On beginnings

Read time: 6 minutes

We know we want to start our journey.

We have decided enough is enough, today is the day we are starting on our path towards becoming who we deeply want to become.

But… where do we start in our beginnings?

Planning

As I’ve said in this blog post, planning is kind of important in any project.

Before we start, we need a plan of action, a way of getting from point A to point B.

We need to create a strategy for us to execute intentionally, to set milestones, to divide our workload into simple enough chunks.

The planning phase is extremely important because if we don’t know where we want to go, we will aimlessly wonder around in life and never get anywhere, instead of spending a day, week, or even a few months to deeply think about where we want to channel our energy.

Getting our hands dirty

Mike Tyson famously said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

Sure, we can spend weeks upon weeks deeply thinking about where we would like to go and how, but the truth is: Your plan is incorrect, no matter how much time you spend on it. It is not useless, just incorrect.

We dwell on living inside our minds, spending as much energy as possible planning, but when we go into the real world, we soon realize that no plan stands in the face of real life.

Real life is messy, unexpected stuff happens. Certain people, events or things might not work out as you expected and simply put, you are very likely to go on a completely different path than the one you set out at the begging.

That is by no means a bad thing.

Remember: What we wanted is to get from point A to point B.

How we arrive to the top of the mountain doesn’t matter if what we truly want is to get to that peak of the mountain.

Now, when we get a taste of the real world, when we actually put our plan into action, we might realize something incredible: We might not want to go where we first set out to go.

Adjusting

In the startup world, it is said that we ought to “fail fast & fail often“.

It means we shouldn’t strive for perfection, at least not when first attempt to work on a project, but rather just plan things out and act them in the real world & see what happens.

In almost all cases, our plan will be different from the real world… and from our inner world.

It’s highly likely that we not only need to ask ourselves if the plan still holds up, but we will also ask ourselves if this is the way we actually want to go.

Say we’ve always wanted to sing and now we decide we’ll give it a try.

We think we want to sing, we make a plan, act on it and after a few weeks we realize we hate the act of doing weird rhythmic sounds in order to warm up.

There’s nothing wrong with getting here… The important part is that we got here fast, we didn’t end up wasting too much time preparing, or spent years practicing.

We got our feet wet as soon as possible, we learnt what this is REALLY about and then we changed to meet whatever outer or inner needs we have.