A Start > A Solution

#116

Friend,

I know you’ve been frozen and unsure of what to do. Climbing this mountain in front of you is overwhelming.

And you don’t want to get it wrong. It’s too important to mess up, so you are trying to figure it out, trying to see things that can’t be seen, anticipating infinite possible contingencies, and all that is too much.

So you are doing nothing.

You don’t need a solution. You need a start.

You’ve heard it before: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” The key is not to figure everything out (you can’t possibly know everything anyway), but to start moving in the right direction.

It reminds me of an antidote from James Clear's book Atomic Habits, in which he tells the story of a guy who wants to start exercising. The first day all he did was get his shoes out and put them by the door. The next day, he put them on. The next day, he drove to the gym. And it built from there.

So today, don’t try to find the whole solution, find the place to start. It’s like trying to solve the corn maze from the outside. You have to enter the maze to begin to see it up close anyway.

In this instance, I invite you to take the advice of the Regional Manager of Dunder Mifflin, Michael Scott, “Sometimes I’ll start a sentence and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I find it along the way.” Sometimes you will.

Love,

Aaron