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“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
– Howard Thurman
You have this big project you want to start. It will change your life. Well, maybe it will. You don’t know yet because you’ve never done anything like it before. But it seems that the only way to find out is to give it a shot and see what happens.
The problem is, even thinking about taking some real action towards your goal scares the crap outta you. It’s as if you were a child again, lying in the dark waiting for the monster to crawl out your closet. You’re terrified.
Yet there is this feeling in your gut that tells you that this might be an awesome adventure and lead to opportunities that you don’t even dare to dream about at this point.
Here’s the thing: You’ll never be a bestselling author if you don’t write that first book. You’ll never land your dream job if you don’t do the soul-searching to figure out what you want. And in my case, you’ll never make a living from your blog if you don’t start blogging. Simple, eh?
But how on earth could little you dare to do something so bold, so big and so scary?
“This is too big for me”
That’s exactly what was going on in my head when I decided to start a blog last spring. This project scared the crap outta me.
Who was I, the broke 20-year-old college student, to dare say I wanted to write meaningful things that people would want to read? What if no one would care about what I have to say? And how on earth should I be able to deal with all the technical HTML weirdness that comes with blogging?
All I had was a burning desire to write about the topics that fascinated me most: “lifestyle design” (create a life on your terms) “personal development” (grow as a person to live your best life) and world change.
Yeah, those were vague ideas at best. So…
If we have never done anything like it before, how dare we think we can make this work?
These kinds of doubts arise naturally when you decide to do something meaningful. They have stopped countless people before you.
I don’t want you to be one of them.
Your dream is worthwhile it’s bold, brilliant, and innocent. Taking the first steps and sticking to it is hard, but you and your dream deserve it.
I’ve learned a thing or two about starting big scary projects as I launched Bright Little Socks. Today I’ll be sharing the key lessons I learned from starting my blog so you can go out there and create something you care about too.
The 5 essential steps to starting any meaningful projec
Do you really want this?
Sometimes it’s easy to think that we want to do a Big Bold Thing because we know it would make our parents proud. But if you don’t really want this yourself, you will burn out pretty quickly. We don’t want that. So take a moment (feel free to grab my best friend, Mr. Journal) to reflect on your WHY behind starting this project.
Don’t reinvent the wheel.
It’s unnecessary and takes more blood, sweat, and tears than needed. No matter how out of space your idea is, someone has done something similar before.
Find the person who has done what you dream about and see if they have a process you can follow. If not, ask Amazon’s book section. When I got serious about starting a blog in 2012, I bought a course on the exact topic by Corbett Barr. He had done what I wanted to do, so all I did was follow his action plans because I knew they would lead me to launch a decent blog.
Bottom line: You don’t have to do this all on your own. Find someone you can model and do it.
Limit the time you spend in the research phase.
Maybe you’ve escaped into books and blogs to learn everything you can about your topic to be as prepared as possible. The problem is that most of us never stop preparing. Spend two weeks researching, find someone whose process you can model, and then get to work.
Set deadlines and tell people.
It took me two months after I setup my blog domain to finally commit to a launch date. Deadlines are scary things because they make the project seem more real which can cause panic attacks.
Needless to say, I had to push back the launch date twice, but without the deadline, I would probably still be talking about launching my blog someday.
You can also tell 3 people you trust what you are about to do, and of course tell the people you want to get advice from (only take advice from people who have done it before). This will give you a sense of accountability.
Just do it.
No shortcut allows you to skip this step. You’ll feel scared no matter how prepared you are. You don’t need to have it all figured out at the beginning. Clarity comes through action, not from thought. Get that? So take the first step, no matter how small it is. Then take the next one. If you fall behind and let the project slide, that’s okay. Just get back to work.
When I launched my blog on October 9th, 2012 I was terrified. I had to take about 3746 deep breaths before I found the courage to remove the maintenance plugin and reveal it to the world. And guess what happened? Not that much. Then slowly people started noticing. I got my first comments, my first email from a subscriber and I could start to see where this project could be going.
Finally launching a project often feels like the end of the journey, but it’s really just the beginning.
You don’t need to have it all figured out. Clarity comes through action. So go take the first step