It’s hard to start a new bullet journal. You don’t want to mess up! Which is why you need to start anyway. You’re going to mess up.
Opening the pristine pages of a new journal is like unwrapping a new present: you’re excited to open it and feel what’s inside. And scared of ruining it at the same time.
This is one of my struggles with bullet journaling – I hate to get started.
There are many excuses we use to avoid doing something and I find nearly all of them relatable; but none are the central truth.
I’m not procrastinating. And I’m not really afraid to get started. Perhaps there’s a little indecision and a bit of confusion. All of this is sort of true. Sort of me. But it’s also something else.
Why am I both excited to start and afraid to mess up in equal measures?
I have to live with the decisions I make.
And this is scary and exciting at the same time.
So I plan and gather information and figure out my priorities. Of course, these are all good things.
But, out of fear, I put off the planning and gathering of information and prioritizing. Which I then realize I’m doing. So I leap into action.
I buy my materials,
get ideas from the internet,
watch videos of how others do it,
and then watch more videos,
and look at all the great ideas,
then I need to go back to the first video because he mentioned his favorite kind of pen in that one,
and I have to write that I need to go to the store to buy that pen somewhere (the bullet journal would be the place for that…),
and I set aside more and more time to plan and prepare,
yet still find the rabbit holes,
until finally, it’s more than a week into the new year and I’ve run out of excuses,
so I buckle down and plan out the journal.
And what do I find when I’m done sketching everything out?
I’m pretty much where I started two weeks ago.
I think there’s a missing step between doing and avoiding doing. The thing we attribute to willpower or indecision, but without honesty and generosity.
There’s a real reason we fear failure.
In Empire Strikes Back, Yoda utters one of the most iconic lines in movie history. Not simply because it’s topical to the film, but its application is universal:
“NO! Try not! Do or do not; there is no try.”
The best thing about this line isn’t just that it always applies. It’s that it always bites.
What gets lost in our hearing it, however, is not that this is a universal phenomenon. It’s the context. Yoda is teaching Luke to be a Jedi.
Of course, there is all the weight of the moment: the Empire is crushing the rebellion and Yoda is the only living Jedi in the universe. The future of everything rests on Luke’s young, naive shoulders. Yes, of course! The pressure couldn’t be more intense! He wants to learn so he can go take on Darth Vader!
Now notice the two conflicts here!
Luke wants to try and get on with it.
Yoda wants to do and take his time.
We usually see the urgency in doing. We hear Seth Godin tell us to “just ship it” because a project that is 90% great and shipped is better than 95% great and stuck on your laptop.
That urgency of pressing “post” or “send” is as frightening as putting pen to the pristine paper.
However, Seth Godin’s mantra on shipping is a lot like his mantra on starting. Just do it. Start. Get over the fear.
The bullet journal isn’t the finished product.
The bullet journal is the training!
While Yoda is interested in what Luke will become, constantly focused on what kind of Jedi he will be, he doesn’t avoid training him. He doesn’t spend hours planning the regimen or put it off.
Luke’s got a lightsaber in his hand and lifting things with his mind. The training is full of doing, not trying. The acts are the training.
And yet, no matter how often I hear the encouragement to iterate as I go, I feel the weight of the context upon me. If I screw up, I’ll be stuck with this journal for months!
Yes! Of course I will! And I’ll learn something from it!
One of the things I learned about my bullet journaling last year is this:
I struggle to deal with the year’s goals.
Why? Because the regular practice of bullet journaling has me so focused on my month and daily actions that I rarely touch my list pages at the front.
This shouldn’t seem weird. It seems like a simple matter of focus, if not for the fact that I think of these goals through an annual lens. So I hate flipping through six months of pages to get the books I’ve read or the movies I’ve watched this year.
It took using my journal for six months to see how my mind struggles to integrate these two parts of the journal. And this is learning I wouldn’t have known otherwise.
So I integrated that learning into my new design.
If you look at my new journal, it won’t look drastically different in format than my old one. But the tweak came in the monthly rapid logging so that I could drive my attention to the annual goals.
Essentially, I sought to integrate rather than duplicate the information.
And I’ve already messed it up.
I worked and worked on my plan to both streamline my annual list pages and my rapid logging in the monthly and daily sections. And guess what?
I forgot a spread for the beginning.
Of course I did! That’s why I gave myself a buffer! Well, not really, it was for something else, but I certainly could put it there! Phew, problem solved!
Except I didn’t give myself enough room in the Index. I wanted that space empty
While I know this isn’t a big deal and Ryder Carroll would tell me to just put it in the next open spread, I really wanted to nail this for myself. And I didn’t.
So what do I do?
Nothing. It’s done.
Of course, I’ll fiddle and work with my options and try something else, but that isn’t really the point.
The point isn’t to make it perfect. It will never be perfect.
The point is to remember that this is all training.
Every success and mistake is a chance to learn. Each page is a new experiment. You don’t get to make perfect. None of us does.
Daniel Siegel compares life to being in a boat going down “the river of well being”. The right shore is chaos and a world disordered. The left shore is order. And while we often seek out a sense of order, having order isn’t safety. Because it is order imposed upon the world, it isn’t actually the world.
Our world is that boat and life is that river. Neither shore offers true security. So we need to learn how to see the beauty of the boat.
Form a plan and test it out!
While you might say the reason it took me a week to start my bullet journal was that I was afraid or I was just procrastinating, I don’t think that fits.
I didn’t start because I refused to embrace the need to learn.
The real difference between “doing” and “trying” isn’t success or action or hesitancy: it’s mindset. Trying plans for failure. And even worse: it sees failure as the end.
But doing, in the way Yoda and Seth Godin direct, isn’t really about outcomes at all! It’s about acting and learning from it. In other words, living.
Do you bullet journal? I love it! Here’s the place to start.
What I love about it is that ten minutes of reading and a cheap notebook get you doing rather than planning. You don’t have to go all in. Just commit to it.
And because you do it yourself, it means you can literally start any time.