You have a project you need to accomplish. Let’s say it’s a creative project that you’ve been thinking about for a few weeks. You think about a lot of different creative projects all the time, but you’ve never started one, it’s always been “at the wrong time”.

This project is the same as all the others. You still “don’t really have time for this” but you really like the idea of making this dream into a reality. You get closer and closer to actually starting to work but the closer you get, the bigger that first step starts to look until you get to a point where you can just see past the first step, towards all of the other hard things along the road that you “won’t have time for”, especially if you don’t have time for the first step.

You are now standing at the very base of the first step. Looking up at the massive amount of work ahead of you and knowing that your life would be far easier if you just gave up and continued with the excuse of “I don’t have time” because giving up at the beginning is far better than failing or producing something bad, right?

The first step for just about everything can often be the hardest. The first step is a step into the unknown. You don’t know how hard it’s going to be, you don’t know if you’re going to actually like doing it, and you don’t know if you’re going to end up being successful. While all of these concerns are valid, you won’t know if any of it is true until you take the first step.

Success in any venture is largely determined by two factors: having the courage to take the first step and having the ability to persevere through hard times and keep working. Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky may have said it better than anyone: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

So the next time you’re faced with taking a leap of faith into a project that you might be afraid to start, just know that the very first step will be the hardest. That doesn’t mean you won’t face other hardships along the way, but it does mean that you will have a much higher likelihood of finding success than if you failed to even start.