How to start

Dave Irwin
Aug 9, 2017 · 5 min read

I have been listening to a lot of self-development books over the last year but now they are starting to blend into one another. At the start of August I decided I had enough of passively listening to motivational self-dev books without applying any of the lesson they proposed to my actual life. So I started a marketing and design business, subjects that I am passionate. I have wanted to have my own business since I was 14 years old, kicking ideas around with my friends about what we could do. We came up with a skate company that sold skateboards online, called it BM-Angoed with which we could fund our ever increasing skating costs. That never happened. No excuses, we were just lazy teens. None of us even had a computer, never mind access to the internet or any idea how to actually make a skateboard. We thought we would have to do everything ourselves. Blew up the process until we convinced ourselves it was impossible. We stalled before we even started. Over fifteen years later and I was still using the same excuses to myself for why I had not followed through on any of the plans. After spending the year listening to Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Robbins, Chris Guillebeau and Patrick J. McGinnis, I decided to throw out the excuses and just start. Of course, while my decision may seem intuitive, it really wasn’t. After a veritable lifetime of telling myself that starting anything is a waste of time, starting wasn’t easy.

I needed to face my fear

I had to admit to myself that I was afraid to start something new. One of the biggest and scariest decisions I have ever made was moving to Canada. I remember making the decision on my 28th birthday. I knew that I didn’t want to be in the same situation when I turned 30 so that settled it for me. I was going to make a change. Hitting 28 made me look at the fear I had been living with in my 20s. I weighed up the pros and cons of leaving and decided that the cons were not as bad as I thought they would be. The main reason I had not emmigrated was due to fear. Fear that I would fail. Fear that all of my friend and my family would find out how I had failed. Fear I would have to return to the same situation I had endeavoured; With the added knowledge that this time there was no escape. I allowed fear to control my life. It was the same with starting a business. I didn’t think that I was good enough to do anything. I thought that my family and friends would ridicule me if I didn’t make a business successful immediately.

Make a plan

One I recognised the fear mindset and resolved to confront I came up with a plan. Some people will tell you to leap in head first. Just Do It. I can’t guarantee this is true for everyone but I think people who live by that mantra win a Darwin award more often than not. I have no problem with the mantra itself but I like to apply it to a specific set of instructions to complete anything. I think most successful people do this. Having a plan of action that I can execute is the fastest way to make progress on my goals. I can make it as intricate as an hour by hour, step by step development plan, depending on what I want to get done. I like to map out my path towards success. Passing goals along the way is a great motivator to keep abreast of progress. It also has the added benefit of being the start of my quest so technically setting the plan of action is the first step in starting anything. Congratulations, I just tricked myself into starting. After I’ve have made your plan, it’s a good idea to summarise it into simple categories. Give these categories deadlines and display them somewhere prominent where I will see them everyday. When one criteria is reached, cross it out as a visible reminder of everything I have accomplished so far. This moves the marker closer to the goal, is a visual queue to keep me motivated towards the end goal.

Execute — Baby Steps

Okay, so planning was the first step but I don't want to cheap out and never get any progress towards my goal, spinning in the project planning phase forever. First I look at the plan I have just made. I break step one down into it’s simplest components, this could be a as simple as setting up a social media account or checking your local government site for information on starting a small business. When I started my business it was researching the registering of a domain. I hopped around for a long time on domain registry sites, wondering which one would be the best place to go to get the domain I wanted. This became tedious with all of the choices available to me. Information overload. Once I realised that it didn’t matter to me where I registered I decided on google because I already had an account with them. Once the domain was registered I knew I needed a site to sit on it. Well that meant I needed to find a hosting company and the list of action to take sort of took off. Building the site. Setting up dedicated email. Opening social media accounts. All of these may seem like superfluous steps but they allowed me to take small, incremental steps towards my goal. I am now done with my first week and I can’t believe my progress. I am moving onto step 3 which means I have successfully started and you can too.

Jedi Mind-Trick

A lot of the self-development books I read mention one mental-motivation trick. The idea that you just make one small step towards a goal and this will inform the next steps. The five minute rule. The idea is that if something seems daunting and you don't know where to start, give yourself an arbitrary time limit and complete as tiny part of it, giving you the motivation to continue. Often in the books a metaphor of a messy room is given. You don’t want to clean it and the job seems insurmountable at the start but if you just tidy for five minutes your inner OCD will take over and soon you will be cleaning the room in earnest. I guess that's the essence of how you start. Give yourself tiny, achievable goals and let it snowball.

Dave Irwin

Written by

Designer @ davidirwindesign.com | Graphic Design | Writer | Marketing

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