Why is STARTING important?
If you don’t start, you’ll never finish.
Thinking, analyzing, and planning are good, but lead nowhere without accompanying action. To get things done, you need to do, move, engage.
How many times have you had a great idea that you never followed up on? The idea, without the follow-up, has no life or form. How often have you questioned your ability to accomplish something yet taken the first step anyway and found each succeeding step easier and easier as you grew closer to reaching your goal? To accomplish distant, long-term goals, you must first work on more immediately achievable, short-term objectives.
If you feel like you can’t get out of bed, and you lie there, minute after minute, hour after hour, motionless, contemplating all you have to do, the day isn’t going to be very productive. If you feel like you can’t get out of bed, but you make an effort to throw off the covers, you’re soon on your feet, ready to turn possibilities into probabilities and probabilities into realities.
Why start? Because you probably want more of something: more connectedness, skills, experiences, money, free time…And having or getting more requires action.
How to Start
Once you have devoted sufficient thought, analysis, and planning to your goal, it’s time to start doing.
This begs the question of what sufficient means in this context. Sufficient here implies that the following three issues have been addressed:
- Is your goal or objective clear? You don’t want to start, to invest too much of yourself, unless you’ve looked far enough ahead to feel fairly confident this is the direction you want to go.
- If you want to start getting in shape, first decide if your primary goal is to lose a few pounds, gain strength, or prepare for involvement in a specific sport. Where are you going?
- Do you want to start learning more about wine because you want to enjoy it more, increase your wine cellar, or qualify for the new opening of wine steward at the upscale restaurant where you work? Why do you want to study wines?
- Do you have the time, money, health, and motivation to make a good effort? If not, perhaps you should prepare a bit more before starting.
- You probably shouldn’t start the car trip if you don’t have enough gas money to reach and return from your destination.
- Starting to plan a wedding may be the right thing to do if you’re in love and ready to settle down and make a long-term commitment.
- Do you really want to follow through on the plans you made years ago with an old friend to someday spend a month trekking in the Himalayas? Is the motivation still there? Is your body still capable?
- How great a risk factor can you handle? Some people aren’t ready to start until every detail has been planned for, every obstacle considered, and every option analyzed. Others require and desire far less organization and certainty.
- I want to liquidate all my investments so I can take advantage of the stock tip my brother gave me, but I’m scared. Maybe I should put only half or a quarter of what I have into this.
- We’ve put a lot of effort into researching how to get the most money from the sale of our house. And we’ve put the same effort into studying the real estate market where we plan on moving. We’re a little nervous about the move but confident that we have all the information we need.
Once the goal or objective is clear, resources are sufficient, and you’re able to live with the risks inherent in what you’re about to begin, it’s time to plan out a sequence of steps to move in that direction.
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