The idea you have for how to make a meaningful contribution to the people you aim to serve deserves your attention and action.
Today.
And before you commit to the conclusion that you’re not ready or today is simply not the right day, consider these things:
- The inertia will always be there: whether it is doubt, feelings of fatigue, your comfort zone, the need for guarantees, or the sense of impossibility and untenability. So stop trying to get rid of it.
- Asking what if does not do you any favors if it stops you from acting for days, weeks, months, and even years.
- The work will never be perfect and that’s okay. If perfection were a requirement for shipping, nothing would ever get shipped.
- Immediate change isn’t guaranteed, but there are valuable lessons aplenty. When you act, your idea crosses the chasm from an unrealized thought to something tangible that people can react to — reactions can teach you about how to produce better work that leads to a great impact.
- You do not have to get to step 1000 in the next 24 hours, you just need to focus on doing the next thing that will advance your mission: think pitching to your first customer or publishing a piece of content that can rally people around an important idea.
- Growth happens from perturbation. When carbon atoms get exposed to a high degree of temperature and pressure they bond and form into a stronger, more resilient material; likewise, the pressure you experience when shipping for the first time is not forever, the more you ship the more you will resilience and endurance you develop.
- Every day of your life is an opportunity to go at bat, to take a swing and try something different that you think will help. The rest is probability: if you go at bat once a year, your chances of making an impact are slim. If you go at bat in earnest every day, there’s a good chance that you will make a generous impact that lifts up the people you aim to serve.
It’s only today once.
The opportunity to do the next thing, to learn a valuable lesson, to grow, to embrace your at bat, and to get closer to making a change is available to you now.
So go for it.
Inertia is exactly why there is productivity inequality. Why the gap between the producers we admire and everyone else is so large. Because just like how the inertia from sitting/standing still can become so unsurmountably heavy, the inertia from doing and taking whatever step is next even if it's not step 1000 can be impossible to stop.
This is why I think people shouldn't do faster, but do sooner. There's a big difference even if it doesn't feel like it from reading the two statements.
But yeah, our talk on Weds really got me fixated on factors of inertia and how to reduce / overcome them. I wrote in 2016 about how I was going to commit to practice of writing and it took me 4 years to actually do it - I want to stop that from happening. I don't want to wake up 5 years from now, start something, and ask myself: why didn't you do that sooner?
It's like a dance.