How to approach big scary tasks?
WHAT
Big tasks are scary.
But, you do want to work on them, to reap the rewards.
If only you didn’t have that the feeling of void in the center of the chest.
Like a black hole sucking all your hope.
That’s fear.
Resistance.
Stress.
WHY
Fear of failing.
Fear of embarrassing yourself.
Fear of affirming your own self-doubt.
Fear of succeeding even, which life changes will you need to apply to keep going?
But mostly, fear of the unknown.
Like a fog blocking your vision.
Making you unable to see where to place your foot.
How to move first?
How to even approach this?
A fog of war.
Walking into the unknown, the fog of war… [generated on Midjourney AI]
But we have to find ways to move forward.
Ways to step into the fog.
Why? Because:
We will never make new progress if we can’t act
We can use this internal friction as an opportunity to grow and strengthen our selves [“the obstacle is the way“!]
HOW
One method I have found that helps me, is to just get started.
Find any step in the general direction, however small, and take it.
Don’t stress over how impactful this first tiny step will be.
That’s not our goal now - “impact”.
That’s for later.
Our current goal is to get over the fear and get over the “static friction”.
Or as psychologist Jordan Peterson said - “find something you could, and you would, do”.
Here are a few benefits to finding a tiny possible step in the right direction:
Some of the fear of starting will dissipate
You will feel a sense of success upon completing this tiny task
You will start gathering signal on how to proceed from there
So you see, the only way to start clearing the fog of war, is to step into it.
Let’s look at some examples.
Stepping into the darkness [generated on Midjourney AI]
EXAMPLE #1: PLANNING TEAM ROADMAP
In 2021, I started taking the lead on the yearly planning process of my team at work.
I had no idea how to start.
So, as my then-manager-now-mentor suggested, I just sent out reach-outs to different people in my organization.
I had no idea what to expect, and what will I do with the answers.
But as soon as people started replying, I started building a picture of where to go from there.
Eventually we built our yearly roadmap.
Of course real life doesn’t go exactly as planned.
But that roadmap helped us see things much more clearly.
More on planning vs plans here.
An illustration of a map [generated on Midjourney AI]
EXAMPLE #2: STARTING THIS BLOG
I knew I wanted to start posting ideas and tools about resilience.
But I had no idea where to start.
So I just did.
And it was scary as hell!
I opened Wix, and started playing around.
I learned a bunch of things, and then scrapped that iteration.
I then tried another blogging service which quickly turned out to be not for me.
By then I already knew a bunch of useful things about blogging, web-hosting, and such.
It was easy to start from scratch on Squarespace [this platform].
But even then, it took about 5 iterations to get to a state where I’m ready to publish a blog.
And it was still, scary as hell!
If instead of taking the first steps, I would have stayed in a “think-about-it” state, I would probably not have been here, writing a new article in my fully operational blog.
TAKEAWAYS
Starting a big task is scary, and that is ok.
Take any step in the right general direction, no matter how small.
The first step can even be asking someone else for help or their opinion
