Question time: Have you ever wanted to start doing something, but you hold back because you want to ‘do it right’? So you spend endless time figuring out the perfect way to go about it that you end up never doing it. There’s a saying that goes “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” I always took that to mean: stumbling through something is better than never trying in the first place. Action of any kind is often better than no action at all. I have a problem myself where I’ll read excessively about something because I want to ‘do it right’, but I end up not doing anything at all. Experience with something is often better than reading about it. That’s not to say reading about something isn’t useful, but knowledge without action doesn’t get you anywhere.
Often, it is required to become like a little kid again. When learning to walk, children always stumble and fall on their first step. It might help to remember that when you get frustrated. Remember that stumbling through failure is the way to success. You won’t get it right the first time and that’s okay, you can learn from it and do better next time.
The action doesn’t have to be much. If you want to write a book (or a blog post), the only action you have to commit to is writing down a single sentence every day. Just write something. You might be thinking, “How could that possibly work, writing a book would take forever that way!” And you’re right. The thing is, some days you might just write that one sentence, but what often happens is you’ll end up writing a lot more once you actually sit down to write. The small action of writing that one sentence has a domino effect. Often, the first step is the hardest one. If you have a hard time keeping your space clean, commit to just picking up one thing and putting it where it goes. That’s it, just the one. If you want to do more, you can, but just do that one thing. You just might find you get some momentum to keep going. But if you just do that one, small action, don’t beat yourself up for not doing more. This is key. If you just commit to the one thing, don’t berate yourself for just doing that one thing. That can sabotage the whole thing, because then you’ll think you have to do a lot more before you even start, so you won’t want to start at all. Commit to the one small action, then allow yourself to just do that one small thing.
I have an example story about this. I had started learning to dance and had been taking lessons for about a month. This alone was a tremendous step for me, but that’s not the point of this story. My teacher told me I was ready to go out social dancing, she felt I would be fine going out and leading girls through some dances. The idea terrified me, but going out social dancing was the reason I wanted to learn to dance in the first place. She told me of a place I could go and I decided I’d give it a try. Here’s how I went about it. I promised myself that all I had to do was show up. That’s it. If my anxiety was through the roof, I would allow myself to leave. No being hard on myself. I didn’t have to ask any girls to dance, I didn’t have to spend an hour there, or all night. All I had to do was show up and see what it was like.
Even with those stipulations, my anxiety was terrible. It’s one of the times I’ve used cold showers to help calm my anxiety before I went out. I went to this dance hall with full intentions to just leave as soon as I walked in the door. But do you know what happened?
I had a blast.
I won’t say I didn’t have any anxiety, but it was far less than I had before I went. I asked girls to dance and was even asked to dance by some girls. Did I do it perfectly? Of course not, I stumbled my way through it, but had a lot of fun overall. Nothing you do will be perfect, but you can’t get to where you want to be without taking action.
That night showed me what was possible for me to do. I did something I thought I’d never be able to do. I’ve learned over and over that I’m wrong about what I can do. In order to see that, though, I had to take action. Learning to dance started with a small action: I signed up for a dance lesson. I told myself I just had to see what it was like, I could even leave if it was too much. (See a pattern here?)
Often, we think we need to make big, huge decisions to change our lives, but it’s the small choices that end up making the biggest impact. Self-improvement is just a series of making small choices. Taking that first lesson was a small, simple action that changed the course of my life.
Write a sentence. Learn a phrase in a foreign language. Go for a walk. Put a dollar in a savings account. Smile at someone. Eat a vegetable with lunch. Take action towards your goals. It doesn’t have to be anything grand. Start small.
What’s a small action you can stumble through today? Take it, you might be surprised at what happens.
It might just change your life.