Rule #14 If you're going to do one thing today, do this! Start!

Every day you wake up you are at the starting line. I don’t care what happened yesterday or 10 years ago. If the sun came up, there is still breath in your lungs then there is life to be lived. Every sing day is a new start.

“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”-Zig Ziglar.

It’s the hardest yet most difficult part of any journey-getting started. I remember I once had a real estate agent who worked for me. He would sit in his office for hours studying for his GRI (the highest designation for a licensed Realtor). He would knock out one class and move to another. He would come to sales meetings with new insight and knowledge he had learned.

The problem was he wouldn’t leave his office. Cocooned away from the the real world in his office, he wouldn’t do the one thing that would actually make him a successful Realtor. Besides crushing those GRI exams he became an amateur Meteorologist thanks to Yahoo Weather.

The one thing keeping so much of us from reaching our goals is simply our refusal to start. We are waiting for the perfect day. We are waiting to have just enough money. We are waiting to have just the right amount of insight. If you want something, get started now.

If you want to get stronger, start working to get stronger. If you want to be a writer start writing. If you want to start investing start investing. Just because you don’t have the perfect strength and conditioning program, the ideal prose, or a ton of money to invest does not mean you can’t start. Do it. Do it now.

Start by opening an online investment account and fund it with $100. I guarantee once you take that first small step, setting up your auto draft will be infinitely easier. Go for a 20 minute walk. Boom! You just started to exercise. Write one incredible sentence on a piece of notebook paper. Bam! You just started writing. Starting does not mean finishing. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed with how daunting it will be to finish a grand task that many people won’t start. The thing is if it’s as great of an endeavor as you believe it will be then it won’t be daunting at all. It will be exhilarating figuring out the journey.

I love the story of how circus elephants (when they had circus elephants) were trained to stay put. When the elephants were small trainers would tie one of their legs to a rope that was attached to a stake in the ground. The elephant couldn’t move the stake and thus would stay in place. As the elephant grew weighing upwards of 11,000 lbs. it still thought it couldn’t move the stake. The elephant had become conditioned to thinking it was forever bound to the stake.

Life often does this to us. We become convinced we are tied to our circumstances unable to move. The distance between starting to uproot the stake is the distance between our ears. Once we realize the greatest limiter of our action is ourselves we can start to approach life much differently.

One of my closest friends told me if I waited to start my podcast until I thought it was perfect, I would be waiting too long. I took his advice and started. Thousands of downloads later I’m so thankful I took his advice. Are the early episodes great? I doubt it. Are the current episodes as good as the future ones will be? I doubt that. However, I can tell you this. I feel a lot better now having started than I did when I was just in my home office consternating over getting to it.

As Dale Carnegie said, “Every day is a new life to a wise man.”

You rule!

Jason

Jason Wright is the host of the Texas Titans Podcast. He is also the Founder and CEO of Texas Titans Media, LLC. Jason is the author of “Push Play: Taking Your Life Off Pause.” He is also a keynote speaker and business consultant. He and his wife Jemilynn live in Tyler, TX. To learn more about Jason please visit JASONWRIGHTNOW.COM