Why Are You Starting From The Beginning?

Remember the first time you ever had to write an essay in school?

You probably started off thinking a bit about what you wanted to write about and the arguments you wanted to make. You might’ve even jotted down notes and a rough outline. Then you got to writing. You’d start from the introduction and write on and on, hitting all your points along the way and tying it all up with a nice conclusion. Then you probably read it over again and it would seem kind of wordy. You’d cut and rewrite but somehow the point you wanted to make didn’t come through.

Your first essay probably wasn’t that great. But as you’re forced to write more of them in school, and maybe even throughout university, you realize there’s a trick.

You’ve got to start from the middle, then fill in the blanks.

When we first learn to write essays, we naturally start from the introduction, then move on to the arguments, then the conclusion. Why? Because that’s how we’ve grown up reading and we write in the order we read because it’s the only way we know how. It’s only once we’ve gotten more experience that we realize we need to start from the middle. We learn to write our arguments first because it’s the core of our essays, the most important part. Then we strengthen it after by writing the introduction and conclusion.

Once we realize we’re allowed to start from the middle, writing becomes a whole lot easier.

But somehow, we never realized we can do the same for all our goals in life.

Maybe you’ve got a big career move you want to make and a dream job you’d like to score. Or maybe you’d like to be more confident at social events.

We naturally go about achieving those things by starting from the beginning. To get our dream job, we start from the beginning by getting the education we need, then scoring our first shitty job in the industry, then working our way up because we assume those are the steps we were told we had to take. To be more confident, we go around gathering up achievements and certificates to make ourselves feel qualified to be confident. We believe that all confident people have these things, so we’ve got to start from the beginning and go through the steps to get there.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The secret is this:

You can start from the middle and fill in the blanks later.

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To get your dream job, you don’t need the education or the qualifications. All those steps are just building up to helping you prepare to do the job. You could go through all those steps… or you could just skip straight to the middle and focus on making yourself able to do the job.

To be confident, you don’t need the Harvard degree, the 100K paycheque or the medal proving you’ve run a marathon. You can just skip straight to the middle and adopt the mindset and attitude of a confident person. You only have to believe in yourself and your own potential.

Right now, I have my dream job. I’m working remotely in digital marketing for a company who’s mission and products I completely believe in. But here’s the kicker. I have no degree in marketing, or even in business. I have no past experience or certificates. But I worked damn hard to prove that I could do the job, even if I didn’t have all those things. Now that I’ve been in the job for a few months, I’m starting to fill in all those blanks. I’m learning the things I didn’t know before, all while already having what I set out to achieve.

If I can do it, so can you. When we start from the beginning and go through all the steps, we risk missing our big goal because we were focused on achieving all those little steps before it. What we realize when we start from the middle is that all those blanks we thought we needed to fill in aren’t so important after all.

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