You Are Addicted To Starting

“Beginning is the easy part, and it always will be. What changes your life is what you do on the days the idea stops being interesting.” – Stephen Scott Johnson

#1 The Nine Expressions of Frequency: From Pattern to Power series

Most of us keep our ideas somewhere, a notebook, a notes app, a folder of half-written plans. If a few of yours stopped at the same point, where the idea ceased being exciting and began needing ordinary, repetitive effort, and a newer idea arrived each time to rescue you from finishing the last one, this Expression will feel familiar.

It's called the Creator, the first of the Nine Expressions of Frequency in my Ascendant cosmology, and it's the one that shows up the most in my own Resonance Map.

The Creator starts things before the information is complete, and that instinct is often right. You have half an idea for an offer, an event, perhaps a new venture, and you can feel whether it has life in it. So you announce it and sort the finer details while it's still emerging.

Then the excitement fades and what remains is the follow-through, the same email sent every week, the upgraded version that fixes what the first got wrong. That's the exact point a newer idea appears, and because beginning feelsaliveand follow-through feelsflat, you choose the beginning. Before you know it, you're surrounded by half-finished projects, and your nervous system is still carrying every one of them long after you've stopped thinking about them.

Everything you never finished is still using your bandwidth.

Researchers found that an unfinished goal keeps pulling at your attention and lowers your performance on unrelated tasks, and the pull stops once you've written a specific plan for finishing it. The restlessness you feel, the way your attention drifts even when you're with the people you love, is partly the pull of every project you left open.(Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011,Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/a0024192).

A client who runs a consultancy came to me recently with eleven projects on the go and a fried nervous system, waking at four most mornings from stress. We chose the most important project, and she wrote the other ten on a single page with a date to revisit each. Within a week she was sleeping soundly through the night, and none of the eleven projects had moved an inch. Once each project had a date it would be revisited, her system could settle.

Your attention is being spent in places you stopped visiting years ago.

For almost four years I was writing a different book, one where the Creator sat at the top of a ladder of self-mastery. Then my life came apart unexpectedly, and every strategy I'd relied on stopped working. In the stillness that followed I saw that I'd been selling arrival, which is the drill the whole self-help industry runs on, and that I'd spent four years perpetuating the thing I meant to solve.

What I'd mistaken for a hierarchy was closer to weather, nine patterns your system moves between, and there is nowhere to "arrive". Trusting the process and staying with the book that emerged beyond the point where every earlier version had ended, taught me something no beginning ever had, which is what it feels like to stay long enough for a thing to become real.

The gift of the Creator goes further than starting. It's knowing which ideas have life in them and which are a version of something you've already built, and perhaps reached for because it's familiar and you know it works.Then staying with the one you chose long past the point it stopped being interesting. Finished things behave differently. They get talked about, referred on, built upon, and they bring you opportunities you didn't go looking for.

So here is this week's practice...

Write down every project you've started and not finished. Choose one and give it the first thirty minutes of each morning this week, before email and before any new idea gets a hearing. Put the rest on one page with a date you'll return to them, and notice what your body does once they have somewhere to live.

To what matters most,