Career
You've had the idea for years and you've done the research and you haven't started.
You have the idea. You’ve had it for years. You’ve read the books. You’ve watched the videos. You’ve followed the founders on Twitter. You’ve drafted the business plan. You’ve calculated the runway. You’ve imagined the first customer. You haven’t started. The next thing on your list is always “more research.”
You’re using the research to avoid finding out whether the idea works.
The launch is still in the future.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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You very likely came out of childhood with a relationship to risk that doesn’t allow for testing. You may have grown up in a household where being wrong was punished, so you learned to research a decision until you couldn’t possibly be wrong, which means you never quite decide. You may have absorbed the lesson that competence means knowing the answer in advance. You may have built a self-image that depends on the idea being good, and launching would risk finding out it isn’t.
The research is doing a job for you. It looks like work. It releases the pressure of not having started. It substitutes for the launching. As long as you can do more research, you don’t have to find out whether the idea works. The fear underneath is that the launch will reveal that the idea doesn’t work, or that you can’t execute it, or that the version of yourself who runs the business isn’t who you’ve been imagining.
For the broader pattern, see I procrastinate everything at work and I’m afraid to quit if your day job is involved.
You’re using the research as the substitute. We work on what would let you actually launch.
Strategic therapy retires the substitution from its current job, the research you’ve been doing in place of the launching. The research has been functioning as the work, which is why the work doesn’t happen. Once research stops being the activity, doing becomes the activity, and the idea gets to find out whether it survives contact with reality.
You’ll launch. The idea will succeed or it will fail. Either result is information you can act on.
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