Why You Have to START before You Are Ready : 3 BIG REASONS

In 2018, Jennifer Qiao, a beautiful Asian-American young lady, was planning her big day, her wedding day. Despite all the excitement, she was struggling to find a modern version of a cheongsam (a traditional Chinese wedding dress) and tea supplies that could match her modern taste. That was when she and her Maid of Honour came up with a new business idea that was eventually called East Meet Dress. Neither of them had experience in fashion design nor had ever got involved in any form of entrepreneurship. Nobody even knew if they could find a market for their idea and turn it into something profitable.

Vivian Chan, the co-founder, started with a landing page to see if anyone is interested in what they have to offer. After seeing some interest, they built a Shopify website with only 1 dress design, and that was it. A month later, they landed their first customer and the rest is history. Today, through a lot of hard work and trial and error, their brand is one of the most successful and well-respected ones in their space.

“Even though we weren’t very confident that we would be able to make this a reality, we decided to just start small and test out our idea quickly. We never truly felt ready to start a business, let alone make custom wedding dresses”

– Vivian Chan.

This is just a single example of countless stories of creators, artists, writers and entrepreneurs where they each had an idea and acted on it with a small start. Starting a journey without being fully ready may seem like one way of doing things. However, this in fact, is the only approach that leads to seeing results and here are three main reasons why:

That’s How You Progress

Let’s say you look at your friends or you go online and see all these successful people doing amazing things with their lives. The first thing you might say to yourself is “I have fallen so behind!”. You need to understand that it is fundamentally human to measure yourself against other people. However, using what others are doing as evidence that they are ahead and taking yourself out of the race until you are “ready” is where the mistake happens; Because you are only in race with yourself. ALWAYS.

Adapting the mentality of ‘Let’s start doing it and see what comes next’ in a creative work is the way to progress. People who have accomplished anything worthy have learned to embrace the unknown and have kept putting one foot in front of the other until they have reached the destination they were going for.

There’s no right time, only right NOW!

All of us think about starting a project with a positive image in mind. No one thinks about failing and throwing in the towel. We all imagine the end result in the best possible way, that our work has driven a lot of great outcomes and that we have nailed it. This creates the illusion for most people that there’s a perfect time to start; a time when their work is good enough, everybody is going to admire it and it will lead them to Hall of Fame.

The reality is when we watch the people whom we love their work, we get fascinated by what they have achieved already. But we don’t take into account the fact that our favorite actor who has amazed countless viewers around the world, one day was acting as Pinocchio in a primary school play in the middle of nowhere not knowing a thing about acting. In order to get where you want to go yo have to start and you have to do it in imperfection.

YOU Will NEVER Feel Ready and… You Will Quit!

Wait, what?!… YES. I know this because I have done the same crap to myself!

As a video creator you might feel like you need to have the perfect camera and the greatest lighting equipment before you start filming your first video or start a YouTube channel; Or as a writer you might assume that your writing should be as good as Darren Rowse’s posts before you start publishing in your first blog. Not having the tools and/or the skills to produce the “perfect” work that you unfairly expect from yourself leads to a lot of useless debating and dwelling inside your head. Eventually, you end up losing this unnecessary battle and finally give up on your unique gift which could have the potential to serve a lot of people in this world.

Your enemy is not you making mistakes, and it is not you changing your mind and it is not even your fear of screwing up. The greatest enemy that you need to defeat is Not Getting Started. To defeat it, all you need to do — as Vivian Chan says — is to start small and test your idea quickly, learn from it and take the next step forward.