The imperfect start is the perfect way to start.
Sometimes in life you look back at a mess and decide to start over. Do this enough and you find it harder and harder to begin until you know can get it right.
For something really important? If you’re anything like me, you’ll stall by refining the idea. Eventually, it’ll reach the point where it needs to be so perfect reality could never live up to the dream—a failure before you even start.
Let’s call this, “perfection paralysis.”
Over the years, I’ve discovered starting something new is one of the hardest things in the world. Fear pounces and the “what if’s” run amuck. You try to get all your ducks in a row, but as the military saying goes, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Let’s call this one, “Inertia.” Remember Newton’s laws of physics? An object at rest tends to stay at rest?
In numerous verses throughout Scripture, the Bible instructs us to “wait on the Lord.” I’m not disagreeing—in fact, I’d encourage we wait on the Lord before taking action much more often. Here, I’m talking about when we already know what God wants us to do.
For instance, we know God wants us to spend time with Him through His Word. Yet, we wait around for the perfect time to start (which for some reason always seems to be Monday), or we have to find the perfect Bible reading plan. You might even be stalling because you have an empty journal sitting in front of you and you don’t know exactly what you should write.
The imperfect start is the perfect way to start.
Let’s go back to inertia: it also means an object in motion tends to stay in motion. So when you know what the right thing to do is, you should dive in and do it. You can always edit and refine as you go—in fact this actually helps you better track your progress later on.
What are you waiting for? START!