This morning I continued my daily walks after a long conference trip and, oh boy, was that hard, except that right after the first 10 steps it wasn’t hard anymore.
Starting is always harder than doing and it strikes me that we do almost everything to avoid starting.
We buy courses, we do checklists, we build systems, just to wait for the perfect moment to start.
We build the perfect conditions for starting, to make sure that when we start we are able to do it.
That is reversed.
Starting itself is the perfect condition for doing.
Starting makes doing easy.
Yes of course, attention is still important and there’s no better skill in the modern world than focus: to be able to do something long enough for the doing to matter.
Bu you have to start first
Try it next time: instead of thinking of doing, just start.
Then try to catch when your attention escapes and just bring it back.
You’re going to find out that all the thinking about doing would have been solved by just starting.
Yeah sure. This sounds like cheap philosophy, but guess what? It works.
Simple things work.
We just love to overcomplicate our things because, hey, that’s what we get rewarded for in academia.
Simo
PS. Both starting and doing are pointless if you don’t know exactly what you should be doing. I’ve got an entire system built around that so you might want to have a look at that if goal setting and direction are important to you. Clickety click here