Paralyzed by potential
Why the vision of your perfect future is keeping you stuck.
Big dreams might kill as many projects as they start.
One of the unique gifts of being human is our extraordinary imagination. In addition to our imagination, we have more visibility into the world of possibility than ever before.
Billie Jean King is credited with saying, "If you see it, you can be it.” Today, we can SEE what it looks like for anyone, anywhere, to achieve their dream.
Inspiration is at an all-time high.
Then one day, you have a flash of insight. An idea appears – seemingly out of nowhere – and you can’t stop thinking about it. When you tell people about it, their eyes light up. They’re excited and supportive – “You should do that!”
Everything and everyone around you seems to reinforce just how good this idea is.
And yet…you haven’t started.
You tell yourself that you just have a few more details to work through. This isn’t quite the right time – better to wait until “things slow down.” Every now and then, you get a sudden burst of courage, and you sit down to start.
But maybe I should change the laundry first.
Actually, let me just check my email…
Suddenly, you glance at the clock and realize you’ve been scrolling Instagram for an hour and lost your motivation.
Maybe tomorrow.
The perfect idea
When an idea is just an idea, it’s perfect. Our imagination has this vision for how it will change our lives. We don’t know exactly when or how long it will take, but we’re confident this idea holds the key to a better future.
The details are fuzzy – just chemicals and synapses firing in our brain, after all. But when we sit down to get started, the details begin to matter. Uncertainty enters the equation – and that’s much less comfy than the feeling of the fuzzy, perfect idea in our mind.
That uncomfy feeling makes us pause and whispers in our ear some convenient distraction, like, “It’s a good day to clean the garage.”
An existential threat
The longer we wait to take action on the perfect idea, the more perfect it feels. And the more perfect it feels…the harder it is to get started. As time passes, we get completely enamored with this perfect idea, and the uncertainty from DOING THE WORK feels like a threat.
The threat is that maybe this idea isn’t perfect.
Maybe I can’t do this.
It threatens your very identity. Not your current identity, but an unrealized identity you’ve created for yourself and become completely attached to. In your mind, you’re already living in the future where this idea is real.
If I can’t do this, then I can’t BECOME this.
But that identity isn’t real! And it never will be if you don’t start moving.
The salve
Action absorbs anxiety. Greater than the risk of trying and failing yourself is the risk of seeing someone else succeeding with this idea while you sit idly by.
Dan Pink has been studying regret with his recent book, The Power of Regret, and found that as we age, our principal regrets are not our failed attempts, but our failures to attempt at all.
The truth is, no idea comes out perfect. Our understanding is incomplete, our assumptions are often wrong, but we don’t learn that until we try.
You need more data.
You can’t realize that future in your mind until you take action.
We all experience the quick tumble from peak confidence. But imperfect action – the first little step – gets you out of the trough of sorrow and on the path to becoming the person you saw in your mind.
I wrote this for myself
I’ve been lurking on Substack for a month now. In my mind, this publication will be the perfect outlet for my more personal writing – things that go beyond the creator space (what I publish under the Creator Science brand).
Feedback has been positive! I’ve grown a following of ~500 using just Notes, and 200 subscribers here before publishing anything!
And yet…the idea was too perfect.
What if no one likes my other ideas?
What if I’m not actually a good writer?
What if Substack isn’t a place where I feel welcome?
It was time to take the first step.
Thank you for reading it.
This is EXACTLY what I’ve been struggling with since starting my business and probably part of why I have pivoted way too often. Reality didn’t hold up to the perfect idea in my head which made me doubt the idea and switch to a different one. A friend recently called me out on that; he said, you seem to freak out every time things get too concrete and then reject everything and start over. This led me to change my whole approach and share my business decisions in public (so that I have to justify them and can’t keep doing this). I’ve finally managed to go deep into the details and even sign a client for that offer and start working with them. It’s not as glamorous as it was in my head but it’s becoming slightly easier to deal with that and there’s also some fun and beauty in the details that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Thanks for writing this, Jay!
I love that, 'action absorbs anxiety'. It reminds me of this wonderful piece from Henry David Thoreau:
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”