Waiting for perfection: 5 reasons why doing something beats doing nothing.

The ones for me are the mad ones.

I want to do everything. Or at the very least there are a million and one things that I really want to do: To travel freely. To be a benefit to others. To be creative. To earn so much money that I can spend the night on a chartered yacht drinking with my friends, without them paying a single penny, and to wake up in the morning better off than before the night started. To be remembered and respected. I want what I do to be unique, groundbreaking and for it have a genuinely positive impact on the lives of others. I want to jump from 20,000 feet, with a snowboard attached to my feet, land on a mountain with a piste that goes all the way to sea level and land in a clear blue sea and sun bathe, floating with cocktails delivered to me by bikini clad waitresses. I want to meet Marion Cotillard and steal her away from her bastard husband*. I want my own private slice of paradise where I can hang out with my wang out. I want all of this, and I’d really like it now. I’d be happy to wait until tomorrow I guess, but really I’d love it now. Instant success. Also, I want this to be achievable without having to risk a lot of money. Actually. I want no risk. And to own 100% of what I do. Complete control.

I want to be able to combine them all into one nice neat ball. One project. One passion that satisfies my desire to do everything. That fulfills me, but leaves me enough time to do fun things. I can start said project. Let’s call it project: bullshit.

Project: bullshit will change the world for the better. Not just my world. But THE world. The one where other people exist and I’m not the centre of it.

It’s taken me 1 year to this point of planning to create project: bullshit. A project that has been chopped and changed more times that I care to imagine. There was always something missing. Some reason why it wouldn’t work.

Where has this got me? A year of planning, dreaming and scheming and we’re back to square one. With the original idea. A simple idea. A ‘me too’ idea.

I’m fed up of waiting. In this year we could have already created something and be on the way to at least reaching a number of those self-centered ‘I wants.’ And we’d have learnt a lot along the way.

Spending your time dreaming and planning is safe. You can’t fail if you never try at anything. Even if the perfect project: bullshit existed, I’m sure if you only looked at the negatives you could still find reasons why it’s not good enough or why it won’t work.

Starting is the hardest part and it’s a case of stop over-analysing and doing something to MAKE IT WORK.

Taking charge of your life, accepting personal responsibility means that even if it doesn’t lead to everything you want, you are still the master of your own universe and can change and improves things, start new projects until you do get what you want. Until you do get to that point, it’s better to enjoy having something that is your own, that you work your arse off for than to have nothing. And the truth is, until you start, you’ll never really know how you feel about it. it’s better to do something and be wrong than to never try at all.

If whilst on your mission you still feel something is missing, well, just remember that work is only one piece of the puzzle. Creating your own life gives you the freedom to fill those holes left over with hobbies.

Feel guilty about owning a successful business that does little to help others? Volunteer to help a charity.

Want to be creative but your job doesn’t do it for you? Write, draw, take a dance class.

The opportunities we have our endless. There has never been a better time to be alive. (Thank you Midnight in Paris for helping me realise that – Marion Cotillard is a real heartbreaker in that)

Oh yes. This was meant to be a ‘5 reasons’ list. Lists are for organised people. A little organisation might do me good.

5 reasons why doing something, anything, is better than doing nothing. 

You learn nothing whilst sitting on your backside – besides how much better it is to not be sitting on your backside. You’ll never be great if you waste time. Do you want to waste a second more of your time building a life you don’t love? I love this quote and it applies to everything. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”  – Ernest Hemingway

You may just stumble upon what you really do want to do, or at the least tick another thing off the list of things you don’t want. You never know where it may lead. Creating your own project, having the power and control to do it yourself means you can grow it, change it, adapt it to your existing & changing needs.

It gives you purpose, a reason to get out of bed in the morning and go to bed at night. This cannot be undervalued. It is a virtuous cycle. The more you work at something, the better you get, the more you enjoy it, the more passionate you become. Doing so will have a positive impact on every other area of your life too.

Confidence & belief. Key to any bold lifestyle choice. Doing something, no matter how small can give you the self belief and confidence to dare for more. Great people weren’t born great. They had to learn to be great. And that’s a long journey.

Getting over your fears. Maybe what you try will fail. Maybe some people will hate it. By finally doing something, you may well learn that fear and the opinions of others aren’t at all as bad as you had thought. And who knows. Perhaps some people will actually love what you do and you’ll find supporters you never knew you had. Once you fall the first time and get back up, it’s no longer so scary to risk falling a second time. Changing your attitude to fears is huge. But that’s a whole post for another time.

