"We suffer more in imagination than reality" -- Seneca
Steven Pressfield writes about "Resistence" in his book 'The War of Art' and talks about how powerful this force is in stopping you doing the thing God (however you imagine it/him/her) has put you on this earth to do.
Why do we resist? This topic has been documented a thousand times over, in every self-help and productivity book you can think of going back many years. But we're still here. Talking about what stops us from doing the thing we want to do, we love to do, or often times we need to do.
For me the forces that plague me starting a newsletter, just simply to collate my thoughts and ideas and learnings week in and week out, has been immense. Some days the thinking ranges from "it's nothing, nobody cares, get started, f**k it" to "is this really what I want to do?", "am I doing this for the right reasons?", "is this sustainable? am I gonna end up failing at this as well?".
In hindsight, ridiculous. In reality, it's very, very real.
Real? Yes. It's stopped me doing the thing I wanted to do, so even if the thinking itself is (imho) stupid, it has won out and I'm sitting here with nothing to show for it.
So how do I battle this resistence?
The same way you take on most things that seem too big to handle- you break it down into small pieces, and then smash those out until the "whole" is resolved.
My small, daily piece to smash out that will lead to the weekly newsletter?
A blog post. Every day. For 30 days.
It doesn't have to be amazing. It doesn't even have to be long. It just has to be done. Every day. For 30 days.
Let's go.