How often do you find yourself going through lot of things at once?
You bought a lot of online courses and now you don’t want to go through any of them. You bought a lot of books but now you can’t decide which one to start with because you don’t want it to be boring and discourage you from reading further altogether. You’re trying 10+ things to market your business seldom getting more traction. If you can relate to any of these things then you have what they call the shiny thing syndrome (or not what they call it)
Shiny Thing Syndrome is constantly bouncing from one thing to another hoping something would work out or something would click that would make sense to your current problem or opportunity. STS (Shiny Thing Syndrome) goes hand in hand with refusal, anxiety, pity, shame, stagnation and disappointment.
To elaborate, let’s say you bought an online course that teaches you how to run online ads. 3 days inside the course you find another course that teaches you how to run online ads with readymade ad copy included. Right away! you go and buy that course because its solving the overwhelming problem you have with the first course which just focused on running online ads. Now that you’ve paid for both the courses, you’re obligated to go through each one of them just to see slightly different methods for doing the same thing, running online ads. This overwhelms the shit out of you and you say “Fuck it! I’d rather hire someone to do this for me” and then guess what you find, a third course which teaches to run online ads with no prior knowledge, no technical skills and setup within 2 days. You’re intrigued and you go ahead to buy that course. We both know what’s going to happen after that.
STS creates a positive feedback loop which forces you to keep accumulating more solutions to your problems without acting up on it. That’s also because you have too many options to choose from and you can’t decide which works and which doesn’t (its uncertain). When we have minimum options to choose from, we tend to feed valued and feel good about choosing, but when we have too many options, it becomes overwhelming and we avoid choosing and going through it as we don’t value the further importance of that choice.
Start somewhere and just stick to it. Commit to one thing at the time, don’t run around and shop around for things that would make you feel good temporarily. Have minimum options, Have strategic plan and just act on it. You’d waste a lot less time (yeah) sticking to one thing and finding it doesn’t work compared to when you try a lot of things and finding none of them works because you never got around finishing them.
Artwork: https://dribbble.com/shots/9834842-BOOoooowHOOP
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