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

— Zig Ziglar

This is part one of my two-part essay on pursuing any activity that one finds passionate.

Have you ever seen a world-class pianist play, or an Olympic swimmer swim, or someone speed-solve a Rubik’s Cube? You might have seen someone be so adept at something that it’s a pleasure to just watch it over and over. We all wonder as to how they make it look so graceful, almost to the point of being magical.

It looks as if it comes so easily to them, doesn’t it? As if they were born just to do that almost exclusively. We call them a natural. More often than not, we would be wrong! Yes, there are exceptions. Some are probably what people in the behavioural industry call ‘genetically gifted’. But exceptions are just that, exceptions. Most high-performers would not attest their achievement to being a ‘natural’. Guess what they attest it to? Practise. Hundreds of thousands of hours of practise until what was once a conscious incompetence becomes an unconscious competence.

The question is what should we do to get there. The answer is as obvious as the question:

1. Start
2. Practise

which certainly happens to fall under the two categories synonymous with the two-part essay that I’m writing. Coincidence? Maybe not. Anyway, they’re the two halves of a whole. If being proficient is the recipe, then they’re the main ingredients. For now, I’d like to talk about the first and leave the latter for part two. This is partly because each of them is intricate in nature and the reasons for their neglect vary between the two, not to mention the fact that I tend to drone on and on with an un-healthy disregard to the word count.

Sometimes, all you should do is just start. Don’t think too much about it. Don’t worry about the result, at least not when you begin. Don’t worry about performance. Just indulge in the activity that you like. It doesn’t matter how long it takes before you master it. It shouldn’t matter. Do it because you want to do it, nothing more. Some day you’ll look back and realize how far you’ve come and the primary reason why you would have been able to achieve that would be because you started.

I’ll give you a story of mine. Over the years I’ve watched a lot of videos of people solving Rubik’s Cube. I’ve always wondered how dexterous they are at solving it. I wanted to solve just like them but I’ve somehow convinced myself that it takes a prodigious skill to be able to solve, probably because I’ve seen only youngsters of the age demographic from 8-18 participate in such competitions and they solve it in less than 10 seconds. I never managed to google for help on how to solve one. In other words, I never started. A few years ago I happened to have a cube that belonged to a friend of mine. I casually googled for help to find out how to solve the cube while I was at work. I was just following the steps in the tutorial and in about 10 minutes I had a completely solved Rubik’s Cube in my hand. I couldn’t believe my own eyes. I was in awe of myself. I got addicted and started reading up more on Cubing and found out about speed-cubing which is solving the cube as fast as possible. Today I solve it in roughly about 54 seconds which is multiple times faster than the time I used to take to solve in the initial days.

If I look back, the single most thing that was important was not how much I practised, but that I started somewhere. I googled for a tutorial on how to solve and followed the instructions. Soon the habit kicked in and now cubing is part of my everyday hobby. I solve it a few times daily just to stay in touch. Recently, this has motivated two of my colleagues to learn to solve. They can now solve and are on their way to practising speed-cubing. They could do because they started.

It is said that 80% of success is showing up. Then what prevents from starting? May be laziness, lack of time, being too busy with other (un)important things around us, and so on. It’s easy to fix these. For example, try scheduling the activity that you love to pursue first thing in the morning. If needed, wake up earlier than usual and do it. If waking up earlier becomes the hurdle then wake up earlier for a couple of days and just walk around your home. All you’re trying to achieve is to get acclimatised to the new habit of waking up earlier than usual. Once you’ve mastered waking up at the desired time, then work on the activity that you want to pursue. It shouldn’t matter how you perform. At least not now. Stop assessing the quality of the outcome. You cannot be good at it in a few days, at least not the outcome you’d eventually expect when you master the skill.

On a side note, if you are at a loss of time because of Netflix, then stop watching TV Series. Movies are okay, they end at a maximum of 2.5 hours. Over. Period. On the contrary, TV Series are addictive and they run forever. When you’re done with one season, many more crop up. And once you’ve watched enough TV Series the ‘you-may-like’ suggestions are so enticing that it’s going to drag you down a rabbit hole.

We all have dull days, and for some, it lasts for weeks. I realized that taking up new activities during such times make us focus on doing it slowly and correctly and not worry about time. Also, the ‘satisfaction’ that comes out of achieving something helps in re-affirming our belief that with enough practise anything is possible. I wrote the word satisfaction in single quotes intentionally, as I don’t have a word to express that feeling at this point. I call it satisfaction because it is more of a long-term feeling as it transcends us into a different dimension every time we indulge in the activity.

So, just start!

*roll credits*