What You Do Right Now Could Change Your Life in 3 Months
Your life can start with a single step.
Just put words on the page.
That’s what I tell myself whenever I can’t write.
Short words. Long ones. Curse words. Words that only a handful of people can understand. Any word at all. Because if you have one word, you have the beginning of a story.
The.
He.
Yesterday.
Superman.
If you were to give yourself a moment, you’d be able to come up with words to follow those ones. You’d end up creating an entire sentence. Again: the start of a story.
The man fell off the roof.
He turned left instead of right.
Yesterday I stole a car.
Superman flew across the sky.
Just words on the page. I started this with “just” and now I’m here. I had no plan, and now I’m here.
Life works like that too. When you take one step forward, your life — your story — develops.
But you can’t see the big picture immediately. When I write The man, anything can happen next. When I write The man fell, he could fall off of anything. It’s not until I reach the end of that sentence that you understand what’s occurred. He’s fallen off a roof.
But that’s why you need to keep taking steps forward.
Sometimes life is so tough and heavy it feels like you’ve already reached the end. But you haven’t reached the end yet — you just need to take more steps.
I’m in a relationship with the woman I’m going to marry one day. But this isn’t something that just happened. First, she sent me a message on Twitter — the type of message I’m sure she’s sent other writers she admires. Then, I answered her — the way I’ve responded to all strangers on Twitter.
But I could go further back: Maybe the first step was deciding to write on this platform. Or getting a subscription. Or maybe discovering this website even existed at all.
I’m not saying that all these tiny steps happened just so we could end up together. But those steps did happen, and we…
