You don’t have to be great to start …

“You don’t have to be great to start …
but you have to start, to be great” – Zig Ziglar.

I came across this quote today on a friend’s Facebook page. And it made me stop and think. This one quote, by Zig Ziglar, sums up one of the most important factors in success, in any area of your life. You have to make a start if you are to have any hope of achieving anything. If you don’t make that first move, your chances of success are literally zero. This is so blantantly obvious and yet so deceptively tricky to manage at the same time.

There are lots of factors to achieving success, and they’re all important. But this, above all else, is probably the most vital. You can have great dreams of achieving your ideal life, or any specific part of it, and you can create detailed plans and visualise your success in advance, down to the last detail. You can write your plans down, and say your affirmations till you’re blue in the face. You can vividly imagine achieving your success, and immerse yourself in the emotions that you’ll feel when it finally makes an appearance in your day-to-day reality. But if you don’t actually make a start … if you don’t actually take action … if you don’t take a deep breath and take a leap of faith and actually DO SOMETHING … then it’s all been for nothing.

I know this more than most. I’ve been blessed with very high intelligence (at least, as measured by IQ tests). I’ve been blessed with all kinds of skills and abilities. Some things that other people find really difficult to master, I’ve found easy. I can turn my hand to almost anything and see at least fairly respectable results, at the very least, and sometimes a hell of a lot more than that. But there have been many occasions when I’ve even shied away from making a start on something, for whatever reason, and, hardly surprisingly, failed to achieve anything whatsoever in that particular area.

Fear of failure?

Sometimes, I’m sure, it’s been due to a deep seated fear of failure. I’m acutely aware how easy it can be to to fail at something, and, being fairly good at all kinds of things, I suppose there’s always the fear that I might make a complete fool of myself by not making the grade. What a pathetic reason not to give it a go! Failure isn’t just an option, it’s mandatory. Without failure, you can hardly ever advance, in anything. In fact, not hitting the target and then making course corrections is exactly the way things work, by and large. It’s how progress is made. Simple as that.

Read Psycho Cybernetics, by Dr Maxwell Maltz, and you’ll be introduced to this mechanism in detail. As he points out, a spacecraft that sets out to make a Moon landing is just set on course towards the Moon, at first. Nobody could set out every mile and every foot of the journey in advance and hope for it to be a success. It just doesn’t work that way. There are way too many variables.

The craft is set on a course towards the Moon (well, towards the point in space where it’s been calculated the Moon will be when the craft arrives at that point) and every so often bearings are taken, and if it’s a few degrees off course a mid-course correction is made. A very short pulse on a little rocket engine nudges it back towards its destination. Then, later, another deviation is automatically detected and a further correction is made. This might happen literally dozens of times during the journey, perhaps even more. The craft zig-zags towards its destination, it doesn’t head there in a straight line. In other words, failure is built into the system! It’s a vital component. It’s expected, and it’s dealt with. Nothing to worry about.

Make progress … cybernetically

It’s the same with us. We make a start on something and, after a while, we notice things aren’t going exactly right. So we make a change (a mid-course correction, in effect), and we’re nudged back on track. Later on, it’ll happen again … and again. This is a continuous process. But being sensitive little souls, we sometimes take it personally if we realise we’re not precisely on target the whole time. The very thought of us not being in complete control, and completely on track all the time seems anathema to us. How ridiculous is that!

We should just accept it. That’s the way it works! That’s the way we learned to walk – falteringly, with lots of falling over (repeated ‘failures’) and lots of getting back up and trying again (mid-course corrections). We do it automatically as kids, without a second thought, but as adults we’re not so tough. The resilience of childhood, instead of getting stronger with time, seems to fade. We get sensitive! We ‘learn’ to worry over the outcome. We start fretting over what other people will think of us. We imagine the worst. We visualise failure, and its horrific consequences. And we visualise it in excruciating detail! We worry and fret and chat negatively to ourselves, until a negative outcome seems practically inevitable. And ultimately we talk ourselves out of even trying, or, if we’ve made a start, of continuing. And so we give up. Often before we’ve even begun.

I’m not alone in this. I’m not suffering some kind of rare psychological disorder. I’m willing to bet it rings a bell with you too, although I’d be surprised if your situation is actually as bad as mine. As I explained, I’ve always had very high expectations of myself, which is a perfect way to set yourself up for suffering from a fear of failure.

Fear of success?

Sometimes it’s not down to a fear of failure at all, but (astonishingly) a fear of success. We worry about what people will think of us if we become very successful. How will our friends feel if we suddenly become very wealthy? Will we still have friends? This is as crazy as the fear of failure! Who cares what people might think! Well, we do, strangely. We shouldn’t though. If your friends have a problem with you achieving success, then you have to ask yourself, were they ever really your friends? A real friend would be happy for you. A real friend would be supportive. If your ‘friends’ abandon you because you’ve made it big, maybe you’re better off without them! You haven’t lost any friends, just found out who your real friends are.

Paralysis by analysis

So it all comes down to fear. Whether fear of success, or fear of failure, it makes no difference. Fear stops us doing things we should just DO! Fear cripples us into inaction. Just as a phobic person instinctively, and mindlessly, panics at the very thought of his phobia, we mindlessly retreat into a state of rigid inaction. When we should be taking action, we’re taking cover! We over-think situations to the point where taking action seems almost impossible, and if we think that way long enough it actually becomes impossible.

We need to ditch all these silly ideas of what people might think, and how it might look if we fail (or if we succeed!). None of that matters. It’s completely irrelevant! The only thing that matters is that we have a go. We need to just take note of Zig Ziglar’s quote, and make a start. Who knows, we might be great after all! But maybe not … maybe we won’t be fantastically successful, but so what, we might do pretty well anyway.

Just do it!

But there’s one thing for sure: if we don’t make a start we definitely WON’T be great! That’s a fact, rock solid. As Michael Jordan said, “I’ve missed over 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Reminds me of another great saying:”You don’t have to get it right … you just have to get it going!“

Shia LaBeouf urging you to just do it!

Not sure if this is meant to be funny or motivational, but I guess that’s just another example of something not really being relevant. Whatever the intention, it might just be the one thing that gets you off you backside and DOING IT! And I’m all for that!