Matt

*Guillaume Canet probably isn’t an actual bastard. He might be. You never know. Best not to judge a bastard before you ever meet him.

What if money was no object?

Money is an object, but is only one of many factors to take into account when making life decisions. Money should not be the primary factor in our decision making. And certainly never the sole consideration.

“If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time! You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living – that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing! Which is stupid!” – Alan Watts

What do you want to do with your life?

Are you?

For four years now I have been enveloped, often tortured by one constant, nagging thought: What the f*ck do I want to do with my life? 

I had conventional, safe, middle class ambitions: Graduate university with a 2:1, move to London, work for a well-known company, buy a car, get on the housing ladder as soon as possible, meet a girl, get promoted, buy a better car, get married, buy a bigger house, have kids, teach them to do the same.

Then, sometime in my 2nd year at uni, around the turn of my 21st birthday, somewhere between falling in love, studying abroad and realising what a hopelessly naïve boy I was, something changed. Love it or not. Paulo Coelho‘s the alchemist played a big role in the transformation in my thinking or at least sparked the ignition that set the wheels in motion. Not only had I finally began reading again, but the theme present throughout the book led me, like it did to Santiago the shepherd boy, to take some time to really think about what it was I wanted. Besides the superficial: money & sexy Spanish girl, I was like a virgin in a brothel, I hadn’t a clue what to do.

With a year and a half left until graduation, I had settled on what I didn’t want but there was no pressing need to worry about what I did want until after uni. Having taken 4 semesters of Spanish alongside my business degree, upon graduation the first thing I did was to jump on a plane with a friend & spend the summer travelling Spain. 2 months of sun, sea and Spanish, amongst other things. 2 good months. So good in fact, that I decided to take a teaching course to teach English in companies in Madrid. Live the Spanish life, improve my language skills, work less than 20 hours a week and have 3 day weekends whilst earning enough to live in a shared flat in the centre of the city (Plaza de España). At 23, recently graduated, all I wanted was to have fun, party and speak Spanish. It was fun. I did party. And I did speak Spanish.. from time to time at least. I should have been happy. But I wasn’t. Not really. Teaching English can be fun. It can be rewarding. But travelling around the city 3 times a day and planning lessons was not. It wasn’t fulfilling. I still didn’t have a bloody clue as to what I really wanted to do with my life.

One year back in England and one thing I am sure of is that whatever I do, it must give me freedom. The freedom to go where I want, when I want and with whom I’d like. Freedom from financial worries. I’d like to leave a mark. Do some good. Create something unique. Add value; something useful to the world. To love what I do. How do I fit all of this into one project that I would enjoy working on everyday for 40+ years without having thousands to invest and whilst living at home with my Mum? I don’t know. If anyone else does…let me know!

It’s clear I don’t know much. So what do I know?

Waiting around for the perfect idea will leave you with a sore arse.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, you just have to start. You can improve and change things later.

We live in a different world to that of our parents. We live in the information age where, once we do decide on what we would love to do with our lives…we can google search how to achieve it and contact people who have been there and done it in a second by phone or email. Staying at one company in one good job throughout our working lives no longer comes with the guarantee of job security and a healthy pension anymore. Sacrificing 40+ hours a week in a job we don’t like in exchange for being told what to do, how to do it and receiving a constant pay cheque and an eventual pension, that goes to buy things that make us feel better about spending so much time doing a job we don’t enjoy no longer makes the same sense that it may have done 20-30 years ago.

We have more opportunities than ever before. We can act on these opportunities more quickly, more easily, and for less money than ever before. The downside? Nothing is certain. Most of us don’t readily have people around us who have forged their own path who can teach us or act as role models. It can be scary to choose to work for yourself or follow a creative path. One with a good chance of failure and blame as opposed to working for someone else. In order to this, we really need to believe in what we want and be willing to take the hits to run with it in the tough times. To be willing to risk failure and say fuck it. I’m gonna do it all over again, but this time I know more so I’ll do it better.

With so many opportunities, the hardest part is the finding out where to start.

The purpose of this site is for people to share their ideas and thoughts on this subject, contradictory or otherwise, and to document my attempts to choose a life I am responsible for and the highs, the lows and inevitable fuck ups that come with it.

Matt