It is a long weekend for us in Canada and the US. I hope you found time to relax, to recharge, and to connect with family or friends. Reconnecting with others and with yourself is crucial to living a glorious life. Don’t deprive yourself of that; life is too short.
This week I thought a lot about how so many people struggle with doing hard stuff. I have been there. While it is still a struggle (and I think that it’s supposed to be!), I have gotten a lot better at it.
Here are some thoughts around it.
Have a great week!
On launching something hard.
Yet another great article by a literal rocket scientist, Ozan Varol. In this article, Ozan talks about the difficulty involved in getting a new project off the ground. Any time that you are trying to do something new, something that is outside your domain of established expertise, something that is forcing you to stretch and grow — it is going to feel slow.
For people that are accustomed to being high-performers, having to go slow is hard. To add to the challenge, since it is something new you are trying out, you are almost certainly going to suck at it. Which is an immense blow to your ego.
But the only way forward is to start, to suck at it, to try, to get frustrated, to learn, and to keep consistently trying. Over and over. You need to set aside your pride and be ready to embarrass yourself.
I recently read something from James Clear that relates to this idea. James noted that “Whether or not something is deemed a ‘failure’ is dependent on when performance is measured”. His point is that when it feels like you may be failing, you are actually “in the middle of succeeding”. You just aren’t considering it on the right scale of time.
I encourage you to take the longer-term view, to stretch yourself by trying something new, and to embrace the fact that you suck at it. Keep doing it anyway for some time. And understand that you are actually in the middle of succeeding.
Need help figuring out how to launch something great? I help high-performers rediscover joy in their work, allowing them to soar to even greater heights. Book a FREE call with me to learn more.
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How to prepare yourself to tackle something new.
Once you have decided that you are ready to take on a new challenge, to create something great, to push yourself beyond your current abilities, where do you even start?
Below is a simple framework that you can use.
- Mindset. What is the story that you can tell yourself about this project, to position you for the most success? This is likely one of the most critical elements. You need to convince yourself that you are doing this for a meaningful reason. You also need to tell yourself that you likely will have limited success for some time while you develop your skills. Figure out how you need to adjust your mindset to allow for success.
- Learn. What are the key skills that you need to learn for the project to be successful? Ask yourself where and how you might go about developing those skills. While doing this, ensure that you are not using your learning as a tool to permit procrastination. The best way to learn is by doing and failing, so take care not to put so much of your time into learning that you are putting off working on the project.
- Ask for help. This ties to the point above about the need to learn and develop your skills. Who can you ask to help you? Don’t tackle everything yourself; have the humility to admit that you don’t know what you are doing, and to reach out to others that you.
- Get creative. By definition, undertaking a tough project is hard. Spend some time generating novel ideas, tapping into your creative energies. I love using mind-mapping tools for this, but a pen and paper will do the trick too. The key is to not censor yourself. Let your imagination run wild and note any ideas that you have about how you might go about tackling this project, without worrying about how practical these ideas might actually be.
- Get uncomfortable. Start working on the project. And get used to feeling that it is hard, that you don’t know what the heck you are doing. Do it anyway. Make yourself mildly uncomfortable every single day. Just a little progress on the project consistently is the best way forward.
I can almost guarantee that you will struggle to start. You will tell yourself that you will “do it tomorrow”, because you don’t have the energy or time today. While there may be some truth to your constraints, the truth is that the reason you aren’t starting right now is because you are scared.
The anxiety you feel is nothing more than creative potential, begging to be brought forth into the world. Recognize the anxiety for what it is and use it as fuel to power your actions.
Starting is the hardest part. Once you get started, you will find that you are so glad that you did the work to advance on your project. Especially because it was hard for you, as that means you are building upon your definition of who you are and what you are capable of achieving.
Quotation I am pondering
I find this to be so true. Motivation, willpower, and energy are finite resources. But if you can learn how to generate more of these precious resources and then direct them towards your goals, you become unstoppable.
How do you motivate yourself? This is such a crucial question to reflect on.
Journal Prompt
The fact of the matter is that change is hard. You adopted your identity, your very definition of who you are, based on all the experiences that you have had in your life. That makes change so incredibly hard.
You literally need to discard who you were to become who you could be.
As scary as that may be, it is also incredibly liberating. You can become whatever you wish to become.
