What’s holding you back? Too old? No skills? No money? No breaks? Are you waiting and waiting for that ‘perfect’ time to take action? The planets to align? Someone else tells you to do something? Sometimes the bare minimum is really all it takes to get started. ALL journeys begin with a first step. What are you afraid of? Fear isn’t a ‘thing’ it isn’t something tangible or omnipresent…it lives in the dark back corner of our minds. What might be a terrorizing thought for one person may be commonplace and trite to another. Heights, snakes, confined spaces, speaking in public – there is a list a mile long of all the fears that people have. But they exist usually as either the result of a past experience or simply a product of our imagination we use to conjure something that may or may not even exist. Bottom line is: You will never know what the possible outcome will be if you aren’t willing to take that first step.
One of the greatest baseball players of all time was Babe Ruth known for his number of homeruns. But he also held the record for striking out. It simply comes down to averages. The longer you play, the more you stand to win.
I remember when I first got in to flying remote controlled airplanes and I was trying to learn all I could from a flying enthusiast friend of mine. He had been building and flying planes for several years. One day, we were a the parking lot and I was watching him fly around. At some point, another guy walked up and was watching the noisy plane zip and twist above the empty parking lot. Then it happened…a nose dive in to the concrete. The new spectator quickly said “Ha ha you crashed!” (I’m not sure what made that funny…but whatever) and almost as if he had expected someone to react, my friend said “No, that wasn’t a crash…it was an uncontrolled landing”. Without getting in to the actual definition of a “landing” – The situation had not turned out the way it had been planned, envisioned and previously experienced, but he was clearly not interested in calling it a “crash”. How many times are quick to label things as a “failure” when they don’t go as expected? Despite the hours, money or hope that was put in to something, when it ends in an “uncontrolled” fashion, it is easy to quickly say it was a failure rather than a learning step.
An inventor friend that I had met at a young age used to tell me over and again “I love to make mistake, because that means I am one step closer to getting it right” Interesting. Welcoming mistakes in order to perfect something. Big things that seem to be perfect weren’t always that way – they had to be proven, experienced and honed by doing it another way.
Don’t wait for everything to be perfect to start your journey. Sometimes the perfect “move” is to do just that…MOVE!