📓 How far have I actually come since June?

Last week I asked which free thing would help you most if I made one to help you get started online. Seven of you answered. 57% picked a simple step-by-step guide. 29% picked help choosing which idea suits you. 14% picked a short checklist, and nobody asked for ChatGPT prompts. There weren’t as many votes as I had hoped for, but it leaned one way. A step-by-step guide is what I'll build next and I will try to make it so it can help you find an idea too.

Before I build anything new, though, I want to do something we almost never do. Look back.

This week I read through everything I've sent you on a Tuesday since June. Fourteen of them. Reading them in a row was a bit like finding an old notebook in a drawer. I'd forgotten how far we'd come.

By the end of this you'll:

Looked at together, the last three months turn out to be one path, not fourteen tips.

Back in June, I told you about sitting with twenty tabs open, trying to pick a pair of reading glasses. Forty minutes later I closed them all and bought nothing. That's where this whole stretch began. Not with too few options, but with too many.

Then, one Tuesday at a time, we took some of the weight off.

In July it was "You are not deciding forever. You are just deciding for now." I'd stood in a hardware store holding two cans of paint and walked out with neither. I needed that one as much as you did.

A week later Bradley showed up, barking the television down, and reminded us that looking isn't committing. He's still wrong about the television most days.

In September it was "You don't have to feel ready. You only have to go second." And then the one that's stayed with me most: you might just be holding a coat that was cut for somebody else.

Read in order, those aren't fourteen separate tips. They're one walk. Too many choices. Permission to choose for now. Trying without committing. Noticing it got easier. Asking whose plan it really is.

You can only see how far you've come by turning around.

When I was five, I got kicked out of kindergarten.

Not for behavior. The teacher said she had nothing left to teach me. So while my friends were at school, I sat home with nobody to play with until the afternoon. I taught myself how to fill a day. I've basically been doing that ever since.

I think a lot of us learned early that we'd have to figure things out on our own timeline. Then we spent forty or fifty years being told the opposite. Keep up. Stay current. Don't fall behind.

Here's the trouble with that. Behind assumes there's a schedule everyone else is on. There isn't. And if you only ever look forward, at what's still left to learn, you'll always feel behind. It's only when you turn around that you can see the ground you've covered.

That's also how you find out whether a direction is yours. Not by deciding it in advance, but by noticing afterward which steps you kept taking without being pushed.

Here's the whole exercise. It takes about five minutes. If you joined more recently, start from whenever you first opened one of these.

Don't polish it. The first honest version is the right one.

Mine would be: "Three months ago I thought I had to pick the right thing. Now I know I only have to pick the next thing."

Same question as August, one tap:

It's the one about whether you've settled on one thing to try online. Asking it again is the fairest way I know to see whether anything's moved.

If you write the sentence, you'll have something the feeling of being behind can't argue with. A plain record of how far you've come, in your own words.

If you don't, nothing's lost. The three months still happened. You just won't have them written down, and progress you don't name has a way of feeling like no progress at all.

Here's the one thing I'd love to hear. Reply with your sentence, or just the second half, the "now I know" part. A few words is plenty. There's no wrong answer, and you don't have to explain it.

And if your honest answer is "I'm still figuring it out," that counts too. Three months ago, it might not have been "still."

Talk soon,
Bob

A short story from my place about Bradley, ice cubes, and what actually holds a day together.