Start Somewhere

February 11, 2016

Snow Business

Winter is here, at last, and as the primary snow shoveler in my family, let me say I’m none too happy about it. The past week brought me a foot of snow, and it’s not gonna shovel itself.

Staring out my kitchen window at twelve heavy inches of snow burying my driveway, it was daunting to imagine how I’d get the driveway clear, and just thinking about the work involved seemed more than I thought I could take. I’m not as young as I once was, and it sure seems like they’re making heavier snow than they used to. Plus – when did my back start to hurt all the time?

I didn’t do it. I didn’t shovel. I put it off for nearly a week, thinking it wasn’t really winter yet, thinking it would melt on its own, thinking the snow fairy would grant my wish for a clear driveway, thinking – somehow – that, if I just came up with the right plan, I’d be able to eliminate the snow without sloughing through it, one shovelful at a time.

Time to get to shoveling.

No matter what end result you seek, there’s only one way to get there. You’ve got to start. It may sound silly, may sound obvious, may seem like advice not worth giving … but we’re an easily overwhelmed species. Nothing ever got finished that didn’t first get started.

Come to think of it, that’s a foundational step in every project we work on at OST. We help our clients get things started. Our clients aren’t in the IT business – they’re looking to us to HELP them make smart IT decisions. That’s not easy – for them or for us. When you’re working with complex corporate systems, trying to determine where (and how) to begin can be overwhelming, even paralyzing. It can seem impossible to know where to begin, and sometimes it’s easier to maintain the status quo out of fear that anything else seems overwhelming.

My simple advice? Start. Start somewhere. Just start. You don’t have to know where you’re going to end before you start, and accepting that you DON’T know is powerful – it opens you up to opportunities for discovery that’d you’d be blind to if you thought you had to figure out where to end before you started. Start somewhere. Just start.

That driveway’s not going to get clear without a first shovelful. Dig in. Get that shovel down to the pavement and give it a good toss. Put your fear and loathing aside, toss away your anxiety and paralysis, and I bet you’ll discover the same thing I did:

It feels good to get started.