Get Started!

So, we’re a month into the New Year.  What have you done so far?

Last month, I posted my fun, hopefully funny, Random Resolution Generator, because, well, everyone seems to make those annual New Year’s Resolutions, but who ever follows through?  As it turns out, almost no one does.  In fact, most people don’t even start, much less follow though.  And, really, getting started is everything.

Go read that last article I just linked to, then come back.  It’s okay, I’ll wait.
Back already?  Great!
So, here’s the thing.  Momentum is real.  Inertia is something that effects more than celestial bodies and speeding cars and billiard balls in physics homework.  It’s a “thing”, as the physicists say.  Bodies at rest want to stay at rest.  Bodies in motion want to stay in motion.  Once a body is in motion in a particular trajectory, it wants to stay on that trajectory and not be diverted.  What’s more, it takes a lot more energy to divert or redirect something that’s already built up some momentum in a particular direction.  Strange, but true.
People are just bodies at rest or in motion.

Personally, I know that once I’m at “rest”, it’s really hard for me to get going again.  I mean, really hard.  To get myself to write this post and queue it up for publication, I had to force myself up out of a comfortable chair where I was wasting time channel-surfing.  I was “at rest”.  But, now that I’ve gotten going, I have plans to write, or edit, several posts, both here and at Diary of a Network Geek, while I’m in a “writing mood”.  Would I have gotten into that mood while staying on my butt in front of the glass teat?  Probably not.  But, now that I’ve started, I’m building writing momentum which I’ll use to prepare original content for my sites that I’ve been theoretically planning on doing for weeks, but could never get motivated enough to actually start doing.
How far will I get?  Who knows, but I do know that, having started, I did more than if I had only thought about starting!

So, get yourself motivated!  Read that article and pick some project, any project, that you’ve been putting off and clock just ten or fifteen minutes worth of work on it and see how far you get.
Remember, you can’t finish anything if you don’t start it first!  So, get started!