What if I told you that beginnings are meaningless?
I believe in persistence. I believe in love at third sight.
People attribute a symbolic and unnecessary value to beginnings. We are driven by feelings, not by reason.
Our brain is addicted to things that are new and exciting. Exposure to novel stimuli activates dopamine circuits — the same circuits activated when you try a new kind of food.
Which is worth knowing, because it means the enthusiasm you feel at the start of anything is not information about the thing. It is information about its novelty, and it will decay on a schedule that has nothing to do with whether the project was any good.
But in real life, in significant changes, most of us fall at the lethal middle stage. When the opening excitement fades.
And the middle has a particular character that makes it so effective at removing people. There is no longer any novelty to carry you. There is not yet any result to encourage you. Nothing observable is happening, and the only available evidence about whether it is working is the fact that you are still doing it.
That is an extremely thin thing to run on, and almost nobody has been taught that it is what the middle is supposed to feel like — so they read the absence of momentum as a verdict on the project, and they leave, honourably, believing they have discovered something.
Success requires the consistent development of muscles — intellectual and emotional.
And the specific muscle is this one: the capacity to keep going through a period in which there is no evidence, and to not interpret the lack of evidence as evidence.