Remember, Your Journey Is Your Own
Are you having trouble getting started?
Remember, your journey is your own.
Pursuing any important-to-you goal is filled with a swing of emotions. I was excited to post my first couple of articles, but then I was struggling to write this one. Self–doubt questions kept arising. Will it be good enough? Will it help people? Isn’t there already a bunch of stuff out there?
Whenever you’re pursuing a big goal or trying something new, self–doubt is inevitable. There are many reasons that we make up for why we shouldn’t do something we want to do.
“Someone is already doing that” is one of the more popular reasons. I know that I have thought it.
And after thinking about it, my response to this and similar thoughts has become: so what? So what if someone is doing something great and you want to do the same? So what if your idea has competition? To be sure, you will need to do some thinking about how your idea/business will be unique — but competition alone is no reason to never start.
If someone has an awesome idea and is working on it and you want to do that too — that’s fine. Take their idea and then make it your own. And what if you fail and they do great? So what? Congratulate them, move on and try to do something else great, that’s what.
Your journey is your own and no one else’s. So many things will happen along the way to make your story unique that it doesn’t matter if the original idea came from someone or somewhere else. Ideas are powerful — but they are also cheap. Anyone can have an idea. Action gets it done and makes the idea worth having.
Am I endorsing lifestyle plagiarism and saying that you should just replicate everyone else’s goals? Of course not. In fact, if you want someone’s idea to work for your life and your circumstances, then you’ll have to do some thinking of your own, anyway.
Plus, you will never succeed in the long run without being genuine, so simply trying to copy every good idea will never work out. What I am saying is don’t feel bad if someone’s good idea sparks your interest as well. Take that little idea and turn it into your own big story.
The funny thing is that when everyone decides something is awesome, then we don’t feel bad about wanting to do the same thing. It’s like the more people that want to do something, the more OK it is to say you want to do that as well.
Thousands of runners want to run in the Boston Marathon, so if you say that’s your goal, then everyone is like, “Wow, that’s so awesome.” But if you make it your own and say that you want to run a marathon on every continent, you’ll start to hear, “Where did you get that idea from?”
Tell the world to stuff it. Go do something awesome. Whether you’re the first or the millionth to do it.