It was the end of summer 2021. I was seated at my collapsible desk in my apartment in Oakland. The sun filtered in through the blinds of the window to my left.
I typed into the small chat at the bottom right of my computer screen. I was excited but tired. I had just finished writing my second book. Through months of editing, I had submitted my book, edited it, designed the cover, formatted it, and prepped it to market.
In the chat, I was saying a farewell to the editor I had been working with.
He asked: “So what’s next?”
“Nothing much, going to take a break. Just focus on my business for now.”
“What are you going to write next though? I can see another book from Toffy’s Divide.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, there are so many characters in there that are interesting.”
I paused for a while, then responded:
“You know I’ve been thinking about writing about this character, Musta, and how he made the Mixtape.”
He replied: “Oh yeah, Musta. That would be a great follow up. Go for it.”
And just like that, as Michael Corleone said in Godfather 3: Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me right back in.
The Waiter’s Dilemma:
A lot of us wait for the grand moment to begin.
We want the clouds to part.
The trumpets to play.
The paved road to appear before we get things going.
Each day passes and we build more thoughts on a mountain of inaction, hoping that one day all the thoughts will compost and fuel us to start.
It doesn’t.
Thoughts just don’t turn into actions.
Decisions do.
You have to decide to act
The flow of time is continuous.
Time waits for no one.
You have to flow with it.
In essence, some people wonder when is the best time to start.
There is no starting. There is no stopping. There is just continuing.
The question is will you continue how you were or continue in a different direction?
3 Steps to Flow Towards Your Goals
When I narrated the audiobook of my first book, within the first three chapters I became frustrated.
“Why didn’t I catch these typos?”
“Why does this sentence sound weird?”
Just before the book got published, I read the entire book out loud to catch everything. A task that took about eight straight lower-back hurting hours. I also had a team of editors, copy editors, and proof readers.
How did we not catch these errors?
I reached out to my editor, saying “hey I’m not sure what’s going on here, not quite happy with the state of the book.”
He responded: “This is normal. As a writer, you’ll always find something to improve. Writing is never done. Writing is rewriting.”
Those words stuck with me. He said if he had left me with the book for ten years, I’d still be rewriting it.
Just like me, most people get stuck on starting and stopping, when there’s only continuing. The main way to overcome is to reframe your mind about what you consider as starting. When you stop building up the starting point into the huge mount to overcome, you will approach your life in a more active way, gain more clarity from taking action, and use feedback to inspire further action.
Here are the three steps to flow into your goals.
1. Continue
There is no start point.
There is no destination.
There’s just the journey ahead.
The only way to get clarity is to take action and get feedback. That could be as simple as writing down your thoughts, talking to an expert or a mentor, or reaching out to interview a prospective customer.
In every moment, there is resistance.
As the author, Steven Pressfield said in his book, The War of Art, resistance is the thin veil between the life you’re living and the “unlived life” within.
Resistance will use anything in its arsenal of trick to pull you away from living a purposeful life. It shows up as distraction, perfectionism, overthinking, judgment, self-doubt.
Resistance has one job and that’s to pull you away from what you really want to do.
You can use this to your advantage. Whenever you feel resistance, just go the opposite direction.
When you go the other direction and act, you gain experience, which is the best teacher. You embody your experience to know the next best thing to start or rather, continue on.
You’re better off trying something out and failing to revise your plans than trying to hype up some perfect plan in your mind without testing it out. The more you get attached to the plan, the more you become trapped by it.
Break away.
Take a step forward.
Just make sure you continue.
2. Compound
The compounding effect is your best friend.
You are probably very familiar with this. That’s how bankers and those finance bros make money off the backs of their customer. Just a little continuous interest that stacks up on one another. The more the principal capital, the longer the time, the more the interests compounds.
This is not a financial lesson.
But this is exactly what happens. When you continue, you build skill capital. If you choose to be deliberate about it and you prioritize learning, every day you get better at understanding your journey. The longer you go, the more the effects of what you do compounds.
Prioritize learnings.
Continue on your journey.
Remember the compounding effect.
3. Communicate
You can be the best technician in your town, but if no one knows about you or your services, everyone will keep going back to Charlie the mediocre technician with his corny commercials.
Your work should speak for itself.
The is the master’s magic.
But before you get to mastery, you have to communicate to attract more work, so you can keep mastering your craft.
On your journey, you will continue, your skills will compound, but if you don’t know how to frame your story, you will be leaving a lot to chance. You will be neglecting leverage.
This is not all about what you communicate to the world, it’s the story you tell yourself too.
As you go along your journey, it’s a good idea to reflect, understand why you keep taking the step forward, and distill what your favorable next step will be. Tell a story so you understand it first.
Use that to build your communication skills, so you can communicate what you want to contribute to the world or the people who need it.
Your skills are important.
The stories around the skill is just as important.
Make it a practice to tell your story.
Build hope to start a new chapter
The story you tell yourself is just as important as the story you tell the world.
The story here is that there’s no starting or stopping in fluid time, there’s only continuing that leads to compounding, that is elevated by communications.
You already have all it takes to get going.
So just continue, compound, communicate.
Yours truly,
Nifemi
P.S. If you read this far, what’s one thing that resonated with you in this letter?
