Just Starting

Most people are obsessed with perfectionism before they start anything... what do I mean by perfectionism? How often have you told yourself "I'll start this weekend" or "now is just not the right time?" This is the most common symptom of perfectionism, we are always thinking in our thoughts that there will be a better time to start something... but let me tell you the truth, that time will never come. That is just your brain at work trying to get you to take the easy way out.

So then when is the best time? When you have the inpiration of the idea! From that moment on, it is only going to get harder to hold onto the idea, and your brain is going to do mental gymnastics to throw another excuse in your way once the weekend actually arrives, at which point you will shrug it off, and you are right back into the cycle of, well, nothing...

You will go back to work the following week, and you will have the same inspirational thought or idea once again, and you will say to yourself AGAIN, "I'll start this weekend, when the time is right." This is the cycle that most people live in. Inspiration hits, usually in the middle of work when we realize that we are wasting our lives away working for someone else, participating in the rat race, and we say to ourselves I hate this (INSPIRATION), and that come this weekend when the time is ready, that is when I'll do something about this.

This is a never ending cycle because the moment we tell ourselves to wait on it until the time is right, we have given into the trap of perfectionism, being passive until the perfect moment has arrived, and all this passion and angst we have built up inside of us will finally be able to be unleashed....

I know many of you reading this have lived through that experience for what may seem like your whole life... I know this because when working that rat race, I spoke to many co-workers all the time about what other goals they had in life and what they wanted to do about it change the trajectory of their life... What were they going to do to get out? But come next week to talk about what they done over the weekend to make progress on their plans, it always saddened me to hear that basically 100% of the time they had done absolutely nothing.

So then what is it that is pushing me forward on my plans right now? What is giving me the strength to do what I said I was going to do? The simple answer I can give you, I just started. I never told myself to wait for the perfect time... I said what I was going to do, and the first thing I would do when I would get home is just do it. This would sometimes come at the expense of sleep, but having now the systems in place that I told myself I would establish, executing on all the things I've always said I wanted to do has become so easy and habitual.

Starting is always the hardest part. We want to do things right so we feel like we need to do all this research first before starting. But the best research of all is just getting started, then you'll actually have some context to make research more effective for you.

Creating this blog and writing my first post is the greatest example of that. I had to do some research online to see how to setup a blog, and how to get a domain name, and how to actually create and publish an article on the blog. But the most important thing in my mind was not making sure everything was perfectly setup first, my first goal was to DO THE THING as I like to say. I want to start a blog, so start a f@#&ing blog. Now that I've done one (almost finished here), I can move on to doing research, and it's going to be a lot more clear to me.

Take this first article of mine as a breath of inspiration to just get started on whatever it is you want to do. It just starts with an idea, then try it out, EXPERIMENT, DO THE THING, then you can start thinking about how you can perfect it. If perfection comes first, then you'll never get started. Whether you want to learn to draw, to play piano, to code, to write, do a draft first, get something out there, create context for you to go off of. You're experience is significant! Trust it, do some outside research, and build from there.

I believe this can turn into a habit in itself. We need to get comfortable with being vulnerable and learning humility, so that we don't need to feel like our first draft is perfect... The strength is not in doing it perfectly, the real strenth lies in your ability to put yourself out there, and be relentless in your pursuit to improve. GET YOURSELF TO WORK!