Starting the Right Way
The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits. We can never free ourselves from habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones. — Stephen Pressfield
I’m sorry, because you deserve more. This post and many that follow it are not going to be very meaty. Or refined. But I have something important I’m trying to build and on the cusp of my 30th year, I can no longer afford to build things the wrong way. I can no longer rely on the volatile propulsion of passion to move me forward. Everything in my life worth having must be built the right way — brick-by-brick, painstakingly.
Excitement is part of my DNA, for better or worse. When I get an idea in my head, the dream grows and I can see it as clearly as any tangible thing in my life. I call up my friends, my co-conspirators, and rally them around the plan. I go on unprovoked, impassioned monologues on a Tuesday at the dinner table as my wife quietly nods and surely thinks, “Crap. Here he goes again”. Many of my ideas have been abandoned half-finished. The next new and shiny thing comes along and grabs my attention and my energy. Excitement is a double-edged sword.
Unbridled enthusiasm will always be an integral part of the fabric of my personality, but I must continue learning to harness it and channel it into the things I truly want in life. It requires discipline and strategically setting up tiny systems of behavior that engineer momentum.
I have something I’m called to do outside the realm of my business career. With my closest friends, I often question and debate the meaning of all this — our life experiences, shared culture, art, sports, science, philosophy — and I want to invite you into that discussion if you feel called to explore it too. I’ve started things in the past — websites, podcasts, projects, etc. — and many of them did not end the way I wanted to. I want to change that. I need to change that. This is important to me and I’m more aware that my time to do it is not infinite, so I have to force (or trick) myself into doing it the right way.
As of now, we are at the beginning and that means building the right habits. I’m going to write for 10 minutes a day every day until it becomes ingrained in me. And I’m going to publish that 10 minutes of work every day. It’s going to be embarrassing and unrefined, but then again, I’ve never once hit “Print” or “Publish” on the hundreds of papers and articles I’ve written before and felt like it was complete. Being too early is better than being too late. These are my new habits. After all, we must master the banalities of cooking rice before we will ever master the egg sushi and earn the right to be called shokunin.
