How often do I wait to do something because I'm not quite ready, yet. How frequently do I pause, because I'm afraid that I'll make a mistake.
Even if I've thought something through, deconstructed, planned for every last contingency, how often will I wait just one more day, hour, minute, with the hope that I'll discover that one last thing that I hadn't yet considered so that my plans will be crash-proof.
This is just plain and simple fear. The paralysis of analysis. Sometimes I'm so afraid of screwing-up, looking stupid, appearing unprepared that I freeze at the switch, and do nothing! Ergo, train wreck.
One of the hardest things to teach smart people is that they learn more by making a mistake than they'll ever learn by doing it right. You learn more when you swing and miss, than you do when you hit a dinger.
In my old job, one of my most important responsibilities I had was to drive productivity. Nothing stands more in the path of that drive than the inactivity of over-planning. Think for a minute how many of our endeavors actually run according to plan: All, Most, A few or None? In my experience, None. The best plans never run to course. Something always happens requiring a change of plans, or a decision on the fly.
This is not to say that you shouldn't plan and blindly, rashly relive The Charge of The Light Brigade. It is to say: gather your info, plan for what could go wrong, solve for those problems, AND GO!
This is particularly true for us. Follow this. Our careers and family lives get tossed into the wood chipper (big Problems); deconstruct (what skills do I have that I can still use, how can I be more affectionate with my spouse, kids, what do I need to learn--smaller parts of big problems (sorry I left out those question marks); then, make a big hairy plan (I'm going to build 5 websites-I'll start with one) AND DO IT, NOW!
Psst, Colin. You don't even know how to use the email function on your computer! (Oops! you're right.) But if I don't start, I'll never get it built--Guess I'll have to make a bunch of mistakes, then I'll fix them.
STEP # 7 Just Get Going, and Make a Bunch of Mistakes!
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