Starting is always the hardest part.
Meh. Agree to disagree.
There’s wisdom in the truism, sure, but it often leads to some real heartburn for those who, having started something, are now expecting things to get easier.
Starting is certainly a very hard part, some times more so than others. It’s undoubtedly the first hard part owing to it being the first point of contact with reality. That is to say, the first contact with accountability—and accountability is inherently risky.
But if you think of the work as a funnel or timeline, you’ll see that `starting` is further to the top than it gets credit for.
There’s all sorts of things left out of here, of course. Developing & maturing, simplifying & winnowing, and, of course, finishing well. Take a moment to note the very important qualifier: well.
This chart is grossly inaccurate. Yet it’s wholly realistic and anyone who has tried to do something hard can knowingly nod along to, complete with a wry been-there-done-that smirk on their face.
It applies to a host of things. Your new business idea. A romantic partnership. Investing for retirement. That big epic of features that was added to someone’s OKRs recently. Creating a new Substack. Oh, shit. 👀
A former mentor of mine would often say:
Stop starting, start finishing.
I’ve carried that mantra with me. It’s in our Engineering department’s Principles document, a page in our company’s wiki overflowing with aphorisms, mental models, and quips.
And while I agree one ought to maintain the right to ripcord the shit out of bad ideas, when you find someone doing so more often than otherwise, then there’s one of two explanations:
They don’t know how to go beyond the start
They don’t know how to effectively choose what to start
I’m tempted to dive into both of those rabbit holes, but let’s try to ease into this thing, shall we? Those can serve as good follow-up posts since, after all, I’ve got a lot more writing to do. It’d be a bit embarrassing to have done only the so called “hardest part” with a first post and nothing more, ya?
So, here we go, I’ve started. On to the hard parts.