If you ever find yourself frozen in the initial steps of doing or creating something, waiting until you're "perfect" before you truly start, I've got a question for you:

How's that working out for you so far?

Look; I know what it feels like to want to get everything just right, right from the start. Who really wants to be that shmuck that shows up on the dance floor barely able to tell their feet apart? Nobody wants to be that guy. Instead of giving you the usual "do it badly, do it scared"-talk (which is a great talk you ought to hear at least once) and instead take your face and shove it into a harsh truth that doesn't get mentioned enough in my experience.

Take Your Pick

Whenever you hesitate on starting, you're either going to end up with something or nothing at all.

There's no third option. You're getting one of those two outcomes.

If you want to sit in the same spot you're at forever, good for you! I hear Zen masters do that a lot: don't know how one of those found my blog, but that's the magic of the internet. I apologize for wasting so much of your time. You can stop reading now, sweetie.

Odds are good that you're actually not enlightened, though. You're somebody that wanted to change something in your life in some way, and you're repeatedly leaving yourself out in the damned cold.

Even in the worst-case scenario, simply trying will put you marginally closer to where you want to go and who you want to be. 1% of progress—hell, even 0.1%—is going to be greater than no progress at all. Every positive number in the universe is greater than zero.

Let's say you try, you give it your all, and you fail. So what? What's actually changed? Nothing is different externally (you don't live in that new mansion with that supermodel spouse, or whatever you dreamed would happen), so why freak out? You already knew what it was like to be here. Might as well panic every time you wake up in the morning, in principle. What has changed is that you now know a little more than you did before, and you're a little bit better than you were.

Since you already did it once, survived, and came back; now you can do it again and be better than the better you already became! Eventually, your "better" is going to become "good enough," and there's nothing stopping you from taking that all the way to being the best in the world (if that's what you even want).

When given the choice between something you don't want (the status quo) and literally anything else, you are actively choosing the thing you didn't want in the first place. Sorry if I'm coming off as harsh here. This is a funny kind of bullying: you are hitting yourself, and I'm merely telling you to stop.

A Tip for Next Time

Simply ask yourself "what do I want?" the next time you're afraid to begin. Remember why you're even asking that question in the first place. Nobody asks a question like this when everything's going 100% how they want.

Don't try to force an answer out of yourself, either. Even if you choose to hold yourself back once again, you'll be able to come back and ask again later. Keep asking, and you'll know when it's time to charge into that new option.

After a while, you can boil the whole process down to that simple three-word litany: This… or nothing?

It's not like you've only ever frozen up one time, anyway, right? Either there'll be plenty more opportunities to grow, or there won't and actually you'll never hesitate again.

You'll be fine~