Don’t Start With Why

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You’ve been lead astray for years by the personal development / business development community.

“Start with WHY!” they say.

“Know your vision!”

“Work towards your big dream!”

And in response, so many people stick their gaze firmly in their navel—and leave it there. They spend years trying to figure out what their Great Work is, while staying in jobs, businesses, lives that don’t serve them.

It’s not that these statements are wrong.

There’s nothing like the feeling of being completely aligned with your Great Work. It’s awesome and amazing.

And it’s also completely unnecessary to success.

The Myth of The One Thing

How long have you been trying to define your vision? To figure out your Great Work? How has not having these answers held you back?

The fact is—clarity comes AFTER action, not before.

You’re never going to find your Great Work without going out and doing a bunch of things.

Worse, if you don’t develop a bias for action NOW, when you do find your Great Work you’re going to find it almost impossible to engage in—not just because of the finances—but also because of the momentum you need to build.

We throw the word “momentum” around a lot—but let’s get super clear on this. By definition, momentum doesn’t begin where it ends. You don’t jump straight to the avalanche, to the tsunami.

Everything starts with the smallest of actions.

Whether you’re in a place of having no idea what your Great Work is, whether you have a hunch that you’re following, or whether you’ve had the breakthrough and you know where you’re going with it—the answer is simple:

Start Small.

I know, right? Totally the opposite of everything you’ve heard.

You’re told to take massive action, to dream big, to have a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Go big or go home! Be a BAWS!

And yet, the vast majority of success I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a lot—both personally and through study. This is a topic I’ve spent my entire life researching.) has started with small actions. Often, those actions are taken with absolutely no idea of where the momentum is heading.

Oh sure, retrospectively, we all like to pretend it was intentional.

“I knew exactly what I was doing from the moment I laid my foot on the path!”

To be fair, sometimes it feels that way. When you get to that point of “success”, you’ve been engaged in The Work for so long, it’s hard to remember how you felt the day you started.

If you could travel back in time and watch so many of your heroes when they took that first step on the path you’d realise:

They stepped into the abyss.

They knew they wanted something but they didn’t know exactly what.

They didn’t have their “why” yet. They weren’t sure of the vision.

Rather than sit around and think about it, they took a step. They did A THING, instead of worrying about “The Thing”.

They made a call. They wrote a sentence. They took a small step that eventually snowballed into something huge.

Success isn’t a single action. It’s the cumulative effect of hundreds of small steps.

The imperfect small step taken today is more effective than the perfect small step being taken tomorrow.

In the Beginning…

In November this year, I’ll have been running my business for 10 years. It’s only in the last 9 months that I’ve figured out what I want to be when I grow up.

It’s driven me crazy for a decade. I’ve been looking for it the whole time. But I haven’t allowed the search for it to stop me from doing things.

My Great Work wasn’t a sudden epiphany. It came out of me getting fed up with not having the answer. So I committed to figuring out the answer by DOING things.

I supported Everclear’s crowdfunding campaign for their latest album and had the opportunity to meet one of my teenage heroes.

I became a patron to Amanda Palmer on Patreon so that I could support the work of someone whose art I really respect.

While we were in the US in April, we made a detour to Vegas for the weekend to celebrate my birthday and met a bunch of really cool people which gave me some massive breakthroughs.

All of these things were crucial elements in giving me the direction I needed.

However, no one of them alone would have gotten me there.

Perhaps more importantly—every single one of them was only possible due to having way more money in the bank account than I would have if I’d been in a day job.

You see, I haven’t waited for clarity around my Great Work to create a business that makes good money.

If I had, I would never have gained said clarity.

I’ve taken so many “wrong” small steps over the years.

I’ve engaged in work that wasn’t worthy of me. I’ve engaged in work that didn’t bring me alive. I’ve taken clients on and helped them because I needed the money. I’ve stuck my head in the sand around things I needed to deal with. I’ve hired people who lacked integrity.

If there’s a mistake that could be made, I’ve made it. I’ve paid the price for all of them.

But every step, wrong or otherwise, has led me to this point.

So in that way, every step has been right.

And they were so tiny in the beginning.

Signing up to a freelancing website. Applying for a job on Guru. Writing an article for $45.

I knew the steps would lead somewhere. I just had no idea where.

Where Are You Going?

You’re trying to peek at the end of the story. You want to know that everything is going to be okay. You want to know how it’s going to turn out before you start.

But life doesn’t work that way.

The clarity, the certainty, the success—they all come AFTER the leap.

If you want them, you have to have the courage to step out into the abyss, and the sanity to do it in a small way. 

You don’t have to sell the house. You don’t need to invest your life savings. The big, grand gestures are rarely the ones that pay off.

Take the small step. The small action. Do the small thing.

Keep doing them.

Keep getting better at them.

And the rest will work itself out.

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