Cult is right.

Cults are usually seen as believing crazy shit that no one in their right mind would take seriously. Take this new “Cult of Done.”

The Cult of Done Manifesto
1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

So, “done” includes drafts, unedited work, BS, failures, mistakes and ideas posted on the internet. And, presumably, actual finished work. So, done encompasses both incomplete and complete, right and wrong, well-done and poorly done… Is there anything that doesn’t qualify as “done”? Perfection, apparently.

Points two and three directly contradict each other: you can’t consider everything a draft if there’s no editing stage. Not to mention, if something is a draft, it’s specifically not done — that’s pretty much the definition of the term (or at least the definition they’re using here, unless they’re referring to the current of their own hot air). Perhaps what they’re trying to get at with point three is that you shouldn’t spend too much time editing or else risk not reaching completion — if they’d spent more than 20 minutes on it — you know, had an editing stage — they’d have worded it a little more clearly.

It’s also interesting that in point seven, the authors apparently consider “done” worthless. Just throw it away, it’s done. Or, do they mean that there’s a subset of “done” that can be thrown away? Maybe the failures and mistakes? Why can’t you just throw those away when you realize they’re not good enough? Be done with it, to coin a phrase.

I think the biggest problem with this manifesto is that it seems to take every variant of the meaning of “done” — done=finished, done=complete, done=through with, done=did it — and mashes them together into an ambiguous mess. And I suppose there’s some utility to the list, as a means of reminding oneself to seize the day and not get bogged down with details. But raw, unmitigated creation is only part of the picture. That whole editing process they throw out with point three is how we get to the good stuff.