The Best Time to…
The best time to start something was a year ago. The second-best time is right now.
If you started a year ago, all the little scary things about new journeys would have worn themselves out by now. The dumb things you learned by trial and error will already be flushed out, and you already know good details about how to adapt to the situation. This is why experience is important. I am willing to bet it took a while for you to first stand up or talk or read. We are yet to see an infant compete at the NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB, or MLS level. The sooner we introduce concepts, the weirdest thing happens quickly. We start to learn. We begin to align ideas together. We conceptualize impossible things, and we create them. But the whole thing doesn’t happen overnight. It should have started a year or two or even a decade ago.
We are apex creatures after all. We have what any species on earth wishes it did better. Learn complex ideas and then be able to share it with others. Do you think for a minute your pet thinks about what a year from now looks like? They are probably concerned with the present moment and maybe a recent past experience. Even though our wonderful, yet sometime curse-like, ability to learn and understand is there, we give ourselves excuses. We end up delaying some of the best things about ourselves. The person we want become.
WE CHOOSE WHAT WE BECOME.
If you want to be an athlete, you live more like an athlete. You make choices around how you think an athlete would decide. If you fancy yourself a generous person, you make choices how a generous person would behave. You still choose. You can’t call yourself an artist if you never make art. It’s a joke like an illiterate reader. This person cannot exist long. If they read, they will become a reader. If they don’t, they will become less and less literate. It’s not about a good reader versus a bad reader. It’s the do and the do not of it. Just think Yoda, “Do or do not, there is no try.”
We often find we are convincing ourselves that we are not good enough. So therefore, we should quit now. Much like the Simpson’s saying, “Trying is the first step to failure. So why even try?” Hard things are hard for a reason. If it were easy to get six-pack abs, they we would all have them. But it is really easy to get fast food. It’s easy to overeat some foods over others. It’s easy to sit on the couch and watch television. It’s hard to go for it. It’s hard to constantly challenge yourself. No one wants to eat healthy. No one wants to study boring topics. We do these things so we can learn how to make the decisions we expect for ourselves next year. The decisions that “that person” we want to become is already doing. Then it’s easier.
That is the importance of right now. We look to what we want to see in ourselves and then do nothing to get closer to becoming that person. It’s literally insane to think this way. Get the embarrassing things out of the way early and often. Start small. Have the courage to look foolish and make one decision that type of person you want to be would make. Win or learn. Take the week and consider how good you can get at something if you continue to test yourself at it. A consistent one percent increase over the year is 37 times improved. You don’t even have to test every day, but you need to test more than you don’t. You need to do the thing more than you don’t do the thing; this is what the do-er does.
