I can sum up this entire article with the following sentence.
Everything comes together and becomes just right WELL AFTER you start; NEVER before.
When I have the money, when I have the connections, when I have the time, when I have the resources. You’ve heard it all haven’t you? When things are set, THEN I’ll pursue my goals. It’s understandable.
It’s certainly very wise to think that you should get all your ducks all lined up in a row before you start, but have you ever seen when ducks line up in a row? They only do so when the mama duck starts to walk. Then and only then do the baby ducks follow in line.
A lot of people would like to start their own business, but don’t have the funds. However, does that prevent them from drawing up a business plan? Doing marketing research? Studying how to pitch to potential investors? You’ll find that if you just start on these types of activities, then all those other things that you’ve wanted from the start will come as a result. Granted there may be extenuating circumstances that prevent you from starting, but for the most part, today is just a good a day as any to start on the journey toward the inevitable achievement of your dreams.
One common theme you’ll find in people who’ve achieved their goals is that they always smack themselves in the head with the palm of their hands because knowing what they know now, they realize how much time and money they could’ve saved from the very beginning. That’s everyone’s story. And there’s a reason why that’s everyone’s story. All that information comes AFTER the fact.
That information comes from the experience that people like to label as “failures”. Great success is always preceded by great failure. That’s just how it works and that’s how it should work because failure is there to teach you all the things you need so you can succeed. When you start off, you’ll most likely trade off failure with opportunity to succeed in a 1:1 ratio, meaning for every failure you have, you can garner an equal value of opportunity to move forward. However as you progress, that ratio starts to increase from 1:1.1 to 1:2 to 1:4, etc., and as you keep moving forward, you start to get exponential returns on your experience because they compound on one another.
That’s the great thing about taking action and garnering that experience because it’s way more effective than reading any article or book. Experience pinpoints you. It anchors you on a course of action and as a result, it gives you tangents to follow that knowledge alone cannot, because knowledge is akin to “floating” everywhere. You can’t pinpoint yourself on anything by reading. Experience can be pinpointed. You’ve done something and here are the effects of it. Where do I go from here? Experience directs you on where to go because it’s evidence that you’ve chosen a course of action to take. Then all that knowledge you’ve read can be applied around that course of action. You start to “zero in” on precisely the knowledge that you need to help you rather than drown yourself in a sea of untargeted knowledge.
Going back to the example of starting your business, it’s an overwhelming project to undertake. There’s so much to do at the beginning. Where do I get the money to start? Who do I get it from? Am I selling a product or service? Is there a market? Because there’s so many things to do, people want to do it ALL from the start and have everything be just right in order to launch their business.
Trying to do all that at once is like running around in circles. List all the things you need to do, sort them by priority, and THEN start on the activity that has the highest priority. It might be thinking of the product or service you want to sell. Don’t worry about the capital you may need or the office space you may need to rent. Just get started on thinking what product or service you want. You may need to read up on books or do some soul searching to think of an idea, but you’ll eventually get one. When you think of a dynamite idea, then that will then propel you to go on to the next activity, which is maybe looking for investors. So you check out some more books on how to pitch to investors, you talk to a couple of people who’ve done it before and you set up a plan and nail it. Now you’ve got the capital. What’s next? You see how the ball gets rolling once you START and how you “zero in” on the knowledge you need that’s associated with the course of action you’ve taken?
You’ll never have everything you need to be just right at the beginning to succeed because you’ll find all of that comes well AFTER you start.
So start today to take action to set up your dominoes. You’re probably going to need to work a great deal on it in terms of setting up the spacing between them to be just right, testing to see what that space is, carefully prepping each domino up, maybe prematurely starting a domino effect here and there and having to clean up, but AFTER you take the action to set them all up, THEN, and ONLY THEN do you have everything just right so you can knock them all down.
So don’t wait until everything is perfect at the beginning. It’ll never be and it can’t possibly be. Only well AFTER you start will it be. That’s just the way it is 
