a vm on the machine, but never got it to work. So it stalled. For years.

Yesterday, I threw caution to the wind, installed docker on the physical nodes, and setup users, mounts, and NSF shares. I decided to not be afraid. I kept detailed notes of my procedure in lieu of config management. And, It was working within a few hours. The project was super fun, I'm so grateful I put away fear, and didn't sacrifice the good for the perfect.

I do this kind of thing all the time. I set the bar so high that just the thought of it makes me procrastinate. The thing is that fear of future regret usually only works by preventing you from doing anything. And then you just regret that.

So I try to regulate fear. Keep an eye on it, but try my best to ignore it. Because progress involves failure, and by avoiding failure you avoid progress. Life is messy, mistakes will be made, and sometimes hobby systems can be setup without industry standard management and control.