Start Stupid

You’ll never feel perfectly confident...because the future is always uncertain.

Our Lord Jesus Christ by James Tissot

(Stick with me…this won’t feel like it’s about Jesus - until it does.)

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.”

C.S. Lewis

Picture a car in an empty parking lot behind a church building. It’s the middle of the day.

I hold a small wire-bound notebook in my hands. On each page the same words fill each line, page after page.

The words are my goals, my dreams - the things I want and the person I want to be.

I’m embarrassed to admit that this actually happened. For several months, not too many years ago, I would spend a few minutes each lunch hour writing down the same goals, word for word. I look back on that moment and wonder what I was thinking this would accomplish? I had read the idea in a book about goals and thought it would somehow help me reach them. It didn’t.

I can also look back and give that version of myself grace. I think what I was doing came from a good place - a good desire. I wanted to be better. I wanted to (and still want to) reach my dreams. But I was somehow overlooking the most important step - the one thing that would make all the difference.

From Belief to Behavior

Several years ago, author and podcaster Richie Norton wrote a book called The Power of Starting Something Stupid. The book’s premise was that many of the inventions and innovations that are now such a significant part of our lives began as “stupid” ideas that no one thought would work. But rather than conceding to the doubts of others, these creators kept going, even if there was no guarantee that their creation would actually ever work.

The key behavior for success in every instance was the same. It was action.

Doing. Moving. Acting. Believing without seeing, and converting that belief into behavior.

Not all at once. And certainly not without many mistakes along the way. They understood that there’s no such thing as the “perfect” time to create something that doesn’t exist. And they also had to overcome an even more imposing obstacle: Their own “stupidity.” Norton uses this word differently than we typically use it. His definition of “stupid” is something new and unproven. Something different than anything before it.

Step of Faith by Michael Malm

For me, the most relevant message from the book was this:

“If everyone waited to become an expert before starting, no one would become an expert. To become an EXPERT, you must have EXPERIENCE. To get EXPERIENCE, you must EXPERIMENT! Stop waiting. Start stuff.”

Richie Norton

“And I was led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do. Nevertheless I went forth.”

1 Nephi 4:6-7

Have you ever wondered why the Book of Mormon begins the way it does?

You’ve got a prosperous family situation with “gold and silver, and all manner of riches.” That likely meant you had some prestige in the local community. And then Lehi blows it all up by seeking to know what God wants him to do. The next thing you know, you’re leaving it all behind to wander off in the wilderness with no idea of what lies ahead.

And then, just when it seems things can’t worse, you are told to go back to the city you left and somehow get some brass plates from the local mob boss. That doesn’t go well. For two of Nephi’s older brothers, they’ve had enough. They tried. They “did” what they had been sent to do. But Nephi disagrees. The commandment wasn’t merely to try and get the plates from Laban. They actually needed to get them. No matter how hard. No matter how long. No matter what it cost them. That doesn’t go well.

There are many familiar contrasts between Nephi and Laman and Lemuel. For my purposes, I’ll just cite one: Nephi persisted.

“Radical Doability”

Oliver Burkeman, author of Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts and Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, recently published an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled ‘New Year, New You’ Doesn’t Work. Here’s How You Can Actually Improve Your Life.

Here’s the section of his article that I found especially applicable to myself:

The very notion of “New Year, New You” crumbles under examination. By definition, the only person who could ever engineer a New You would be Old You, with all his or her familiar issues. In trying to erase our past selves, we become like Baron Munchausen in the old German stories, who tried to drag himself out of a swamp by pulling on his own hair.

Freedom lies not in this futile struggle to become someone else but in consciously accepting who we really are and starting from there. As the psychotherapist Bruce Tift has suggested, maybe you’ll never achieve complete freedom from your tendency to procrastinate or be distracted, your short temper or your fondness for foods you’d be best advised to avoid.

Instead of “becoming unrecognizable,” the New Year should be a time to commit to what I like to call “radical doability.” This means having the guts to engage in new habits “dailyish,” in the words of the meditation podcaster Dan Harris—not so wedded to rigid consistency that a few missed sessions knock you entirely off track. It also means embracing the pleasure of an easily reachable goal.

If you want to wake up at 5 a.m. every day but struggle to get out of bed, make 7 a.m. your initial goal and relish every day you meet that goal or exceed it.

Radical doability also means focusing on a limited number of goals at a time. If 2025 is your year for getting fit, it probably isn’t also the time to start decluttering your home or learning a new language. It also means daring to ask what you’d actually enjoy doing differently in life, not just how you think you ought to change.

Above all, effective change requires understanding that real security and control—the feeling of being on top of things once and for all—was never in the cards. There will always be too much to do, because the incoming supply of to-dos is effectively infinite. You’ll never feel perfectly confident about your health, or anything else, because the future is always uncertain.

Once you grasp that this vision of the future is a mirage, you get to stop postponing the real meaning of life to a subsequent date and plunge into it right now. From the perspective of radical doability, the most thrilling plans you could imagine mean nothing, compared with the extraordinary power of actually doing something, however imperfect.

So let 2025 be the year when you finally stop trying to become a different kind of person and instead start doing a few things differently: one message to a friend, one meditation session, one workout. Not later, but right now, in the only lifetime any of us ever get.

“Radical doability.” This is what was missing when I sat in multiple church parking lots, writing out my goals day after day. I was trying to change myself and my circumstances through words. But what I needed to change were my actions. I needed to stop writing down my goals and start acting to achieve them. I’d love to say I’ve since learned this lesson, but I can’t. Not fully. But hopefully, even if just a little bit, I now understand better that small steps, even if they are “stupid” ones, are the best way - the only way, really, to progress.

Daniel in the Lions Den by Briton Riviere

There is no limit to the Savior’s capacity to help you

This is where understanding the Savior’s Atonement can make such a difference - maybe even all the difference. I don’t believe His ability to help us is limited to “spiritual” things. He himself said that “all things unto me are spiritual” (D&C 29:34) which I take to mean that to God, there are no exceptions, except for unrighteous desires, to what He is able to do to help us.

“Please listen to this promise of Jesus Christ to you: ‘I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my Spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you, to bear you up.’

There is no limit to the Savior’s capacity to help you. His incomprehensible suffering in Gethsemane and on Calvary was for you! His infinite Atonement is for you!”

Russell M. Nelson

This leaves me without excuses when it comes to putting my heart in God’s hands. Waiting to repent is stupid - in the negative meaning of that word. Putting off change because the timing isn’t right or our situation isn’t optimal is dumb. Knowing that I have unlimited access to His unlimited power should remove any and all reasons for me to wait until later.

As applied to the principal of “start stupid,” I think this well-known quote captures the idea perfectly:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

W.H. Murray

Go and do in this brave new year, friends. Chase that impossible something. Wait not. Crack open your heart and let all the fear and risk and doubt have their say.

And then do it anyway. Start stupid.

The Good Shepherd by Bernhard Plockhorst

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

Rebecca Solnit