This week's book: "Start" by Jon Acuff.
"You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great."
Zig Ziglar
Feeling stuck? Who hasn't been.
One of my favorite chapters in this week's book is chapter three, What to Expect When You're Starting. It's a wake-up call for anyone who's felt that way, and I'll admit I read it twice, then listened to the audiobook on top of that.
I love Acuff's honesty. He doesn’t pretend that starting something meaningful will be glamorous. You have to learn, make mistakes, build the skill, and earn your progress one step at a time. There's no version where you skip ahead to the good part, i.e. the reward.
He points to two things that stop most of us before we even begin. Entitlement and fear.
Entitlement says we deserve success before we've done the work. I know that voice. A few times in my life I tried to skip the hard part and jump straight to the reward. I can tell you it never once worked. The work isn't in the way of the result. The work is the result. The reward follows.
Fear is the opposite. Fear says don't start, because you might fail. I let that one have its fair share of wins too. What changed is when I stopped seeing fear as a reason to stop and started seeing it as a reason to move forward. Proof I was attempting something that mattered. Now when I feel it, I take it as a signal I'm in the right place, not the wrong one. And I’ll tell you what else, a higher fear factor could mean that what you are starting matters even more.
Looking back, every meaningful opportunity of my life asked me to move before I knew how it would turn out. I never had a perfect plan, even though I thought they were all perfect. I just came to trust that if I kept learning, working, and adapting, I'd find my way. And the path almost always changed along the way. All Star Mentors is changing from the original plan. And, I dare say, getting better all the time.
One thing to try today
Name the one thing you've been putting off, and ask yourself honestly which voice is stopping you. Is it entitlement, waiting to be handed the reward before doing the work? Or fear, telling you not to start because you might fail? Name it and write it down. Then take one small step before the voice talks you out of it.
Which of the two tends to influence you more, entitlement or fear? Hit reply, I read every one.
I'll go first: fear, almost every time. (I’ve never really felt entitled to anything.) I've never once felt 100% ready for anything worth doing, including this. I've just learned that momentum has a way of silencing fear.
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Talk tomorrow,
Mike
Practical wisdom for the life you're building