doing the thing is always better than not doing the thing

before i do the thing, i often question, "what's the point of doing the thing anyway?" surely when i do the thing this once, it's not moving the needle enough to matter in the grand scheme of things. so why do it at all? why not just skip today and then do it better some other day?

on the days when i overcome this doubt and do the thing anyway, i'm always struck by just how different doing the thing is from not doing the thing. 

my boyfriend and i are starting to lift—he's done it before, but for me, this is the first time i'm trying to consistently go to the gym and build strength. last week we were planning to go to the gym before our other plans, but were quickly running out of time to do so. 

i'm always quick to say, "let's just do this another day," if things aren't panning out how we intended. but my boyfriend insisted we go anyway, and i found myself pondering this on the walk over. what if we get there and we only have time for one set of one exercise? would it still be worth it? why not just wait until another day?

but if we hadn't gone that day, then it would be easy to just kick the can further down the road the next time, too. "not today" turns into "not this month" and then before we know it, another year goes by without making any progress toward accomplishing the thing. 

on the other hand, doing the thing once gives you so much more information than never having done the thing at all. even if it doesn't feel like a lot, you only need a small amount of information to then inform your next step, which you wouldn't have gotten by not doing the thing at all, even in a tiny way.

even if i hadn't gotten to any actual exercise that day, simply going to the gym at all meant i gained lots of new information: now i knew which entrance to go to, how many flights of stairs to climb, how to scan the qr code to enter the gym, where in the app to find it, how to use the lockers in the locker room, etc. meaning next time i go, i wouldn't have to worry about any of that, and could focus on the next thing to tackle. 

so as often as i can, for whatever the "thing" is at that moment—lifting or writing a blogpost or modeling or playing the piano or learning swedish—i'll overcome my doubts and simply do the thing.