How to take the second step forward?

Waiting for the right moment, for a situation to feel confident enough, for “perfect” timing – it’s an inhibiting perfectionism.

This feeling that once I’ll have the tools, once I’ll master the abilities, the space, the time, that soon enough I’ll be able to be professional enough and go out into the world – these are excuses that will hold back and keep you at home.

Believe me when I say – You don’t have to be an expert, and you don’t have to specialize in order to get going. 

Lately I find myself saying this a lot – get going, learn as you go. This may be the best advice I can give to those who want to become a digital nomad, open their own business, lose weight, prepare to run a marathon, you name it.

Get going. now. At the most difficult timing, while you feel unprepared, unprofessional, and have little knowledge.Precisely the lack of confidence in expertise, carries with it the understanding that the field at hand is vast, requires research and learning and thorough consideration, that you will never reach the top, there will always be more. There’s always something to learn. This insight is a professional understanding and above all – a mature one. 

In every field – whether jewelry design, fundraising, customer service, product development or software development, anything! There’s a lot of depth, and luckily for us today, knowledge is  so accessible. So many users and creators with different levels of understanding and knowledge, publish their insights and experience, so it’s  very tempting to feel inferior to them. By the way, it might be possible that they in fact, consciously or unconsciously, use the Feynman technique – according to this method developed by nobel prize physicist Richard Feynman, the effective way to learn any complex subject is to explain it to a 12-year-old, the most simple way possible. So Are these social media publishers really experts? Or just students with a little more courage than you to stand in front of the camera and talk about things they barely understand?

Your confidence will not come from mastering a discipline, but from the inner belief in two truths, that once you have them inherit in your mind, you’ll get going without any hesitation.

First truth is, thatt you have the sufficient base and understanding of the general idea, the system, the “method” of how, more or less, things works. Approximately enough,as for there’s no perfect, and no mastery.
The second truth is that you’re humble enough and courageous to go out and look for answers.  Simon Sinek, author of the bestseller “The Infinite Game” says – I like to be the idiot in the room, I am the one who will ask the questions, maybe trivial, maybe simple that everyone already knows the answers to, in any case, It will only benefit me, I will learn from the explanation I get. 

Buzz word these days is talking to OpenAI GPTChat, and extracting from it the information we want. So, What’s the real skill required from us? It is the ability to ask questions, to know what to ask and how to ask it in order to get the answers we seek. After all, knowledge is accessible to everyone. The successful ones are those who learn to dig deep into an issue and apply what they learned five minutes ago with enough success to advance to the next step. I’ll take it one step further-  even if we forget what we learned, we can always ask the same question, or a similar question, again.

I’m a trekkie, no doubt about it. One amazing thing in the Star Trek universe, it reveals the development of human imagination throughout more than 5 decades. The original series aired in 1964, and here we are, 50 years later, we anticipate the new season of Picard, which will be airing next month. 50 years apart, the Enterprise, same Enterprise. 

The human imagination is our limit, said Charles F. Kettering, chief dev engineer of General Motors in the 1920s. 

In the Star Trek The Original Series, Captain Kirk and his friends would enter the space ship lift, hold some kind of handle to make it move. The creators at that time thought that you had to press/touch something to activate the elevator. During the 90s, In Star Trek The Next Generation series no longer was needed to hold anything in the lift,  Captain Picard and his friends would speak directly to the spaceship computer, say-  “computer – deck 5”, and the lift would start moving. That omniscient computer, you ask it questions and it answers, sounds familiar? Yep, it’s the GPTChat himself. Captain Kirk signed on a tablet with a special pen back in the late 1960s, A touch screen with fingers was introduced in the next generation series, alongside augmented reality that stimulates all senses. Although I’m still waiting for the official launch of the teleporter that beams people up from place to place in seconds, I’m sure someone is already working on it. As for everything else – Star Trek imagines the future to the edge of the galaxy, inspiring and developing ideas among scientists and product engineers, then and now.

Let’s take another perspective on limits of the human imagination, as a limiting force. Have you ever considered, how is it that most aliens in Star Trek (and not only there) are human-like creatures – with two legs, two hands, and two eyes? And if they are monsters – how is it that they often resemble some form of insects (Hello to you too Lt. Ripley!). These are the limits of our imagination. We find it difficult to see the extreme end of the unknown. The abstract alien, who may not consume food like us, may not breathe oxygen like us, may not produce offspring like us, perhaps their perceptions of time and space completely differs from ours. There are just a few references to this type of aliens, one would be in Deep Space 9, where these abstract aliens are perceived as divine gods, and take a human form in order to communicate. 

Recently I sat with a client on their retraining program. We talked about their strengths and soft skills, what she loved and felt confident in her previous career. However, first, we dreamt big. We asked, what’s the furthest far point, in a perfect world, where would she want to be. We set the limits of her imagination, and set them as high as we could. Next step, we examined how her skills can benefit towards the next career. She has a lot of experience working with NGOs and civil organizations, a lot of experience in fundraising and working with complex governmental bureaucratic systems. While trying to imagine her next career, we thought of commercial organizations and companies, in which these skills and experience would give her an advantage – companies that need help with governmental regulations, or getting in touch with potential investors. At the same time, she emphasized that she still has strong ethical values, in blunt words – she did not want to sell her soul to the devil, therefore we began to map commercial companies whose product or service they offer corresponds to her values: sustainability and welfare, technologies that seek out solutions for climate change problems etc. Yesterday’s  contributors to NGOs she world in, could be her tomorrow’s employers. 

When we embark on a journey of change, we go from the familiar to the less familiar, but not to a complete stranger. We probably won’t be able to deal with the complete stranger, we will be afraid and overwhelmed and paralyzed. The complete stranger is the extreme end of a completely new world, he is the abstract alien that we cannot imagine, a new land we know nothing about, a new activity we’ve never experienced. So we go out to meet a familiar stranger – we take one step forward, it’s going to be a date with an alien. Yes, a hot masculine, black haired alien with pointy ears – and yet – he has ears, just like we do. 

 
So … what now? 

Get going.