Just get started on the thing you want to do. There's no perfect way to do it. The worst thing you can do is nothing. The best thing you can do is to get started.

Those ideas capture the reason why I started this blog and why I chose "getting started" as the topic of my very first post. I've loved writing my whole life, but I had never put my writing out there for other people to see. I knew I wanted to start a small blog so I could share my thoughts with the world, but I spent so long trying to make the "perfect" website for the blog that I didn't even spend any time writing articles. What good is the best blog website in the world if there's nothing on it to read?

I recently read the book Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the creator of Nike. Knight loved running and running shoes, and he decided he wanted to start a company selling Japanese running shoes in the United States. Knight went to Japan and asked leaders at Onitsuka, the running shoe company, if he could order shoes from them and sell them in America. Onitsuka agreed, but they didn't know that Knight didn't even have a company yet. He needed to borrow $50 from his dad just to cover the cost of his first order and sold the shoes out of the trunk of his car at local track meets. Long before Air Jordans and the world-famous swoosh logo, Knight had a dream of selling shoes and knew he had to just get started somewhere, no matter how small.

I doubt that this blog will ever be as big as Nike, but today I finally decided that if I really wanted to share my writing that I had to get started. I knew that if I just created the simplest website I possibly could to power my blog that over time I could tweak it and make it more aesthetically pleasing. I told myself that all I needed was a home page where I could see all of my posts and then a page with the content for each post. That's it! To get started, nothing else mattered. I just needed something that worked, just like all Phil Knight needed to start Nike was some shoes.

Stop trying to get the right answer

I was always a good student in school. I had to work hard and spent countless late nights studying alone in the library, but as long as I diligently reviewed the material my instructors covered in class, I did well.

In the tests and assignments we have in school, there is almost always just one right answer. What's 9 + 4? 13. Who wrote the play Romeo and Juliet? William Shakespeare. What are the powerhouses of the cell? The mitochondria. If these questions were on a test, you would only get full points if you answered 100% correctly. In most school classes, you can do everything perfectly if you get all the right answers all the time. It's not easy, but it's possible.

My studiousness served me well when it came time to graduate college and get a job in my field, but as my college days get further and further behind me, the more I think about the ways that the mindset I acquired in college has fallen short when it comes to facing the problems I have as an adult. Most of the time, there is no single right answer. Sometimes there are many right answers. Sometimes you won't know the right answer at all until you've tried a lot of different wrong answers. Sometimes the right answer for you will be different than the right answer for someone else.

Thomas Edison famously tried 10,000 different ideas for the lightbulb before he finally found one that worked. I never had a single test in school where I could have tried 10,000 wrong answers before getting full points for the right answer, but real life isn't like school. There are no points and there are no grades. Edison didn't have a study guide from a teacher that taught him everything he needed to know about inventing the light bulb. There was no course he could take or book he could read that would tell him exactly what he needed to do. He never would have succeeded, though, if hadn't started trying in the first place.

Conclusion

Do you want to start a business? Just get started. Do you want to learn a new language? Just get started. Do you want to write a book? Just get started. Setbacks are inevitable, but success will never come if you don't get started.

There is no single right way to start your business, learn a new language, or write your book. But you do have to get started. Take all the courses and read all the books you want, but if you're putting off starting your project because you want to do it the "right" way, then you're wasting your time. You're going to try a lot of things that don't work, but you have to try them in the first place to know that they don't work. You'll learn a lot on your journey, and one day you will look back and be proud of what you've accomplished, but the only way you'll ever have that journey at all is to get up and get started.