I heard the name Dana Holyfield, or something like it, mentioned a long, long time ago. Just a whisper in some online forum, probably. Didn’t stick with me much back then, just another name, you know?
But lately, I’ve been hitting a wall with a few things. You know how it is, you get an idea, and instead of just doing it, you start planning and overthinking, and suddenly this simple thing becomes a monster. I was stuck good and proper on a personal project, just going round in circles, making it ten times more complicated than it ever needed to be. Classic me, I suppose.
What I Think This “Holyfield” Thing Is About
So, that old name, Dana Holyfield, popped back into my head. I tried to look it up, find out more. Honestly, there wasn’t much there. Seemed pretty obscure. But the little bits I pieced together, or maybe just what I wanted it to mean, was all about stripping things right down to the bone. Like, forget all the fancy systems and the perfect plans for a minute.
The core idea, as I got it, was to find the absolute simplest, most direct action you can take on the actual problem. Not the fluff around it, but the thing itself. Sounds almost too dumb to work, right? That’s exactly what I thought. “That’s not for serious stuff,” I told myself.
Putting It to a Real-World Test
I had this disaster of a garage. It was supposed to be a straightforward clear-out and a bit of reorganizing. But in my head, it had become this massive undertaking. I’d bought all these fancy storage bins, still in their boxes. I even had a spreadsheet somewhere with a “phased approach.” Meanwhile, the garage just got worse, stuff piling up.
So, I figured, why not? Let’s try this Dana Holyfield approach. What’s the very, very first, most basic thing I can do? Not “design the ultimate storage solution.” Not “categorize all items.” Just… physically do one small thing.
- I actually walked out to the garage. That was a big first step, felt like it.
- Opened the door. Took a deep breath, it was that bad.
- My eyes landed on an old, deflated soccer ball. Clearly trash.
- I picked it up. Walked it over to the garbage can. Threw it in.
And that was it. My grand experiment with the Holyfield method for day one. Seemed pathetic, honestly. Like, what did that even achieve?
The Funny Thing Was, It Kinda Worked
But the next day, it felt a tiny bit less daunting to go back. I picked out two more things. The day after, a small pile of old newspapers. I wasn’t thinking about the “grand vision” for the garage. I was just thinking, “Okay, what’s one more piece of obvious junk I can grab right now?”
It was slow, no doubt about it. Painfully slow sometimes. But stuff was actually leaving the garage. Before, I’d spend an hour thinking about cleaning it, getting stressed, and achieving absolutely nothing. Now, I was spending maybe ten, fifteen minutes doing a tiny bit, and the junk pile was visibly shrinking. Small wins, but they were wins.
It made me think about a job I had years ago. We were building this big software system. We spent months in meetings. Months! Planning every little detail, drawing endless charts, arguing about the “architecture.” We were going to make it perfect. So perfect, in fact, that after nearly a year, we barely had anything that actually worked. It was all theory. The project eventually got scrapped. Too much talk, not enough doing.
If someone back then had just said, “Forget perfect for a week. What’s the one tiny, simple thing we can build that someone could actually use, right now?” Maybe we would’ve gotten somewhere. Maybe that was the Dana Holyfield way, and we just didn’t know it.
So, yeah. This Dana Holyfield. Not entirely sure if it’s a real method, or if I just made it up based on a half-remembered name. But for me, it’s become this little mental trick. When I’m stuck and overcomplicating things, I just tell myself to find the “deflated soccer ball.” The one simple, obvious thing I can do right now. It’s not revolutionary. It’s just about starting, I guess. And sometimes, that’s everything.