Just getting started

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” — Arthur Ashe

“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” — Rumi

“Whether a decision is good or bad can change based on how you act after the choice is made. You can’t learn all the lessons beforehand. You learn a lot about what you want in a marriage after getting married. You discover what type of career you enjoy after doing a lot of work. And so it goes in nearly every area of life. In many cases, what you wish you knew ahead of time can only be learned after the decision is made.” — James Clear

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The Ovsiankina Effect

= The Hemingway Effect

Definition

• describes that once we start a task, we feel a drive to complete it—even if we’ve only made minimal progress.
• refers to the innate human urge to finish tasks we’ve initiated.

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Start even if you can only do a little. Once you get started, it is much easier to continue going. Make that decision to get started.

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萬事起頭難

“Begin now to be what you will be hereafter.” — St. Jerome

“The secret to getting ahead is getting started.” — Mark Twain

“The heaviest weight at the gym is the front door.” — Ed Latimore

• It’s easier to steer a moving ship than to put a stationary one into motion.
• My yoga teacher always starts class with this line: “Congrats. The hardest part is over. You showed up.” I feel like that mindset applies to most other things. Worrying about a task often is far worse than the task itself. Starting is the hardest part.
• The Scandinavians / In Norwegian, they have a phrase dørstokmilla (The Doorstep Mile)
  • Meaning that the first mile away from your front door is the hardest of all.
  • It is the psychological threshold that we have to get over in order to go outside, to leave the comfort of the house behind, and set foot into nature.

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Work has a sort of activation energy, both per day and per project. It’s just about matching the required activation energy—overcoming that initial hurdle.

• “The Physics of Productivity” by James Clear
• [1]
  • Newton’s First Law of Motion, often called the law of inertia :¹ ‘An object at rest stays at rest, while an object in motion stays in motion, unless acted on by an external imbalanced force.’ In other words, if an object is still, it will remain still; if an object is moving, it will continue moving, unless another force (like gravity, or air resistance) prevents it from doing so.
  • As Newton recognized, it takes way more energy to get started than it does to keep going. When you’re doing nothing, it’s easy to carry on doing nothing. And when you’re working, it’s much easier to carry on working. When you feel like you’ve tried everything to properly motivate yourself but you’re still procrastinating, you need one final boost to get started.
  • I like to think of the principle of inertia as a literal hump on a road. Imagine you’re about to cycle down a hill. You’ve got your helmet on, your gears are well oiled, and you’re itching to get started. There’s just one problem. You need to cycle uphill a little before you get to the long slope down. It’s going to take a burst of energy to get over the hump, and exerting that energy might not be the most pleasant thing in the world. But once you’ve overcome it, you’ll be cycling down-hill, the wind in your hair, feeling better than ever and gliding on home.

Footnotes

1. from «Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica 自然哲學的數學原理» ↩

[1]

Abdaal A. Feel-Good Productivity: How To Do More Of What Matters To You. Celadon Books; 2024.