All set? Ready to start? 

When will you be ready to start? Uh? Start what?? Your new exercise routine … your new diet … your new habit … your new website … your new Facebook page … your new product … your new product line! … your new business!! … your new ebook … your new … anything! Take a leaf out of Richard Branson’s book and just do it!

We all (okay, 95% of us or more) hesitate before starting. Before starting anything. And that’s good. It’s sensible to hold back and make sure you’ve got your stuff together before starting out. If you were at Everest base camp with a team of other climbers and you were just about to start and one of them said “Hey wait, I just wanna go through my checklist … I want to make sure I have everything in my backpack … and make sure I know the exact route we’re taking … and, well I wanna check everything … won’t take long”, you wouldn’t say “Ah, to hell with that, let’s just kick off and see where it takes us, everything’ll be okay”. Because that would be a really stupid comment in those circumstances, right? Of course you have to make sure you’re prepared, and starting out to climb Everest would be a huge commitment so you could be forgiven for checking your stuff a few times. In fact, in those circumstances, only a fool wouldn’t check and re-check everything.

But in everyday life starting out on lots of things feels a bit like starting out from Everest base camp. You’re faced with a long climb … you know it’s going to be tough … you know people have failed trying this … and you feel like it’s a BIG THING. Of course you feel that way, I totally understand that. But at some stage you just have to just buckle up and start climbing!

Jeff Walker warns against procrastination

I just watched a great (and very short) video by Jeff Walker, who is a great online marketer, and he made this point really well. As he said, his early videos were terrible. His first website was junk. His first email campaign was shockingly bad. He was failing all the time. And he’s checked back over the early work of other high achievers in online marketing and theirs were the same … terrible! But you know what? They did it anyway. That’s the key thing. They didn’t keep holding back for ever and doing nothing, they made a start. They took action. And they learned on the way.

Jeff  himself is a great learner. He likes to take everything apart and find out how it works. He’s had to temper that urge to learn with taking action at the same time, so he’s moving forward while he’s learning. He still feels the need to learn how everything works, but he doesn’t let it hold him back. He’s moving forward all the time. Relentlessly.

And that’s the key to success. Taking action. Making things happen. And sure, you’ll fail. You’ll make mistakes. Your first website might be awful, your diet might be a disaster, your ebook might be laughably bad, but you’ll be learning how to do things better and you’ll be moving forward. You wanna be successful? Learn to fail, and move on!

Michael Jordan knew this works. Here’s a great quote from him:

He failed again and again, and that’s why he was such a success. Sounds like a contradiction but the two, strangely, go well together. Remember, every little kid stumbles and falls when he or she is learning to walk, but they’re too unselfconscious to care or worry about failing. So they just get up and try again … and again … and again.

Stumble and fall … and get up again

If a parent told a child to stop trying because he kept falling you’d think that he was a terrible parent, and Social Services needed a call. Because everyone knows you have to fail, again and again, before you can learn to walk. The sad thing is, as we get older, we start to worry about failing, as though it’s a terrible insult to our intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth!

The smartest kid in the class is the one who keeps raising his hand and asking questions. Other kids might laugh at him because he doesn’t know the answers already, but I’m willing to bet that twenty years down the line that kid will be more successful that all the others, and probably worth more financially that them all put together. Because his attitude is brave; he’s unafraid to appear stupid, or unsure of himself, and he’s always moving forward.

I was watching a clip of George Formby the other day (yeah okay, I’m that old!), and it was of him appearing on TV, must’ve been in the Fifties I think. And he explained how he left school at seven years of age to be apprenticed as a jockey, and consequently never learned to read and write properly. He eventually became world famous for his music and comedy but he never learned to read music either. Or even retune his banjo or ukulele. He said different songs needed to be in a different key, and he always made sure had several instruments he could grab, each one tuned to a different key, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to play.

Did he let his inability to read and write, or to understand written music, or to retune an instrument hold him back? Hardly! His early efforts on stage were a nightmare, a complete flop, but he carried on to to become one of the biggest stars in the world. He even turned down offers from Hollywood, preferring to stay home so he could entertain the troops in Europe. When he died over 150,000 mourners lined the streets to pay tribute. Failing didn’t do him any harm, it helped him succeed and become one the most loved entertainers in the world.

Richard Branson doesn’t mess about!

When Richard Branson had an idea that he’d like to run an airline, everyone warned him off. They told him he didn’t know the slightest thing about running an airline, that he’d be competing with some of the best run and longest established aviation companies in the world, that this was entirely different from anything he’d previously attampted, and they kept hitting him with all kinds of reasons why this was a really, really bad idea. Sure, he’d made a big splash in the business world, and yes, he was amazingly successful in lots of diverse ventures, but they argued that this was just going too far. This was just one idea that was destined for failure, and probably on a monumental scale.

He listened to what they had to say, but he stuck to his guns. His response: “Screw it, let’s do it”, and he went on to create Virgin Atlantic, which challenged British Airways and the other ‘big boys’ of the aviation world, and his airline proved to be more than up for the challenge, it became a force to be reckoned with. Oh, and he’s now well on the way to pioneering a commercial space venture!

Mr Branson knew he might fail. Did that stop him? Of course not, because he believed in his idea and he was prepared to give it a shot. He was even prepared to handle the possiblilty it might become a huge failure. But he went ahead anyway. In other words, he took action. And he had the determination to stick with it as long as it might take.

We all need to learn from this, me as much as anyone else. Don’t be frightened of failure. You will fail, so you might just as well accept that. It’s inevitable. Just like a kid learning to walk, you will fail and you’ll fall down and you’ll graze your knees. It will hurt, and you’ll end up crying. And it will happen more than once, maybe many times. But it won’t kill you. Failure isn’t fatal. It’s a stepping stone to success. If you don’t try, if you don’t actually do something, i.e. take action … that’s failure.

Procrastination is the killer of dreams

Ah, but if you do … if you grit your teeth and actually get on with it … you won’t be looking back years from now and kicking yourself for not taking action on your ideas, you’ll be reaping the rewards of being determined enough to take that big scary leap in the dark and move forward. 

Is there a lesson in all this? Sure there is! And it’s a simple one. You will fail. Of course you will. But those early failures will pave the way for success, and they’ll be long forgotten when you eventually do achieve your goals. So take heart, and take a few deep breaths … and take action!