Got a Goal or Dream You Want to Reach? Start Today.

Anytime our vet gives our pets medicine, she writes the dosage on the prescription with the directions: “Start today.”

This is advice I need when it comes to writing.

I’ve been wanting to write a book about everything I’ve learned about how success doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness and all the things that do, but I keep on reading and researching instead of Starting Today.

Maybe I should just listen to this one other podcast about creativity first. You know, I haven’t finished Marie Forleo’s new book or Gabrielle Bernstein’s of a couple years ago. I just downloaded the Nonfiction Authors Association guide to writing nonfiction books, maybe I should study that first before putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as it were)?

But our dog Duke just went to the vet today for his incontinence issues (poor thing, and our poor carpet) and on the prescription, it says Start today.

Start today.

I have no doubt I can learn from the podcasts and books and writing guides I mentioned. But nothing will get me closer to writing actual content for my book than Starting Today.

I have to capitalize it, that’s how serious it is.

Because I’m plagued with paralyzing self-doubt. Despite the dozen years I spent writing on the tightest deadlines for the widest readership at AP, and despite the years of newspaper writing before that, I am full of fear about my writing. I worry that it’s not good enough, that no one will be interested, that what I have to say is obvious or lame. Yet, at the same time, I worry that I’ll never reach my goal of actually writing the book (and hopefully bookS — I have big dreams), which ultimately would be so much worse than simply sucking.

So even now, as I dread sitting here and force it to happen, I am taking the vet’s advice to Start Today.

And it makes total sense of course. I just read this morning, while I was procrastinating about actually writing, that “doing something is the secret to doing something.” (Thanks, Marie Forleo mini-class!)

And it’s true. No writer writes a book without writing it. No fit and healthy person gets fit and healthy without exercising and eating right. No athlete reaches the top of their sport without practice and training. They had to start somewhere. And for the beginner, we may as well Start Today.

There are a lot of benefits. By writing this now, I will have written it! (Obvious, but still a win.) By running this morning, I continue my progress toward becoming a better runner.

Sure, I could apply this logic to reading and listening to podcasts, but that’s not where my resistance is.

A quote that I read recently resonated with me so much that I wrote it in my journal and sat with it for a while. Steven Pressfield, author of many books including “The War of Art,” says: “The more important an activity is to your soul’s evolution, the more resistance you will feel to it.”

That’s why I can always find a bazillion things to do before writing. Do the bookshelves need dusting? Am I due for a colonoscopy? Anything I need to take care of at the DMV?

But if I really want to make progress, I must Start Today. And start anew tomorrow and the day after and the day after. I think it was Aristotle who said,  “We are what we repeatedly do.”

I am a writer. I am working on my first book. I Started Today.