‘The secret to getting ahead is getting started.’
—Mark Twain, author and humorist
DAY ONE. BIG day, huh? Better get this right – start by planning the whole thing out properly …
Screw that!
Don’t make a big deal out of getting started. If you are obsessing over exactly how to take that first step or you’re making meticulous plans before you make a move, you’re stuck in workerbot thinking. Starting a life-changing – or even world-changing – project need be no more momentous than making breakfast.
Don’t worry about a five-year plan. The world today moves too fast for detailed and long-term planning and, besides, there is so much up in the air at this stage of your journey that any plan you do make will need to be thrown out within a few days.
You don’t need to know your next hundred actions. You just need one – your first action. Then get on and do it. As award-winning novelist E. L. Doctorow put it, ‘It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’
‘We have a “strategic” plan. It’s called doing things.’
—Herb Kelleher, co-founder of SouthWest Airlines
Pick one simple thing that you can do today in 20 minutes or fewer, something that’s at the heart of your project. Make a call, write an email to someone, join Blogger to start your blog, make something, write something, grab the nearest scrap of paper and sketch a rough design for your app or your book chapter list or the course you’d love to teach. Did you know the original idea for the iconic Mini that went on to sell 5 million cars was sketched on a restaurant tablecloth by Alec Issigonis of the British Motor Corporation?
The original idea for the Mini that went on to sell 5 million cars was sketched on a restaurant tablecloth
Whatever you choose to do, do it right now if you possibly can. It’s only 20 minutes. We’ll dive deeper into this trick of breaking your time into small blocks tomorrow.
‘How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.’
—Anne Frank, diarist and writer
Whatever your project, even if it’s part of some eventual world-domination plan, there is a whole bunch of stuff you might think you need, but you almost certainly don’t at this early stage. I’m talking about things like:
What you do need is to cut to the chase and get to the heart of your project. Find the nugget that matters to you and make it happen. Then keep playing every day to create something of value: put something of yourself into it, make it as good as you can and keep making it better and better until people can’t wait to ‘Like’ you, follow you, subscribe to you, steal from you (they will!) and, yes, buy from you.
If you’re opening a hot dog stand, you could worry about the condiments, the cart, the name, the decoration. But the first thing you should worry about is the hot dog. The hot dogs are the epicenter. Everything else is secondary – Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, in the book Rework
What really matters in these 30 days is your mission to create something of value to other people. Do that and the rest is relatively straightforward. Don’t waste time on all the trappings of business when you’re still finding out what you want to do and how to make it into something other people like.
If your project is about writing, put your focus on writing every day. If your project is to try making money from a skill you enjoy using, go use this skill right away. See if you can do it for a friend or colleague even if it’s free the first time. Go teach them what you know or put this skill into action for them – design their website for them, coach them on their wedding speech or whatever it may be. If you want to be a public speaker, focus on writing and practising speeches. If you want to develop an app, focus on the design and coding. Leave the other stuff for later.
All successful businesses, websites, blogs or events must start somewhere. You might be trying to build something big, something that will make consistent and significant income. But when you’re starting out, this can feel overwhelming. Remember that you can start with just one thing – your first product, first event, first blog post, first client – without worrying too much about what’s going to happen afterwards.
Delivering your first whatever-it-is makes a big difference. You can have the grandest plans in the world for, say, a series of original themed events, but it’s difficult to get people excited about a concept. You can, however, get people excited about a real event that you’re organising when they know where it is, what the theme is and who is speaking or performing. Start with the first one and build it from there.
Jeff Bezos did this with Amazon when he started out. Although Amazon now sell everything from PCs to MP3s to saucepans, Amazon started with just one product – books. They picked books because of their worldwide popularity, low price point and because Amazon’s virtually limitless shelf-space would be particularly beneficial to book buyers. Amazon sold their first book on 3 April 1995 to a Mr John Wainwright; the catchily titled Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Within two months, Amazon’s sales were up to $20,000 a week. Now they make that amount every six seconds. But they never forgot customer number one. In fact they named a building on the Amazon campus after him – the Wainwright Building.
So for now, put all your thinking and energy during your Play Project into creating the first instance of what you’re doing and make it happen.
I know you’ve been told all your life that you should know where you’re heading and how you’re going to get there before you set off but that’s not how entrepreneurship and creativity works. As Picasso said, ‘To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.’
The interesting thing about any significant creative project you undertake – whether it’s a book, blog or business – is that, while you might have a title (and even some kind of outline), you don’t really know what it’s about until you dive into making it.
Sometimes you think you know at the start, but it always changes along the way. For my first book, Screw Work Let’s Play, it was only when I’d finished the whole of the first 60,000-word draft that I turned to my agent and said, ‘I think I know what this book is about now.’ It had taken that long for the core message to evolve and become crystal clear to me.
Essayist and venture capitalist, Paul Graham says, ‘expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong’ – and the same can be said of most creative projects, including starting a business.
So don’t be alarmed if your idea seems kind of half-baked and you’re not really clear how you’re going to make it happen. Trust that the process you’ll learn over the next 30 days will fill in the gaps in ways that will surprise and delight you.
‘If the path before you is clear you’re probably on someone else’s.’
—Joseph Campbell, writer and mythologist
Each day, I’ll be covering the kind of thoughts that are likely to pop up that could get in your way. These are thoughts arising from the training we have all had to become workerbots – and you’ll need to be able to spot them and challenge them.
‘I haven’t got the headspace to make a proper start so I’ll do it tomorrow when I have more time.’ Don’t wait to be in the right mood to get started and don’t make a big deal out of it. Just do 20 minutes today if nothing else.
‘If this is my first thing it had better be perfect!’ It’s easy to think of your first blog post, event or offering as the decider of your whole future. But that’s not helpful. Think of it instead as your first experiment. I see people get very hung up on publishing their very first blog post, for instance, but it might help you to know that in reality very few people will see it! So, in one sense, it’s your least important blog post. That doesn’t mean you should be slipshod about it. It’s important to do the best you can do at the moment. Just remember that you will get better every time you finish something and put it out into the world. You have to start somewhere. So start now.
‘I don’t know where to start.’ Then start anywhere. Choose anything on your project and do it for 20 minutes.