“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
― Seneca
How do you begin setting up a business? Or learning Chinese or Japanese? How the bloody hell did Elon Musk built a space company after building Paypal without knowing anything about rockets?
You just do so.
Don’t get caught up in the trap of thinking too much before actually starting to do anything you’ve been thinking about doing.
I truly don’t believe there is even 1 person who knows exactly what they are doing all the time, life is just too complex and chaotic and our brains are not big enough for the task.
Our brains are great improvisers.
What would you do if you were thrown in an Island by yourself with a knife, a backpack and a bottle of water?
Well, after freaking out about your situation and calming down, the smartest thing you could do would be to scout. You’d need to know where you are and you’d also need to know what are the resources available.
From that point forward you’d maybe looking for Wilson and planning your way out of the island to get back home.
The same is true with everything else. Finding purpose? Scout. Where do you think you might find it? I’m sure you have at least a vague idea.
“Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.”
― Alfred Adler
Go out, read the book, google the business industry you want to get into and research. By doing this you will start carving your path towards it.
And by the way, Elon Musk answer to how he started Space X was: “I started reading as much as I could about Rocket Science”
Courage
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
In the end, trying something new, starting a new project and almost everything venture related resumes in an act of courage. The courage to actually do it.
It’s common to say that you don’t do this because you don’t yet have this or you don’t do that because of that but if we take it to its core, it’s just a matter of courage.
The reason we repel doing something new is because we fear failure. Not really being able to do the thing we’ve been saying we are going to do is terrifying and so it feels better to just trick (supposedly) ourselves and others by saying that we can’t do it because of something. The thing is, this way of thinking is precisely what keeps us from doing anything, because that something is a lie, an excuse.
You have to realize that failure is needed to know the difference between what works and what doesn’t.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Marcus Aurelius
It’s not entirely hard to do something, that’s what your brain is for, but the actual decision to do it or not to will determine if you ever begin to live or not.
Realize that this decision is universal in your life, not just in one area.
The hardest part, undoubtedly is the start, conquer that first, answers will appear once you do.
Begin at once to live.
Want to read some more: Courage
Subscribe and receive for free the Askesis ebook to further develop your practice of stoicism.
Don’t forget to visit our shop, carefully curated. Shop
Visit our Patreon page for more stoic, Patreon only content. Thanks.
