Start Before You Feel Ready
There is a version of you that is waiting to feel ready. Ready to start the business, to write the first page, to make the call, to sign up for the thing. That version has been waiting a long time, and it will wait forever, because the feeling it is waiting for is not produced by waiting. It is produced by starting. Readiness is not a gate you pass through before the work. It is the residue the work leaves behind after you have done some of it badly.
What “Ready” Actually Means
When people say they are not ready, they usually mean one of three things. They do not feel confident, which is fair, because confidence comes from evidence and they have not generated any yet. They do not feel prepared, which is often true and almost never the real obstacle; most tasks reveal what preparation they needed only once begun. Or they are afraid, and “not ready” is a socially acceptable way of saying so. None of these is fixed by more waiting. All three are fixed, to a surprising degree, by the first clumsy attempt.
The First Attempt Is Supposed to Be Bad
Every skilled person you admire has a first attempt behind them that they would not show you. The first sales call was awkward. The first chapter was abandoned. The first workout was embarrassing. This is not a regrettable phase they suffered through; it is the mechanism. The bad first attempt is how you learn what the second attempt needs. Skipping it is not possible, only postponing it, and postponing it means postponing everything that comes after.
How to Start Anyway
Shrink the start
You do not need to be ready for the whole thing. You need to be ready for the next fifteen minutes, and you are. Open the document. Dial the number. Walk into the gym. The full task is intimidating; the first physical action almost never is.
Lower the standard for the first version
Decide in advance that the first version will be rough, and let it be. A rough draft that exists beats a perfect one that does not, by an infinite margin.
Set a date instead of a feeling
“When I feel ready” is not a date. Tuesday is. Choose Tuesday, tell someone, and begin on Tuesday regardless of how Tuesday feels.
Expect the fear to come along
It will not leave before you start. It will come with you, complaining, and it will get quieter about ten minutes in, once there is something to do besides listen to it.
What Happens Next
You start, it goes worse than you hoped and better than you feared, and you learn three things you could not have learned any other way. The second attempt is better. Around the fifth, a strange thing occurs: you notice you feel ready, and you realise the feeling arrived several attempts after it would have been useful, which is when it always arrives. It was never a precondition. It was a consequence, and you have been waiting on the wrong side of it.
Go
You will not feel ready. That is not a signal to wait; it is a description of what starting feels like for everyone. Shrink the first step, lower the bar for the first version, pick a date, and take the fear with you. Ready is on the other side of the start, not before it.
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The book itself — 40 laws in ten parts, 320 pages, each ending with The Work — is funded first on Kickstarter.