How to Stop Hesitating and Jump Into Something New

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a hundred ideas swimming around in your brain-space every day. This can lead to all kinds of difficulty when it comes to focus but it can also cause you to miss out on opportunities. When is the right time to finally get started on that project you’ve been dreaming about?

Maybe you’ve been saving dozens of URLs and videos to your inspiration database or your read-it-later list. Maybe you’ve been fiddling with notes, sketches, mockups, models or brainstorming techniques and, every time you add something new, you think, next week I’ll finally start.

At some point, you have to conquer your fear, turn on your focus engine and begin.

When is that point? And how can you stop hesitating before you miss your opportunity?

Not Enough Time in the Day

This was my problem:

Picture me at my desk, putting the finishing touches on some blog content for a client, sending it away in an email and relishing the blank space of time left in the day to work on my big projects (there are always several, despite my best efforts). I’d look forward to my goals, my creations, my ambitions.

I’d eat something, take a deep breath, and… feel stuck.

What to do? What to prioritize? I know I started that yesterday, but I really want to work on this today. I only have—let’s see—three and a half hours before the evening, dinner and family time. I probably couldn’t get this done in that amount of time, so I’ll save it for “tomorrow” (read: “eventually”) and I’ll work on this instead. I guess… Ugh.

The Power of Self-Discipline

Self-discipline—gross. I know. It’s your ambition—let it run wild!

We writers tend to be enormous dreamers. Thinking, imagining, living within the fiction we create. But to accomplish your goal and to make your passion into a successful operation, you have to say no to yourself. You have to set limits, practice a little restraint and do the work.

When Am I Ready to Jump Into Something New?

The feeling that comes with saying "I'm ready" to a new project is the same that comes with saying "I'm done" to a finished work. Neither is easy, or clear, or definite. The writer is never finished if left without a deadline.

Like knowing when you've finished, knowing when to start is about paying attention to your feelings. Notice when you procrastinate and when you think, Maybe I've planned enough. Listen to yourself and realize that there's never going to be the "correct" time to jump in.

There's risk in every worthwhile endeavor. It might seem scary to start something and be caught under-prepared. But much worse than that is never starting at all.

How to Conquer Fear and Finally Begin

Starting. Is. Scary.

It might not work, you're thinking. And I'll have wasted hours and days and weeks of time on a thing that failed.

That right there is a recipe for failure. And that, right after it, is a cliche but it's also true. Nothing is guaranteed to work and hard work doesn't guarantee success. But letting the fear of failure overwhelm you all but guarantees a hard time.

This isn't a pep talk about believing in yourself and diving blindly into the next idea you have. It's about having confidence in the idea that you obviously think has merit, or you wouldn't have spent the last six weeks or months or years wavering about starting it.

You have more ideas in a day than you probably realize because most of them are so bad they simply float right away and disintegrate. But a few stick around. They're the ones to pay attention to. And if you've got a few coming back day after day, then it's time to dig in and decided which one is the really good one, which one leads to the vein of gold.

Which one are you passionate about?

I kept coming back to the idea for this website, day after day, as I wrote fiction and clients' blog posts and marketing copy. I just kept thinking about the vast world of writing and what my niche could be.

And I thought there was a message that I wasn't hearing enough: "publication" could be subjective, could be the achievement of one's goal, whatever that was. You can define what publication means for your writing.

For me, it was simply to earn a living with my writing, but that means my writing--not a client's assignments or an editor's pitches. Whether it's fiction or this website or guest writing somewhere else, I wanted to turn my passion for writing into a sustainable business.

I thought about what it meant to write as an unpublished writer for weeks before I considered its potential as a website collecting essays on this topic. I brainstormed and planned what that website might look like for months. The idea evolved in the back of my mind for months while I commuted to work, during lunch and in the evenings. It survived the transition to freelancing and an out-of-state move. It survived digressions to other projects I'd begun.

It proved its merit by sticking in my mind for nearly a year. And now, it's real.

There might not be specific day on which you decide, today's the day. It might simply be the transition from passively thinking to actively creating. Whichever it is, recognize that you've taken that step and commit yourself to the idea.

That's the time to stop hesitating and start.



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