150 years ago, here in the U.S., we were grappling with a very ugly piece of our history. We couldn’t decide if we should free all our slaves or not. And we ended up fighting a pretty nasty war about it.
Obviously, in the end, good prevailed. Funny how the answer seems so obvious after the fact, right?
In The South, much of the agriculture business was based around slavery. With an economy so dependent on slaves to do things for us for free, the question of the time was:
“If we free the slaves, who will pick the cotton?”
150 years ago, there wasn’t enough foresight to realize that with progress and innovation, we’d eventually pick whole cotton fields with one big piece of automated machinery.
The rationale seemed to be, “We’d like to do the right thing, but we’re afraid we’re not smart enough to adapt if we do.”
Unfortunately, not a lot has changed since then.
Today, you can draw the same parallel to many of our modern concerns like climate change, gay marriage, and other dilemmas that involve trading comfort for the opportunity to do the right thing.
The sentiment is, “We’d like to do it, but we’re not sure if we can deal with the change.”
When I started The Bootstrapper Guild last year, I asked myself, “Can I really do this? It’s a lot of work!”
I almost didn’t go through with the project because I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to handle running Advanced Riskology, writing guest posts, and also create something new for a business project every single week.
Eventually, I went ahead and did it anyway and things have turned out fine. We have a nice little community, I have a new project, and I still get to work on exciting things right here at AR. It’s business as usual—or not.
I hadn’t given myself enough credit, and I hadn’t accounted for Parkinson’s Law.
Everyone realizes this—you experience it all the time—but it doesn’t make getting started any easier.
Something new always looks and sounds scary. That is, until you do it. Once it’s done, it doesn’t take long to become routine. You forget you ever had trouble doing it in the first place.
Try to remember this the next time you find yourself saying: “I’d like to do the right thing, but I don’t know if I can handle it.”
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Photo by: bara-koukoug
That’s the best part of life changes. It doesn’t take long for new things to become part of your routine – and then it’s just as difficult to imagine life without the change as it was to imagine life /with/ it before the shift.
I agree whole-heartedly with taking some time to be introspective to realize and take out limiting beliefs.
But, in the spirit of encouraging debate, a few caveats:
Maybe, instead of the answer being to just pile a new project, we could individually test and train a dependable capacity for hard focus (deliberate practice). When we apply this to a rare and valuable skill set and test our ability to make it (or money), we could KNOW, not hope, that it’ll all work out. A scary leap like job-quitting, without a known skill set, is a justified fear.
Parkinson did his research on British bureaucracies, and found that the bureaucracies kept growing in staff as the empire crumbled (their workload dropped). His statistics found that growth can be unrelated to people working, that large institutions can behave irrationally, not on an individual level, but because of the relationships between people.
Ideas to mull over.
Do the right thing, but be MEGA-rigorous when choosing the right path.
Cheers
Yes, this concept comes with the caveat that before you take on something new, it needs to be the right thing to do.
How you determine what the right thing to do is up to you, though it’s usually not that hard to figure out—it tends to be whatever you’re most scared to do…
The easiest thing for me is to start something. Starting something never really bothered me all that much. What scares me to death is the proverbial “second day” when all the excitement and cheering stops. When everyone forgets you and you are alone, grinding it out. The first day of my diet and exercise kick is easy, but the next day I’m sore as hell and what to gorge on cookies and ice cream. The first day of my site launch was awesome. I was pumped. Sure it was a lot to tackle but optimism ran high. On the second day I looked at my traffic stats and got seriously depressed. The magic of launch day was over and I was left with one post and no visitors.
This is why internal motivation is so important. Having some kind of outside influence can be helpful, but at the end of the day, you’re only going to stick to the things you really care about and would do even if no one was watching or helping.
At its core, fear of change is just fear of the unknown. If we paused for a minute to consider just how creative we are–consider the catastrophes we imagine when contemplating a risk–we might be more ready to act.
Every single time I’ve pushed the Go button, it’s turned out okay. Maybe not how I originally envisioned, but always, always good and worth my time.
Also have to be careful, when looking back over our accomplishment, that we do not find some way of justifying doing the wrong thing, even if it’s for the right reason, or doing the right thing the wrong way. (As was done in the example of “Who will pick the cotton”)
Hey Tyler,
it’s a perplexing question, how much is too much and how little is too little, and what are we really capable of. Sometimes we don’t find out until we really push ourselves, sometimes we get there by adding a little bit at a time until we find that it’s around right.
But with respect to change, I truly believe, that with the right amount of leverage and motivation, that we can find the impetus to change any habit or belief. But it’s finding the right combination that can be challenging (not ever impossible).
Getting started is always the hardest part. My problem has been “getting ready to get ready.” I’m finally learning to get over the fact that I don’t know everything. I just have to start.
Humans have such wonderfully creative minds. Looking at problems that have been solved on a small scale, I wonder why there seem to be so many roadblocks to moving them to the larger scale (clean water, adequate food, clean fuels, etc.). Maybe it’s those nasties that we’ve created along the way (government and big business) that block our own good intentions. But that’s another post…
Well, the smaller the scale is, the more personally invested people feel about it. When things grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to get people to keep caring as much.
Maybe the answer is to find the commonalities of the best small-scale solutions and repeat them rather than try to take them and turn them into something else?
This is so true and applies to many things in life. For me, becoming vegan was like that. I saw that animals are being tortured just so that humans can eat them or their products. I didn’t want to be a part of that any longer. But at first, I thought: But what am I going to eat?? Turns out that about a year after giving up all animal products, I am much fitter and in perfect health, eating lots of good food and having a better conscience to boot.
Thanks for your articles!
Tyler I have not yet found an article I dislike from you! Your words of wisdom inspire me every week! You continue to help me as well as others face our fears so that we can live a better life! Thank you!
Nice. This post was encouraging for me as I have a few projects that I am planning on launching but have been tentative about because of the normal blog/website stuff I have been working on. Thanks for the kick in the pants- and the shout out to parkinson’s law (so true!).