Just Start

 Just Start

I want you to go back in time and enter the mind of your five-year-old self. What is your life like at your current age? What are you doing? Where do you live? What do you look like? What have you accomplished? Have you done the things you dreamt of doing? Gone to the places you dreamt of going? Are you with the person you dreamt of being with? 

Think of every single thing you wanted to do as a child. How many of those things have you actually done? I know for myself, it’s not many. But why? Why was it so easy for me to imagine doing these things as a kid, but now, with all the resources at my fingertips, does it seem impossible?

Now ask yourself, have you tried? Have you actually started? Have you put in more than a half-hearted, ten minutes of thought into your dreams? 

If you’re anything like me. You’re probably feeling a lot of regret. Disappointment. Hopelessness. Maybe even anxiety. 

That’s exactly why we’re here.

Now I want you to think about why you haven’t done those things. Is it because you don’t have enough time? Didn’t know enough to begin? Not in the right place in life? Not enough money? 

Sure, all seem like valid reasons to not start. What if the right time never comes? What if the stars never align? What if it never all falls into place like you want it to? Then you just accept that it wasn’t meant to be and call it a life. I’d rather not.

The truth is, the conditions will never be perfect. You will never have it all just come to you. Even if there is a better time, there will still be something in the way of beginning.

There is a word that I have thought about every single day for the last ten years. That word: inertia.

The law of inertia states that “objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force and objects at rest tend to stay at rest.”

Sometimes all the fear lies in the possibility of going the wrong way. The cost of potentially wasting time on the wrong thing keeps us from even beginning. If everyone approached life this way we would be without a lot of key inventions. To name a few: microwaves, sticky notes, penicillin, potato chips, super glue, and many more.

All of these things were invented because of people who began and screwed up. They didn’t create what they intended to. But somehow, what they did create is seen as a success. A failure turned into a success.

Everything that has ever been created has only taken two things: time and energy.

Time is often viewed by humans as the most valuable resource we have. No wonder we don’t want to risk wasting it. But what if I told you that you might just be wasting time by not even giving yourself an opportunity to waste it? What if your action is more beneficial than inaction no matter what?

Let’s dive into a few key reframing methods that help with beginning.

Pain of regret is worse than pain of failure

Doing something hard is painful in the moment, not doing anything is painful forever.

Take a second to reflect on your biggest regrets. Not saying what you wanted to say. Not doing that thing when you had the chance. Not going this way, and going this way instead. Regrets are haunting.

Your anxious mind is constantly analyzing every regret. It is reliving the past asking “why didn’t I…” fill in the blank. It hurts. It’s a type of hurt that sticks with you over the years. Something that lowers your confidence in yourself. Those regrets have created a story in your mind about who you are. You are telling yourself something negative about yourself because at one point you let yourself down.

Now I want you to reflect on the hardest things you’ve done in your life. Remember the pain. Remember how your muscles ached, your brain hurt, the emotions poured out of you as you worked to do whatever it was you did. But all that pain from then, is gone. All of the hard work, effort, blood, sweat, tears that went into accomplishing what you did is no longer something you experience. When you look back you are proud of what you’ve done. The pain you put in is worth it.

Exchange short term pain for long term accomplishments.

The pain regret felt from not doing whatever you wished is much worse than the short term pain you felt over the time it took to accomplish the goal.

The cost of effort fallacy

Everything we do costs us an opportunity. That opportunity could be good, bad, or neutral. The reality is, by doing one thing, you are in turn giving up another thing.

We are wired to believe this way as humans so therefore we attribute a use of time or effort that doesn’t immediately result in a positive outcome as a loss. It goes in our minds as a sunk cost. Time we have lost that we will not get back. 

The outcome is unknown when dedicating time to a subject you have never explored before. It seems unlikely that a positive outcome will come out of it due to unfamiliarity. Therefore, our minds perceive it as a potential risk.

The risk of lost time.

It causes anxiety and stress to potentially waste time doing something. Especially for those with a highly analytical mind like myself.

