You Don’t Have to be Great to Start …

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“You don’t have to be great to start …
but you have to start, to be great” – Zig Ziglar.

I came across this quote today on a friend’s Facebook page. And it made me stop and think. This one quote, by Zig Ziglar, sums up one of the most important factors in success, in any area of your life. You have to make a start if you are to have any hope of achieving anything. If you don’t make that first move, your chances of success are literally zero. This is so blantantly obvious and yet so deceptively tricky to manage at the same time.

There are lots of factors to achieving success, and they’re all important. But this, above all else, is probably the most vital. You can have great dreams of achieving your ideal life, or any specific part of it, and you can create detailed plans and visualise your success in advance, down to the last detail. You can write your plans down, and say your affirmations till you’re blue in the face.

You don't have to be great to start

You can vividly imagine achieving your success, and immerse yourself in the emotions that you’ll feel when it finally makes an appearance in your day-to-day reality. But if you don’t actually make a start … if you don’t actually take action … if you don’t take a deep breath and take a leap of faith and actually DO SOMETHING … then it’s all been for nothing.

I know this from personal experience. In my case, I think it’s probably because I feel can turn my hand to lots of things and see fairly respectable results. I suppose this makes me feel a bit nervous that I might not make the grade this time, and I’ll just make a fool of myself for even trying. What a pathetic reason not to give it a go! Failure isn’t just an option, it’s mandatory. Without failure, you can hardly ever advance, in anything. In fact, not hitting the target and then making course corrections is exactly the way things work, by and large. It’s how progress is made. Simple as that.

psycho cyberneticsRead Psycho Cybernetics, by Dr Maxwell Maltz, and you’ll be introduced to this mechanism in detail. As he points out, a spacecraft that sets out to make a Moon landing is just set on course towards the Moon, at first. Nobody could set out every mile and every foot of the journey in advance and hope for it to be a success. It just doesn’t work that way. There are way too many variables.

The craft is set on a course towards the Moon (well, towards the point in space where it’s been calculated the Moon will be when the craft arrives at that point) and every so often bearings are taken, and if it’s a few degrees off course a mid-course correction is made. A very short pulse on a little rocket engine nudges it back towards its destination.

mid course correctionThen, later, another deviation is automatically detected and a further correction is made. This might happen literally dozens of times during the journey, perhaps even more. The craft zig-zags towards its destination, it doesn’t head there in a straight line. In other words, failure is built into the system! It’s a vital component. It’s expected, and it’s dealt with. Nothing to worry about.

Make progress … cybernetically

It’s the same with us. We make a start on something and, after a while, we notice things aren’t going exactly right. So we make a change (a mid-course correction, in effect), and we’re nudged back on track. Later on, it’ll happen again … and again. This is a continuous process. But being sensitive little souls, we sometimes take it personally if we realise we’re not precisely on target the whole time. The very thought of us not being in complete control, and completely on track all the time seems anathema to us. How ridiculous is that!

learning to walkWe should just accept it. That’s the way it works! That’s the way we learned to walk – falteringly, with lots of falling over (repeated ‘failures’) and lots of getting back up and trying again (mid-course corrections). We do it automatically as kids, without a second thought, but as adults we’re not so tough. The resilience of childhood, instead of getting stronger with time, seems to fade.

We get sensitive! We ‘learn’ to worry over the outcome. We start fretting over what other people will think of us. We imagine the worst. We visualise failure, and its horrific consequences. And we visualise it in excruciating detail! We worry and fret and chat negatively to ourselves, until a negative outcome seems practically inevitable. And ultimately we talk ourselves out of even trying, or, if we’ve made a start, of continuing. And so we give up. Often before we’ve even begun.