If you don’t start, you don’t fail

One of the most rewarding parts of this project is being in direct contact with the community. Receiving your messages, your anecdotes and your reflections fills me with joy. I never imagined how many stories we would share and how this beautiful connection would form.

I have already said that my team was worried when I finally decided to start this project, they thought I wouldn’t have enough time, and I, for my part, probably thought I wouldn’t have enough stories (boy, was I wrong!).

Originally, I had planned to launch the blog in November last year, but there was always something “more important” to do. First, a project that took up my time; then, younity’s expansion into the English-speaking market. I would always find an excuse to procrastinate.

But what exactly is procrastination? The word comes from the Latin pro + crastinare, and basically means “to leave for later”.

And I have told you all this story, because a few days ago, Regina asked me to talk about it.

Since the blog is such a young project, every time I talk about a new topic, the community itself makes it grow, raising new questions and exploring new approaches, but to begin with, I want to share a reflection…

On a psychological level, we fear failure. There are instinctive parts of our brain that have not evolved along with modernity. Some mental mechanisms still identify fear as a risk to our life, and as our brain’s main goal is to keep us alive, it tries to persuade you against taking unnecessary risks.

That is one of the origins of procrastination. If you don’t take a risk, it is not possible to fail, so you put off starting forever, or until the last possible moment, in case there is a deadline in between.

It sounds a bit ridiculous, and it is, but that’s the factory software our brains run on. The good thing is that, like any other software, it is always possible to update it.

How? By acknowledging those fears, facing them and rewriting our internal narrative.