The First 90, the Last 10
The journey from couch to marathon doesn’t start with finding the optimal timing for your PowerBar chews or deciding whether to use band-aids or BodyGlide on your nipples. Those are problems you encounter in the last 10% of that journey. The first 90% is just a whole shitload of running.
The path from stick figures to beautiful portrait painting doesn’t start by agonizing between hog-bristle and synthetic brushes. The first 90% of that journey is just trying to draw eyes that don’t look weird. Brush materials are a last 10% problem.
Purchasing a sous-vide machine and a pound of white truffles off the internet doesn’t make you a chef. The first 90% of that journey is a lot of washing dishes and peeling shallots. There are years of that before you get to fully understand what to do with an ingredient like truffles.
There are plenty of lists, tips, and secrets-of-the-pros for that thing you’re working on. But the path to success is paved mostly with stuff people stopped writing lists about a long time ago. 90% of any new adventure is not newsworthy or shareable. We know this. It’s why we spend so much time looking for hacks. We’re hoping people can report back from the last 10, telling us how to skip the first 90.
But it doesn’t seem to work that way. Focusing on the last 10 before you do the first 90 is a form of procrastination. If you’re truly committed to your new venture, the things you should be working on are often the most obvious and unspectacular.