How often are you starting over?
How often does it feel like you’re completely redoing something?
How often do you feel like you’re starting from scratch?
Sometimes it feels as though you’re starting from scratch because you took some time off. So, when you resume you feel like you are back at the start.
Sometimes it can feel as though you’re starting from scratch because you want to scrap everything that you have done before and rebuild it, brand new.
Something that I found in my career, but often haven’t paid enough attention to, is that we rarely start from scratch.
Carl Sagan once said:
““If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
That…is the definition of starting from scratch!
In our lives, we typically are starting from a place where we build upon lessons that we’ve already learned. In most cases even when learning something completely new, we are not starting from scratch, but rather remixing and rebuilding on top of prior knowledge.
Recently, I started a new business called The Superhero Institute. My plan was always to build a site exclusively for The Superhero Institute but when I first started, I built it into my homepage. Upon launching The Superhero Institute, I have to completely redo my homepage.
It feels like I’m starting from scratch.
But then I remind myself that I have written and rewritten my homepage copy dozens of times at this point. I have written and rewritten services pages, and about me pages over and over. I’m not starting from scratch. I’m starting again.
I think it’s helpful, and encouraging to remind ourselves when we feel the long journey ahead of us, that we’ve been there before, and will probably be there again.
So, I’ll start again. I’ll rewrite my homepage copy and it’ll be better than the last time precisely because of the last time. Unless you can go back before you ever started anything, it’ll never be from scratch. So relax, do the work, and watch how much better this time is than the last.
