There’s a hope that when we start creating a new habit, we’ll master it and never have to worry about it again; or when we start a new project that it’ll go perfectly. Unfortunately, life never goes according to our plans. We travel, and eating and exercise habits go out the door. We get sick, and our meditation habit falls off. We have visitors, and our writing project falls into a deep abyss.
I know from my own experience, and coaching thousands of others, that habits and projects are a messy affair. We get good at building and maintaining 5–6 habits, or we get off to an amazing start with a new project, and then everything falls apart when our lives get disrupted. And this becomes a huge problem — we get discouraged!
But what if the disruption and falling off aren’t the problem? What if the problem is our hope that we’ll never have to get disrupted and that things will always go perfectly?
This hope is, of course, greatly misguided. Things don’t ever go smoothly, progress is never linear, and we’ll always get disrupted. It would be best to give up that hope and instead deal with the reality of our lives.
What we need to do is get good at starting, and then starting again. And again. This is an incredible skill that becomes a superpower; when everyone else is wringing their hands about how much they suck at life, how difficult things are, how everything has fallen apart. Instead, we just focus on starting again, and let go of all the stress.
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