I have always wanted to do new things. Many things like starting a YouTube channel. Starting a business. Starting to read a book. Then I even wanted to start writing a book. Start learning a new language. And even my own blog—which I now have gratifyingly started—was in my “Want To Do” list. I haven’t always been quite successful in starting out on new things. Especially things that make me go public like this blog. It’s really funny. Deep down I know I want to be super-famous one day but I can’t even get myself to share my thoughts with the crowd. I start thinking—’what if no one likes it?’, ‘What if I make a fool of myself?’, ‘What if…’, ‘What if…’, ‘What if…’. There’s an infinite number of ‘What if’s…’ when I want to start something new.
The fact is that I really want to do whatever is on my so-called Want To Do List. Anyone will agree. When you want to do something but eventually “can’t”, maybe because of fear (fear of people or going public), or thinking too much about perfection, that you never even hit “Publish” or “Upload” or even begin in some scenarios for that matter. Starting new things out is hard. It was very hard for me to start with this blog. In fact, I got the idea for starting one six to eight months before this, but I never really made anything out of that idea until this week, where I decided that this was enough and I wanted to do this and so I made a website and you’re now reading the first article of it—all in less than three days of work. I definitely think that the mental barriers are harder when starting out than the physical work barriers. When you really want something that bad, it’s easy to put in the work but it’s hard to stop other thoughts. Like the “What if’s…”.
During those kinds of times, I strongly believe that the right perspective is really important. We need to look at the “Bigger Picture”. When I decided on starting out with this blog website of mine, there were many options on the internet to choose from. A personal website plan, a premium one, a business one and many others from various services as well. I spent so much time reading through the reviews, watching YouTube videos and comparing plans when I remembered about the whole perspective idea. And that I am not looking at the bigger picture. Who cares about what plan I take? I just need to have a simple website with some features to be able to write articles and publish them for the world to read. I don’t need to take the “perfect plan”, or make the “perfect design”. I just want people to read my stuff and find it to be great.
If it wasn’t for the Bigger Picture, I still would have been stuck choosing design templates and comparing plans. Understanding that I should be focusing on the writing and content part and not the design or service plan part of my new project which I could easily change whenever I needed to in the future, made me write my first article (001, stay tuned for more). Sometimes just getting a little bit of perspective and looking at the bigger picture—rather than getting all caught up in the smaller, unnecessary things while starting out—can go a long way.
I wish you luck on starting whatever you want to and I hope the idea in this article made you step aside and think about your bigger picture for a moment and how even you can just start doing the thing you want to rather than procrastinating on overthinking about small and superfluous things in your way of doing the thing you really want to do.
Arjun Khemani 