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Awesome read! Spot on!
The False First Step
This is the false first step: believing we’ve made a meaningful step toward a goal when all we’ve actually done is spent money or not done the thing we actually need to do. We’ve actually lost something (money and time) rather than attained something (meaningful progress).
What You’re Actually Buying
I hadn’t been buying things – I had been trying to buy a better version of myself.
Whether it’s a yoga video on a Kindle or a heart rate monitor on our wrists, we’re spending a lot of money on things that are supposed to help us be healthier and happier. But is any of it working? Let’s take a moment to consider it.
Is it realistic to imply that an Amazon Kindle is the first step to getting healthy and happy? Sure, you can look up recipes and yoga videos on a Kindle, but you can watch Netflix and browse Facebook, too.
Buying a Kindle Fire to get healthy and happy is like saying that the only thing keeping you from your goals is that you don’t have a portable electronic device with a seven-inch screen.
We take a false first step when we have an aspiration and then take an action that isn’t actually doing something. The false first step is an outsourcing of effort, a delay of progress, and likely, a loss of money.
We all know how to be healthy. Go outside, walk, stretch, or move in some way every day. Eat fruits and vegetables, and avoid high-sugar foods. We all know how to do this, and there is nothing on the Kindle Fire that will make us more likely to do these things. But we buy it, anyway.
What Was Your False First Step?
- Buying yoga pants instead of doing yoga
- Writing 10 blog posts before you publish your first one
- Buying a laptop instead of writing on whatever you have available
- Getting stuck on a project and starting a new one instead
- Researching new cameras when you don’t use the one you have
So, what happened exactly?
Buying that Kindle Fire convinced your brain that you actually managed to do something meaningful towards becoming that person you want to be. Enough so that, for a while, it satisfies your desire to progress and grow, and it makes you feel like you’ve actually accomplished something. Since you’re convinced that you’ve made progress, you move on, and the action never actually happens. Until that uncomfortable feeling comes up again, that is.
Since taking a false first step eased that discomfort last time, the cycle repeats. Perhaps this time, it will be yoga pants or a new pair of running shoes. Maybe it’s a Fitbit that will finally get us outside. Perhaps.
It took seeing that collective financial damage for me to realize the true nature of my buying habits.
Build a habit before spending money.
It should be obvious by now that we can’t buy better versions of ourselves. The only way to become better is to spend time working towards what we value most in life.
If your first instinct is to buy something in order to accomplish one of your goals, realize that this is likely a false first step. If you haven’t even tried to accomplish something using the resources you already have, slow down and assess the situation. That discomfort you feel is your opportunity to stop the cycle of consumption dead in its tracks.
Start first by establishing a small action to complete every day—something that, over the course of a few weeks, has the potential to become a strong habit. How amazing will those new running shoes be once you’ve been walking every day for a month? Once the habit is established, those shoes really can enhance your experience and help you continue your fitness journey. But they’re not going to do the work for you.
Learn what you don’t know by failing and failing again.
The best way to figure out what you actually need is to make a solid go of it and probably fail. You don’t yet know what you don’t know. By making a solid attempt at achieving your goal, you will ask better questions, be able to find better answers, and fail a little better next time. You can figure out exactly what you actually need to get to the next step once you know more about what you don’t know.
The fear of failure is something that plagues us all, but owning that fear and embracing failure as a step along the path is the best thing you can do. Instead of purchasing a new diet plan or perhaps a new camera and placing the blame for failure on those things, own up to your personal growth process.
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