Besides everything we feel from starting things, there are all sorts of consequences in order to make progress. To follow-up on “saying I want A and taking action on doing A”, you have to take new actions. And that might not always be easy to do.
Let me put a couple of my challenges of starting writing this book in a broader perspective. But let me be very clear. This book is not going to be a Biography of my process of writing a book, publishing it page by page. This book is about you. About how you can do the things you really want and care for. How you can start your journey and overcome your obstacles along the way.
The moment I started writing my first page, I decided to publish page by page. That was not planned. So I had to figure out how to do that. And there wasn’t much time as I promised to publish the page the same day of the writing. With only a short amount of time, you don’t have time to find new and novel solutions. You want to pick from what you know.
The great thing about limited options is that making choices is way easier. The more options you have, the harder it becomes to make a choice and the more time it takes. I decided that it had to be a website. I was looking for a website name but then figured out: I still have a domain name that is waiting for me to activate. It wouldn’t have come up “inspiredbyfrank.com” if it wasn’t already there.
In this case, I can deal with the consequences of that website choice later. It’s not life changing, it’s not going to matter. There is nothing I can’t change at a later stage. It is not impacting anyone else but me. In cases where there are consequences that also impact others or could possibly change your life, I wouldn’t recommend making that choice in the blink of an eye.
The actual realisation of that website would normally take me days, not to say months. It’s good to care for the quality of what we want to accomplish and doing things right. But when perfectionism takes over, it will hold us away from actually doing the right things. In this case, the right thing was to get this simple website up and running, post my first page and share the content with the world. As a side project, I will change the site along with writing the book and maybe, maybe, it will all be finished at the same time.
The inner critic comes in many forms. Fear of failure is one of those, self-doubt another and there are so many more. Am I good enough, what will other people think of me, I can only do this when…. We have to understand that our inner critic will always be around. It’s not getting rid of this inner critic, it’s taking action regardless of that. Living and coping with the voices in our head or the devil on our shoulder is how we are strengthening our muscles of growth and progress.
There is so much more to tell you around the topic of "actions have consequences". It will be an underlying theme within the book. Here it's just on the surface but I promise we will dive deeper into that and I will also see what kind of research I can use to give it more body and context.