How to Start
There is a certain kind of weight that does not show itself on the surface. It lingers quietly, pulling gently at attention. Some days it feels light enough to ignore. Other days, it hums in the background, asking to be noticed.
For the past month, I carried the simple desire to refresh the website for Pivot 5, my AI newsletter. It was a small project. Something I thought about almost daily. Each time I met someone new and wanted to share the newsletter, I found myself pulling up the old site, feeling a small, familiar discomfort. A reminder that there was something unfinished. Something waiting.
I kept telling myself it was a quick task. I kept not doing it.
Yesterday, somewhere between East Asia and Western Europe, sitting on a long-haul flight, I opened my laptop. There was a rare feeling of determination. No fanfare, no special plan. Just a small window of willingness. I connected to the airplane wifi, opened a blank page, and began.
Within forty-five minutes, the new site took shape. Nothing complicated, nothing revolutionary. Just simple, clear, and — for now — enough.
After I hit publish, I closed my laptop and pulled out my journal. I sat with the question: why had this felt so heavy for so long?
It wasn’t that the work was hard. It wasn’t the time it would take. It wasn’t even the skills involved. The real weight had lived elsewhere — in the mind, not the hands.
There is a difference between cognitive load and physical load. Physical effort is easy to spot. Muscles tire. Limbs ache. But cognitive effort is quieter. Decisions accumulate. Doubts pile up. Expectations build until even the simplest task feels like a mountain.
For this website refresh, the cognitive load was heavier than the task itself. Every time I thought about doing it, I imagined all the decisions that would need to be made. What to say. How it should look. How it might be received. Somewhere beneath it all, a perfectionist voice whispered that it needed to be great, not just good enough. That if I wasn’t ready to nail it, I shouldn’t even start.
It is not lost on me how often this pattern repeats itself. The things that weigh the most are rarely the things that require the most physical energy. They are the ones that ask for emotional courage, for the willingness to face uncertainty.
In other areas of life, I have found ways to ease this burden.
I love attending yoga classes, even though I could easily practice at home. I often work out with a trainer, not because I don’t know what to do, but because it feels lighter to follow. For years as a CEO, and even now working independently, life has required a kind of constant self-leadership. Always deciding, always setting the direction. There is a certain fatigue that comes from always leading, even if only oneself.
Sometimes, it feels good to let someone else guide the way. To follow a recipe rather than invent one. To ask ChatGPT even the most basic of questions, just to lighten the load. To not have to figure everything out alone.
There is a certain conservation of energy that happens when the cognitive load is shared, even slightly.
Starting is often the hardest part. The mind can inflate the difficulty of beginning into something monstrous, while the body waits patiently, ready to act. Resistance grows in imagination, but shrinks in the doing.
The experience on the flight reminded me that conserving energy is not always about becoming stronger or pushing harder. Sometimes it is about creating conditions that make important work feel lighter. Reducing friction. Building systems of ease. Lowering the cognitive cost of beginning.
It also reminded me to have compassion for the parts of myself that hesitate.
The part that delayed the website refresh was not lazy or careless. It was cautious. It cared about getting it right. Sometimes, delay is not resistance but a quiet form of protection — an attempt to preserve energy for when it might be most wisely spent.
There are no simple answers here. Only open questions. How to recognize when to push through resistance, and when to listen to it. How to distinguish between the heaviness that protects and the heaviness that holds back. How to create more conditions where beginning feels lighter, and more days where the work flows without force.
The energy to live, to create, to move forward — it is precious. Perhaps conserving it is not about holding it tightly, but about learning how to spend it wisely, and how to trust that sometimes, even the heaviest things are lighter than they appear.
And that is how I learned to start.
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