A great danger to your happiness is the grand vision you may have for how achieving your goal is meant to be. It guarantees you will achieve nothing.

It ensures that you will be trapped in your current state, whether you like it or not. Thankfully, there’s an easy solution.

The problem of the grand vision

First, what do I mean by the grand vision? Well, think about this.

The beginning of January is the most exciting time of the year. It brings a fresh start for everyone; it’s the perfect opportunity for you to start radically improving your life. But consider where you are right now and where you wanted to be now, back then. If you have fallen short, what might have been the problem? Why do you hear about so many people losing steam around this time of the year?

You might have had a goal to read more, to read three books every single week while being able to recite every single word you read. You might have had the goal to build a good physique, to go to the gym every day for three hours, perform the most optimal routine and become buff after your first week. And those goals only lasted for one week.

Now, of course, this is an extreme exaggeration for the majority of people. You might not have even had the goals I mentioned earlier. But the problem of the grand vision is still relevant to you in some way.

You might never start something because you’re terrified of falling short of your ridiculously high expectations. You might not even realise how high your expectations are when you’re just starting out, which is the scary part. You might be afraid of failure but you’re just starting out, remember? There’s nothing to lose.

You might even be dreaming of the perfect conditions to spur consistent action, which will likely never come. And so you never start. You might even make a start but quit a few days later since you’re not doing as amazingly as you imagined. Maybe, the thing turned out to be far harder than you could have ever thought.

The problem of overconsumption

You might have also consumed an absurd amount of information from books and podcasts on how to grow a business, run every day, start the blog, or whatever. You might have been seeking the optimal and perfect way to do the thing, to spare yourself from the agony of making slow progress towards your goal. In fact, you might have consumed too much content.

It’s too effortless to consume content nowadays. We’re fed with so many tools and tips and pieces of advice which can certainly be useful. The reality is that they don’t serve us unless we use them in our lives.

There’s the danger of becoming trapped in endless consumption where the mere thought of taking action horrifies you. Why not remain comfortable (and decay) consuming and consuming, foolishly believing you’re progressing? You are learning after all, which is a good thing.

Just consuming means you don’t have to do the work. It makes life easier than it should be. You get an instant reward from it that simply can’t be gained from putting the reps in. And that’s addictive.

The problem of being social animals

We are also hard-wired into believing that the opinions of others matter; it’s human nature to seek approval from our peers. But often when we have the desire to start something, not everyone will respond positively. Some might be jealous. Some may judge or taunt you. Some may tell you to not take the risk.

That grand vision in your head may have led you into believing that everyone would be supportive and kind. Having that belief shattered would cause you to lose all motivation to continue your new-found passion. How sad would that be, to just give up like that?

The solution?

Start the thing.

This is common advice you’ve heard quite a few times by now, I’m sure. And it’s easier said than done. But making just a tiny step towards your goal will have a huge impact on your life. It can be the start of a new habit, and building it is like ‘cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time‘, as James Clear puts it well in the book Atomic Habits.

You also have to destroy your grand vision. Show no mercy towards it. The reality is that most days of working on any goal won’t be perfect. You won’t reach those ridiculously high expectations every day, right at the beginning. It just doesn’t make sense. There will be days when you won’t have the necessary energy, or you may simply feel bored. This will happen. You’ll have to keep going on regardless, even if it doesn’t feel perfect. You can’t beat yourself up if you fail.

Let’s use reading as an example.

A daily reading habit of just one page a day at the start is more sustainable than expecting an absurd amount from yourself like reading one hundred pages every day.

When starting reading, the simple act of picking up a book and reading is more productive than spending all your time watching videos on the absolute perfect way to read with an assortment of pretty highlighters and fancy pens for notetaking so you can remember everything.

Reading will give you knowledge and insights to level up your own life, while the people who judge you for it… are missing out, aren’t they?

So, if there’s anything that you are delaying starting in hope of the perfect moment coming, the main message is to do something small to move the needle forward. Starting sucks. It is ugly. It’s the worst part of the journey and I’m not glamorising it. But it’s extremely underrated.

Just think: everything has to start somewhere. You won’t regret that you started something when you’re one week in, over that first hurdle and making even a small bit of progress, will you? What you will regret is spending all your time fantasising, consuming, and caring too much about what others thought, meaning that you did nothing.