the last lecture

Though yesterday may have been the day I got un-stuck (yes, I am now officially un-stuck and will henceforth stop using the phrase un-stuck), yesterday was but the culmination of several weeks worth of reflection. Perhaps I’ll expand on that reflection in the coming days, but not today. What I’d like to do today is thank Randy Pausch.

If you don’t know Randy’s story, that’s okay. I didn’t know it either. I mean, I’d read about Randy and his battle with pancreatic cancer and I’d heard about his lecture at Carnegie Mellon, but I didn’t know much else. Not until a colleague lent me his audiobook version of The Last Lecture did I really get a sense for who Randy is, and by that I do not mean a man battling a terminal illness. I’m not going to give away the head-fake, so you’re just going to have to watch it yourself:

I don’t know how to thank someone for a gift like that, but I do know that I believe in prayer and that he and his family are in mine.

The Hardest Thing About Getting Started Is Getting Started

Tried it. Got stuck. Been stuck for a long time. I could tell you how long I’ve been stuck, but it’s pretty embarrassing to respond with 2 years, 2 months, and 11 days. Some un-stucking is in order.

A while back (somewhere in that 2 years, 2 months, and 11 days range), I picked up a copy of Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start. I read it, re-read it, recommended it to a friend, and then put it on my office bookshelf. I refer to it every now and again — particularly to the chapter entitled “The Art of Pitching” as I think it’s excellent counsel. That, however, is another post. Today I pulled it off the shelf, thumbed to “The Art of Starting,” and started reading. It was all of 30 seconds before the following jumped out at me:

The hardest thing about getting started is getting started … Don’t worry about being embarrassed. Don’t wait to develop the perfect product or service. Good enough is good enough. There will be plenty of time for refinement later. It’s not how great you start — it’s how great you end up.

Here’s to getting un-stuck.