How do you start writing a book? How do you start operating a business? How do you start building that extra bathroom in your house? How do you do anything really? You just start. Pick a sentence, start a website, pick up a hammer.
I thought about how I would start writing this post for about 5 minutes and then I thought, “hey, if you don’t just start writing, then you probably won’t ever do this. You’ll say to yourself ‘I’ll think about it through lunch and start this afternoon.’ But once it’s afternoon you’ll say ‘I’ll sleep on it and start it tomorrow.’ You know what? F that. Just start writing.”
You know something else? It’s the same with everything. Nothing will ever get done if you keep thinking about it. You tell yourself that the more you think about it the better it will be. Well you know what? To be honest probably the opposite will occur. The more you think about it the more diluted your ideas will become because you’ll try to make your ideas fit into a mold.
When we were little, we had that game where you have to fit the circle in the circle and the square in the square. We’ve been taught since we were tiny children that a circle doesn’t fit in a square. We’ve been brainwashed that if we don’t do things correctly and in a proper order/sequence, OR if what we start doing doesn’t fit in with what society wants, then we’re bound to fail. Well that’s just not true.
Ask a painter or a sculpture to explain exactly in detail what is going to be on that blank canvas or that piece of rock. Oftentimes he’ll have no idea. And if he starts thinking about it he’ll end up painting what his friends or his mother wants him to paint because he’ll hear the voices of everyone he’s ever known interjecting their opinions into HIS project.
I’ve heard sculptures say that their only job is to release what’s already in the rock! Think about that.
How brilliant is that?
We should all live by that formula. The formula that says that only by starting something can we know what we’re making. It’s not until the sculptor figures out there’s a face here or a hand there that he starts to get a picture of what he’s doing. Well the same is true for you. You won’t know exactly what you’re doing or where you’re heading until you start. You can plan all you want but only by doing will you ever start.
Plans? Let’s look again at our sculptor. Ask him to take a piece of rock and plan out exactly what he is going to carve from it. Well, first off he won’t get started working for a long time because he’ll have to stare at the rock trying to guess what’s inside. Then he’ll have to draw plans, throw them away, and draw more plans. Finally he’s ready. He steps up to the rock and start chiseling and you know what? The grain of the rock goes left to right instead of up and down! Suddenly all his planning is worthless!
Now, we’re not saying that all planning is unnecessary. Hey, we live by the 7 Ps (Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance). But what I am saying is that much too often we disguise procrastination, or even guesswork, as planning. Look at what I was about to do with this post… “I’ll plan it during lunch and write it after lunch.” That’s just procrastination. Not planning.
The same is true for you and your business. You can plan all you want but it’s not until you pick up your hammer and chisel and take a few whacks at the rock that you can even begin to understand the type of business you’re getting into.
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