We spend most of our lives making things up.
The stories that we tell ourselves about what others are supposedly thinking about us are just a tiny part of them. There are also the limiting beliefs and their own stories, there’s the lies we make up about how we’re going to start dieting tomorrow. One of the most important ones for me has been the requirements question.
When I want to begin something, whether its to finally write the book, or to finally send out the email blast letting people know about my new business, I come up with a made up list of requirements. Heck, some of us will sometimes even go out of our own way to purchase a new laptop when we start a new venture and will actually stop ourselves from pursuing our dreams just by not being able to find the perfect business card.
No, we don’t need the laptop nor the business card to begin. Those are made up requirements.
We don’t need to bring somebody to go watch a movie, and no we don’t need someone to sit with us when we eat (unless you’re eating at an all-you-can-eat Korean Barbecue place with their evil two-person minimum).
Things that we’ve used as excuses are slowly losing their effect on me the more I reflect on this stuff. I don’t need a laptop to write, and I don’t need the newest iPhone with the five cameras to get that perfect shot. On a broader scale, you can think about how much knowledge is in your local library and if you can actually manage to learn Excel or American Sign Language without actually paying for a course.
But it’s a big business, this requirements thing.
Schools and the online gurus offering you their new courses with their but-wait-there’s-mores would be out of business if we found out that we don’t need to pay for most things in order to get things done.
If you want a job, you need a certain amount of experience. In order to get a degree in engineering, you need to take a course about the struggles of Asian women in America. Sure, it helps. Not me, but it I mean I’m sure it has to help somebody.
No wonder we think so much about requirements even with our own things that don’t need any of those things. So next time you want to begin a project, skip the logo and the business card. Skip the new bag and deciding on the color of the uniforms. Get working with what you have and get only the help you need to start and grow your idea.
To gain an Instagram following, you don’t need a course in Lightroom or Photoshop. You don’t need to learn how to code in three different languages in order to get a website. There’s no degree required to write a book.
Get to it.