It seems, in scenarios like these, the best course of action is total avoidance. We feel it is better to completely avoid any risk by not doing anything.

It is imperative to reshape your mind to see the cost of complete inaction as a more severe risk than not completely optimizing your energy by knowing exactly what to do. This is exactly what learning is. At first, a task may seem extremely complex and hard to pinpoint. But with practice and repetition, it becomes simpler and easier to pinpoint.

Any action, even if it is perceived as “wasted” action, is better than inaction.

Embrace being a beginner 

As we mature and age, we slowly begin to recognize what we are good at. We dedicate more and more time to doing things that come easier for us and soon enough become experts. The longer we live, the more time we have given to certain activities, disciplines and topics. It is true for nearly all adults. Everyone has a few things that they are better at than other people because they have dedicated so much time to them.

Although this is a good thing, it also causes us to perceive the idea of being a beginner to something as a bad thing. We feel like a child again. We feel dumb. We feel incapable. We feel embarrassed.

One of the hardest things to do is admit that you don’t know anything about a subject, especially when there are people years younger than you that are experts. This ego that we hold keeps us from accomplishing new dreams we have for ourselves.

Taking a cynical approach and seeing being a beginner as a negative thing keeps us from ever taking the step to learn something new. We say it would be better to just not begin ever because we have waited too long.

We need to shift our mindsets into always being a student. The most successful people that have ever stepped foot on this earth know more about more subjects than most people. The reason why: they never quit being a student. Having the mindset of a student allows you to continuously learn new things, without seeing the idea of being a beginner as a negative thing.

You must continue to tell yourself “I don’t know yet and that’s okay.” You must realize that you will learn in time. The only thing that the experts have on you is time spent on the subject. Yes, there may be some intangible things that go into their expertise, but for the most part it is just time.

The best thing to do is embrace sucking at something. If you knew everything, life would be meaningless. There would be no reason to continue living because there would be no novelty to life. Everything to possibly know would be known. There would be no mystery. Without mystery there is no fascination. No surprise. No discovery.

There are many things I suck at. Currently writing is one of them. And I’m still better than some people because I have dedicated hours to it. But in comparison to a true expert, I am a complete novice. But part of the reason I am here writing this is to get better. At some point the finished draft of this will come out and I will look back at this part in the journal of writing and see the progress.

That is when satisfaction will finally be felt.

Remember that the longer gratification is delayed, the better the satisfaction. The more time you spend being a novice, the better it feels when you are an expert.

Continue being a  student.

Go the wrong way

“General ambition gives you anxiety, specific ambition gives you direction”

-Alex Hormozi

Sometimes finding the proverbial right way takes time. It takes swinging and missing. It takes getting lost. 

The “right” thing is all subjective. It is all relative to each person. Because we are all individuals, the right thing for some is the complete wrong thing for others. If we decided that there was a “right” blood type, there would be a lot of issues when we try to give type A+ blood to someone with type O-. 

The word “right” is formed from what generally works for the majority of people. It is not a testament. There are no rules to life that state the right and wrong way of doing things.

That is why we must go the wrong way. Going back to the idea of inertia, we find that by going some way, any way, even if it is the wrong way, may be the right way. 

Moving in some direction, may just help us find the direction we need. It may show us what doesn’t work so we can find out what does work and give us the “right” direction.

When Christopher Columbus sailed to what is now the Americas for the first time, he believed he had discovered a new route to India. Had he found a new route to India, he may have been remembered, but he most likely wouldn’t have. He would have been like any other explorer who was looking for the “right way” to India. He would have been one of many.

The reason we all remember his name is because he was the first. He unintentionally founded the Americas by going the wrong way. Was it necessarily the wrong way then? You could say finding America was his biggest achievement. A wrong turned right.

What we must remember about this is that he set out to do something. He took action in search of one thing, and even though he failed his original mission, he succeeded in the grand scheme of it all.

Going the wrong way may just lead you to what you are looking for. But you must start by going somewhere if you wish to find anything.