We’ve heard many inspirational quotes to get us to take that first action:

• There’s the healer’s aphorism: “The first step to recovery requires us to identify the problem.”
• Or ye olde outdoors trekker musing: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a step.”
• Or the laborer’s motto: “Move a stone at a time and you’ll move a mountain.”
• Or the worker productivity mantra: “An inch of progress is better than no progress.”
• Or the quantitative version of the work productivity mantra: “If you get better by 1% each day, by the end of the year you’ll be 37 times better than where you are now.”
• Or the gambler’s motivator: “Gotta be in it to win it!”
• Or the guilt tripper’s jab: “Tomorrow you will be happy you started today.”

Whether it’s a New Year’s Resolution or a new quarter resolution or just a new thing you want to do unrelated to a calendar prompt, going from that inspired moment of wanting to be better to actually being better is a challenge for us all.

We know why. Breaking old habits is hard. We relapse. Our life’s schedule is not always in our control. $#!+ happens.

Other reasons: we had the thought/idea, but we didn’t have a plan. We went straight to doing and found ourselves facing a mountain of (unexpected) challenges. The path to success wasn’t a steady climb, but filled with steep inclines and impassable regions. We didn’t anticipate all the gear we’d need. And the outdoors trekking analogy continues.

But yes, to succeed, we must begin.

Stop right there! Forget about succeeding.

Let’s look closer at “begin”. Whenever we have failed at following through on that inspired moment, it comes down to “failing at beginning”.

Here’s what I mean.

• I’m going to write a book! I’m going to start writing a page day.
• I’m going to get in shape! I setup a diet and workout plan and got a gym membership.
• I’m going to learn to play piano! I signed up for lessons.

We took the first step. We marked our beginning. And we doomed ourselves.

What we failed to do is to “burn in” to our beginning.

What Is “Burning In” and How Do You Do It?

We are trying to change habits. We are trying to get better. These are, in essence, transition from one state of being into another. Now, when these are small incremental changes, we can usually incorporate them without much fuss. But big time goal setting is not incremental. It is asking for a “jump discontinuity”. It is asking for a regime change. It is asking for transformation.

But! Big time goal setting is not asking for this instantly. We know this. We know we’re not going to write a book overnight. We know we’re not going to get into shape instantly. We know that we can’t just sit at a piano and be a virtuoso. We know this.

What we don’t know, or at the least, what we forget, is that the big time thing we’re actually trying to do instantly and not incrementally, is that we are expecting ourselves to change our flow — cold turkey.

We need to burn in to beginning. Unless if you have a serious forcing function [aka gun to head …], you’re not going to write a page day. You’re not going to switch your eating habits completely tomorrow. You’re not going to practice piano daily. Instead you need to work this into your routine.

It may sound obvious, but a lot of us don’t do this. And because we don’t, and because we marked “I’m beginning”, we start start to see how we are not continuing, which leads to abandonment and our conclusion that we failed.

Do you want to write that book? Yes, you’re going to have to write daily. But you don’t have that as a habit. So work on that habit first. The first goal is “I want to develop a daily writing habit” not “I want to write a book.”

This defers your mental alignment with “starting”. If you can’t develop a daily habit, you haven’t started. If you want to mark where you failed, it’s that you failed to start. This is far better than having told yourself that “you started but couldn’t do it”. You didn’t start!

I call this is “burning in” because it lets me remember that I don’t want to “burn out“. Burn out is a result of doing too much. That “too much” is relative to your habits. Guess what, I can work on math and programming 12 hours a day and I don’t get burned out. You know why? I’ve spent a lifetime building that habit.

Every time I’ve started writing my book, I’ve burned myself out. I didn’t build a burn in time period. I didn’t build daily writing as a habit. I didn’t set up what healthy habits look like. If you set those up first, then you’ll set yourself up for success.