Perhaps too there are a few things on your list that have been sitting there, gnawing at you, forever, but just seem like to big a deal to get going on. You never seem to have enough time, enough energy, or enough who-knows-what to sit down and start working on them. A lot of advice about motivation and reaching your goals applies more to the middle part of a project, where you’ve burned up all your initial enthusiasm ad now have to go through the daily routine of moving it forward to completion. But getting started can be just as hard, and even harder — especially when you’re looking at something that will make a major change in your life, like starting a business or writing a novel. Here are ten things that keep us from getting started, and some suggestions about how to deal with each. We live in a “Just Do It!” society, where the inability to get started is often seen as a moral failure — as laziness or stupidity. The danger of this is that when we find ourselves unable to get started on a project, we assume that it’s because something is wrong with us, and either give up or make excuses to protect our sense of self. To get going when money is tight, you need to address both the financial situation and the attention it steals from you. Tim Ferriss and Guy Kawasaki both have some interesting ideas about “bootstrapping”, getting a business going using minimal resources and re-investing early returns to help the business grow. The idea is to make your ventures pay for themselves. Consider if there are ways of making money from your project, or of starting with little investment. Another option is a trade-off — finding expenses you can cut out to pay for your new project. If a financial investment is absolutely necessary, you’ll need to practice frugality to make ends meet. But for most projects, it’s not the money we need to spend on them that’s an issue, it’s the need to work and the worries over money that steal our time and energy, making it difficult to focus on a new project — especially one that doesn’t have any immediate financial return. Time management and focus are what’s needed. Just as a financial trade-off might be needed, a time trade-off is in order. Consider things you do that could be sacrificed for your new project — an hour of TV watching swapped for an hour of writing, for example. Make the same trade-off with your attention — just as your TV watching is a way of relaxing and escaping the day-to-day worries about money, let your passion make your new project an escape. This is the trickiest issue on this list, because it’s so hard to wrap our heads around. Visualization might help — imagine your life after, the good things and the bad things that might happen if you complete your big project, and rework your plan to minimize the bad things. Rationally, we know most of the bad things won’t come about, but this is not really a rational fear, so knowing that doesn’t help. Instead, you need to reassure your irrational self that you’re taking measure to make sure the bad stuff can be avoided. The reality is, moral failure usually has nothing to do with our inability to get a project off the ground. But because we’ve learned to see inability in moral terms, we rarely look clearly at what exactly we need to do to fix the things holding us back. Don’t fall into this trap. If you’ve been planning something that you just can’t seem to get moving, ask if one of the above problems applies to you, and fix it. Or, if you’re getting ready to start your planning, keep them in mind and make sure to consider all of them in the creation of your plan. Don’t put yourself into the situations above in the first place.
