Summary: It always seems impossible before you start. It applies to almost any endeavor you can think of: to a health regiment, to getting your work done every day, to any act of creativity, even to just waking up early every morning. Before you start, it seems impossible, you’re stuck on zero miles per hour and there seems to be no way to get the car into Drive. The first step takes an act of will to get you moving, and this is really IT in the beginning, a simple act of will. Will you do it or will the Resistance keep you where you are? I think about this often: why is it so nearly impossible to get going at first? What makes it so difficult? More and more each day I notice it’s because of the fantasy in our heads. We glamorize the work, what attracts us to it ends up being the same reason we fear it. Our goal looks cool as shit, beautiful even, we think we’re not worthy of being the ones who do this type of work for a living, we think we’d be to lucky to become THAT. We’ve been out of shape our whole lives, do we really deserve to have a flat stomach? We even glamorize the suffering. We somehow know there will be trials and effort required once we start, but we make this out to be some sublime form of struggle. Instead, we should see that any endeavor just requires blue collar work ethic. Being the VP of our division is often heavy lifting in a similar fashion that working construction is. You have to make things move, one way or the other. With words or with physical presence, but something must move as part of the work. And that ties in with the next reason getting started is so difficult. We don’t yet know how to distinguish between the essential elements of the job at hand and the inessential. We see so much that should get done, but we don’t know that only 20% of it is crucial to success, the rest can be delayed or outsourced. We envision ourselves as David in front of this Goliath-this endeavor we want to start. We think of ourselves as insignificant in size, it’s an unmovable mountain we’re facing. But little do we know that being small is precisely where our advantage lies. If we would just start, it would reveal itself to us. David can and does win. David is swift and scrappy. So taking the first step remains the hardest step of all. And the most important one. But SHOULD we take that first step, we would see all the forces that materialize to help our cause. We forget that humans are creatures of habit. Starting creates some momentum in our favor, we quickly get used to doing what’s required, and not necessarily out of enjoyment, but just because we’ve gotten used to it. Then it becomes harder to stop the forward momentum than it is to just stop the effort. Success becomes more convenient than even inaction is. We’ve boarded that train, and no matter how slow that train is going, we know we can get to a new place if we just stay on. The choice we made of starting now simply becomes the choice of how much and how great do we want our accomplishments to be. You see why knowing what we know, it becomes impossible to NOT succeed once we start.
