Halfway There: Why Starting is the Hardest Bit (and How to Do It Anyway)
There’s an old Latin proverb I stumbled across recently that stopped me in my tracks: “Initium est dimidium facti.”1 Or in plain English: “Once you’ve started, you’re halfway there.” Isn’t that just perfect?
Starting is so often the hardest part of anything—from writing an email to changing your life—and yet we constantly underestimate the power of simply beginning.
Not smashing it. Not perfecting it. Just… starting. Even if it’s messy, reluctant, or halfway fuelled by sheer bloody-minded stubbornness.
As you’ll know by now if you’ve been here with me for a while, I do so love a quote.
If I had a penny for every time I’ve written that in an article on this platform, I’d have… ooh, at least a quid, maybe two.
And if I had a penny for every quote/motto I had tattooed on my body, I’d have… thruppence, as they used to say here in the UK (before I was born, I’m not quite *that* old).
I came across this one this morning in a newsletter from the wonderful James Clear, author of Atomic Habits his Thursday newsletter 3-2-1 (From the blurb: Each issue contains 3 short ideas from James Clear, 2 quotes from other people, and 1 question for you) which is often a real highlight of my week, and it invariably contains something that makes me stop and think. Today was no exception.
While I’d never heard the proverb before, this is a principle I often apply to my own life, whenever resistance rears its ugly head and I struggle to get myself going on a task.
I’m a lot kinder to myself when I feel like this, these days. At one time I would’ve berated myself, criticised myself for my weakness and probably turned to either booze or food (or both) to self soothe my bruised emotions.
I can deal with it now, and understand it better because of all the reading and learning I’ve done about how our brains work.
Simplifying things enormously, we have two parts of our brains which are the ones which fight each other.
There’s the higher part of our brains, the one which puts lofty goals in our heads and wants us to achieve great things, and then there’s the prehistoric part, which breaks into a sweat and presses the alarm button every damn time it sees us trying to push ourselves too far out of our comfort zones.
That’s the part which frustrates us the most, the one which holds us back in the interests of keeping us safe. It keeps us shut in a little box, a cage made of fear and doubt.
Why does it do that? To be fair to it, it’s just doing its job. It’s not changed much since prehistoric times. You know, when the world was a far more dangerous place to be.
In those days, if we tried to do something which might put us at risk (for example, disagreeing with the rest of the tribe or ignoring an ominously rustling bush) then the consequences could literally be life-threatening. Being socially ostracised or wrongly believing there wasn’t danger around every corner could lead to us being kicked out of the group or finding ourselves the next meal of a hungry animal.
While the world around us has changed beyond all recognition (imagine one of our prehistoric ancestors suddenly being teleported into the 21st Century?!) sadly our brains haven’t.
Now, being criticised—either by our bosses, our colleagues, friends or a nameless, faceless online troll—are all things that our prehistoric brains are utterly convinced will kill us.
Is it any wonder we often shy away from taking risks, that every time our higher order brain makes a suggestion, our caveman side kicks into gear and slams the door in our face? Hardly.
That’s why we struggle.
So, let’s get to the point - what are my little hacks that help me to make a start when I feel like doing anything but and my brain is screaming at me?
Calm your nervous system
Yes, I’m a big proponent of meditation. But just sitting quietly for five minutes and doing something like the 4-7-8 or box breathing techniques can help enormously and can often give you enough mental calmness to be able to just start the task which has been scaring you half to death.
Just do 5 minutes
Set a timer for 5 minutes. Sit down and commit to just doing that.
Be honest when the timer goes off, and if you’re still not feeling it, then stop, and do another 5 minutes later on.
But be honest with yourself, because often once you start then our human tendency to want to complete tasks will kick in and help you keep going.
Use the 5-second rule
Mel Robbins wrote a whole book on this, but you can pick up the idea on YouTube in this video.
In short, when you think ‘oh, I should do x’ you insert the phrase ‘5-4-3-2-1’ into your mind and get up to go and do it, BEFORE the prehistoric part of your brain even has time to open its mouth and to try to stop you.
Use the Pomodoro technique
This technique (in its basic form) gets you to chunk up your time into 25/5 minute blocks.
The 25 minutes is spent working on a thing you want to do, and the 5 minutes is a short break (which can’t be too interesting or engaging, otherwise you won’t go back to the task in hand)
For more information, look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
Ask myself ‘what CAN I do?’
I love this one. Sometimes we resist a task because what we’re thinking of doing is just too big, too challenging or scary. Break it down into smaller pieces, something so small and trivial it can’t possibly be seen as scary by your prehistoric brain, and just do that.
Renegotiate with yourself, if you like. I sometimes do this when it comes to a lack of enthusiasm for working out.
I might have planned a strength session and a HIIT ride, but I ask myself this question, and I might compromise with myself and do a shorter, low impact ride. Some days all I can do is some yoga.
I don’t see this as a problem, as some exercise is always better than none, and some days I stick to my original plan, so I don’t sweat it. I trust that it all balances out in the end.
Do an MVP version of the task
MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a concept from my software engineering days.
Rather than taking years to build a fully featured (probably bloated) piece of software, with loads of functionality customers may not need or want, you decide what the minimum is to start with.
Build that, ship it quickly and get feedback to see what people would like in the future.
We can apply this principle to our own lives.
Were you planning to write a book? If a whole novel-length work seems out of reach, and you’re not sure if people will even want to read it, why not write a short story (if it’s fiction) or an eBook guide version, to test the waters?
Do that, and then give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done when it would’ve been all too easy to nope out and not bother at all.
So if you’re stuck today—if your brain is making a compelling case for staying exactly where you are—try one of these tiny but powerful tricks. Five minutes, five seconds, one tiny action. That’s all it takes to tip the balance. And hey, if this resonates, hit the 💚 button, share it with someone who’s wrestling with resistance too, or drop me a note and let me know what you do to get started when everything in you wants to stay put. I love hearing your hacks.
Horace, the Roman poet, in his work Epistles
And now I must go out and pull some weeds up! 5,4,3,2,1.....thanks for the push! 😁