I’m going to be vulnerable for a moment.
I feel so restless. I’m ready to dramatically change my life. Not that life right now isn’t good, because it is. I just want more. I want different experiences to the ones I’ve already had. I want my dreams to come true.
But how? I’m a bit stuck.
Knowing what you want, and knowing how to get it is the valley where so many of us live. Sometimes forever. I refuse to be that person. Perpetually stuck in the valley of longing and desire. The liminal.
So what has to change? I believe there’s three things:
1. Stop confusing “research” for action.
I don’t have screen time turned on for my phone (I turned it on as I was writing this), so I don’t have a very good idea of how much time I spend on my phone, but anecdotally, I know it’s more than I’d like it to be. I rationalize this by telling myself I’m doing research, as I scroll, and save posts, and watch videos– on how to be a flourishing polymath. I do believe that this is a good and important part of the process, but I also believe that it isn’t substantively moving the needle towards the things I’m trying to achieve. Like, it is in theory, but not in practice. It moves to practical once I review all the posts and things I’ve screenshotted, saved, made notes about, and compress them into one tangible action.
2. Start taking action, before I feel 100% ready to.
I don’t self-identify as a perfectionist, but I might be. I pride myself on the quality of work I deliver, and how I present myself, knowing what I put into the world reflects me as a person. And I take that seriously. This means that everything needs to be buttoned up, and presented extremely well before I let a soul see it. That ultimately means I bake, and sometimes over-bake my ideas, resulting in them missing the optimal timing, or worse– never seeing the light of day at all. Obviously I don’t need to swing to the other extreme and churn out half-baked ideas, but I do need to give myself more creative license to experiment, and iterate.
3. Give myself permission to succeed and fail.
So much of this entire journey is about mindset, and I truly believe it’s what separates the yearners from the actualized. The more things I try, the better the likelihood that something is going to work and take off. But it also increases the chances of things not taking off the way I hoped. If the ratio of success to failure is 7 to 3, launching more often means more chances to fail. Not more than my chances to succeed, but that 3 still scales up alongside the 7. That’s just math. And I need to be okay with that. Some might even argue the ratio itself improves as you get more reps in—the compounding effect of experience means it’ll only get better. Still, not everything will hit, and that’s okay.
One component of my dreams coming true is becoming a prolific world builder, and one of the tools in that arsenal is creative writing. Writing this piece of work right now—and the fact that you’re reading it—means I’ve published it, and that I’m on the right path. I’ve never really known how to get unstuck, other than getting so fed up, I do the thing. That works for me because I have a penchant for action, and am highly self-motivated. Even with that being true, sometimes it takes letting myself get uncomfortable, and frustrated, that I feel I have no choice but to take action. And there’s evidence of how I decide to take action, and when. When I think back to every time I made a bold change, or finally did something I’d always wanted to do—did I feel forced? By whom or what? Was it external pressure? Was it internal pressure? Was it a light switch that flicked on or off?
We’re actually pretty predictable beings. So what does my past behaviour say about what I’ll do next?