I’ve Been Trying To Start This Blog For Ten Years

I’ve been trying to launch this blog for over ten years. I can remember sitting in my bedroom at my sister’s condo and having this great idea to launch a blog that would ultimately launch me by allowing me to package every aspect of my life into a single project.

But I didn’t start writing blog posts. I just thought about it.

I didn’t start planning out a content calendar. I just dreamed about what one might look like.

I would get motivated to start, only to fail within a couple of days and then begin the process all over again.

You see, this wasn’t—and still isn’t—just a blog. It’s an operating system for my life that happens to contain a blog. It’s a massive project that has only grown in scale over the last ten years.

I want to build systems, utilize journaling, create workflows and mind maps, and start with a clean slate and be absolutely perfect from that moment on.

But that’s not possible, because life happens.

I would have one bad diet day. I would miss one workout. Something would come up with my family and I wouldn’t get to put the time into the project that day, and suddenly it wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t perfect enough.

So I had to start over.

The problem wasn’t motivation or inspiration because I could always bring those to the table. The problem was sustainability and consistency.

The problem wasn’t not knowing what to do because I had every detail sketched out in my mind.

The problem was overthinking, overplanning, and failing to act.

The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t make progress because I could.

The problem was that progress didn’t mean perfection, and if it wasn’t perfect, then it wasn’t good enough to continue.

Thus the name: The Young Napoleon Project.

If you haven’t had a chance to read my post about the name (Why The Young Napoleon Project), I hope you will, but the short version is that General George B. McClellan was known for overplanning and underachieving. He would plan, strategize, prepare, and think about what needed to be done, but struggle to take action.

That sounded a little too familiar.

I would plan, strategize, prepare, and think about all the actions I was going to take and then fail to take any of them.

So what changed?

This iteration of the project has been live for seven days now, and this is the seventh blog post I’ve written. What’s different this time?

Honestly, I have no idea.

Maybe nothing is different.

But maybe I just grew tired of starting over.

Maybe I got tired of writing the same introduction over and over again and completing the same setup tasks for the hundredth time.

Maybe I realized that as I get older, take on more responsibilities, support a family, maintain a household, and hold down a full-time job, there is never going to be a perfect time to launch.

And maybe I finally accepted that one bad day doesn’t erase all the good ones if I simply wake up the next morning and keep going.

I don’t know if this project will succeed, and honestly, I’m not even sure what success looks like beyond showing up each day and moving forward.

I don’t know if anyone will read this blog other than me.

And I don’t know if I’ll achieve all the dreams I’ve attached to this project over the last ten years.

But what I do know is that I’ll never find out if I keep hitting the reset button.

So I came back today to write this blog post.

I’m planning on being back tomorrow.

And the next day.

And the day after that.

Because the only way to guarantee I never achieve those dreams is to stop giving myself the chance.