Episode 5: The Magic of Just Getting Started
Welcome to episode 5 of the DeskCussions podcast. We've got an awesome one today about the power of just getting started.
And one of the first exposures I had to this was when a family member or friend said that before a student takes a gap year, it could benefit them to do a year of university and invest enough time in that degree before they go and do their gap year, that they won't want to waste it. They'll want to go and finish that degree when they get back.
And this is the concept of putting enough effort into something so that that amount of effort is what motivates you to keep going. I've already done this, so I am motivated to go and do that. And the magic behind this is that a lot of things we think we're not capable of, we’re kind of scared to try, but the first step is something we are comfortable doing. So today we're going to explore how we can use the magic of just getting started to help us achieve the big things in life that we may be a little bit unsure about going after straight away
So the first application of this is when my friend came to me and said he'd seen some information on drop shipping. He liked the idea of starting his own business, but I could just tell he was completely unsure of where to start in the e-commerce space, and from how he was talking I knew he wouldn't go and launch the whole brand, launch the business, get the inventory etc. So I said, “man all you need to do is to get the ball rolling, go on Shopify, go on Squarespace, go on one of the pre-made e-commerce website builders and go build a free landing page.
Go build the one page of your website that people would go and see, and you could do that in a few hours, but I knew if he went and did that and he would start building the landing page, and you'd require a logo, you go and either buy a logo or create a logo on Canva. You have to describe the business, now he'd be writing about the business in the description, and that's a step that wouldn't have scared him because no one can see it It's a private website at this point, it hasn't been published.
And it's the first step, and there's no fear, he can go and build that and make it as good as he wants to, but then that web page becomes his motivation, you can look at that web page and think damn I've created an incredible web page, I want people to go and see this, I want my friends, my family and the market to see what I've created.
And that will motivate them to say, hey it's time to create this content that I can sell, or it's time to purchase the inventory that I can sell, or launch the service that I can sell. Because he built that simple landing page, now he's going to be motivated to go and do that next step, which he wouldn't have done in the beginning.
And that totally happened to me when I built the Desk Clarity brand. I was hesitant at every stage of launching the books, launching the eBooks, launching the online courses, launching the in-person services. Each upgrade was me launching something I'd never done before and entering a field where I had no experience.
But what motivated me was the step before, because I'd spent so much time developing a strong landing page, I don't know much time I spent on it but to me it was a really good website, I said if I'm scared to go and launch these eBooks, in case I get criticised and it’s not as good as I think it is, but I would just go to my website and think this is awesome, these videos are great, someone needs to see this. And if I want people to see this, it means I have to do that next step. It's time to launch the books.
And that's why I really like this this rule, the magic of just getting started. And I apply this in my personal life all the time, whenever I decide it's time for me to get a bit more healthy and do what I call “shredding up” a little bit, which is where I just try and lose weight, I can't just stop eating delicious foods, it's too hard to just get straight into dieting, and I don't really want to go and start doing cardio every day to be honest, when I'm kind of out of funk with it.
So even the concept of going to do half an hour, or an hour of cardio on the stair stepper or a treadmill, it doesn't make me happy. I don't want to do it, but the starting point that that I always have ease with is going to the gym. There's no problem with going to the gym and doing an easy gym session with weights. So I'll give myself two or three sessions to just get the ball rolling, go to the gym, do an easy weightlifting session.
Now I know that's not going to help me achieve my goal of fat loss, but what it does is it gets me started because now I'm thinking, I put a bunch of effort into lifting these heavy weights, but it's not achieving my goals, so now I'm ready to do a bit of cardio as well.
So after the gym session, I do 30 minutes of cardio. And because I put so much effort into the weights, I may as well put effort into the cardio as well, and it's created kind of a cycle. I'm doing cardio because I did the weights, and then after you build it up a little bit, here's the secret, if you do 45 minutes on a stair stepper or treadmill and it's hard, you won't want to eat bad foods.
Your body will be thinking, why did I do 45 minutes of hard cardio just to eat this? You're going to turn that bad food away and you're going to choose to eat something healthier. So to me, it's the circle of losing weight, is my personal framework for how I lose weight when I want to.
I gym enough that makes me want to do cardio, I then do cardio enough that it makes me want to eat healthy, and then when I'm eating healthy, I know it's working and I train even harder and the cycle repeats itself. It's worked for me plenty of times and feel free to take a variation of that for yourself.
And there's plenty of other ways that we can apply this this theory of just getting started to our lives. If we want to become readers that read a lot of books, but we have trouble focusing and getting through a chapter, let's just simply go one page per day, I'm going to read one page today and tomorrow. And maybe next week I'll bump it up to two pages, three pages or it might just be one page the first day two pages the second day etc.
But by just getting started with something that you do feel comfortable doing, it's going to give you the motivation to go and read that full chapter at a time, because you've known that for the last two weeks you've been building up to it.
And it reminds me of this thing I used to use called a Key Activity Tracker. It was the most simple Excel spreadsheet and it just had a list of things I wanted to do each day, like wake up at 5am, go for a walk, journal and read for 30 minutes etc.
10 things that are kind of hard to do, they are things that I don't always feel like doing, but I knew that I really wanted to do them for my life. So how the Key Activity Tracker works is that for each day you've got a cell, and each column represents the day, and as you go through each day you highlight the cells for the activities that you did. So if I walk that day I'll highlight the walk box. If I journal that day, I’ll highlight the journal box and it visually shows you what trend you're on, and you'll see what you have been doing and what you haven't been doing.
The benefit here is that when I see that I've walked for five days in a row, if I don't want to walk on the sixth day, I'll look at that block of five cells and I'll say “Why did I do five days of hard effort if I'm not going to go and do that that sixth day,” and I’ll say “Why did I read for 10 days in a row just to give it up now? I wanted this habit, I've done 10 days of hard work.” That 10 days is going to inspire me to do that 11th day.
So feel free to apply this logic to anything, and that's a visual way to do it. You create a piece of paper or create a little spreadsheet. Mine was printed out and posted on my door so I could visually see the progress that I've done after I started, and that inspired me to keep going with it.
We are creatures of habit. I can't remember the old expression but it's like we're just what our repeated habits are. That's what we become, we're just a sum of all of our habits that we do regularly. The actions that we do repeatedly is what creates who we are so, this is a really easy way to develop those habits, to develop that character that we want to be.
Just getting started with it do something we feel comfortable with and building upon that. If that's public speaking, for example, start by doing the smallest that you can think of a couple times. Speak in front of your whole family, in front of your friends and build up to speaking in front of your colleagues, then build up to speaking in front of an audience on TikTok, for example. And start with a little bit of effort that's going to inspire you to put a lot of effort in to take the big next steps. So thank you for joining us for episode 5 of the DeskCussions podcast. Please subscribe below so we can bring you more content.