Forge’s “Beat Yesterday” slogan is catchy and positive. Yet, it emphasizes the wrong goal. Beating yesterday may be great, but what if you did nothing yesterday? Then, beating tomorrow shouldn’t be all that hard!

The real objective should be to beat the tomorrow you would have if you didn’t change today. If you did one push-up today, would tomorrow be better? Yes, but not by much.

Does this mean you shouldn’t do it? On the contrary, that’s the first thing to do.

Start now and fail

Don’t push things away. Don’t give excuses. Don’t expect tomorrow to give you more opportunities. Don’t regret not having done anything yesterday. Do it now.

“The secret to getting ahead is getting started.”― Mark Twain

Whatever you want to accomplish, you’ll need to start someday, somewhere, somehow. Would tomorrow be easier? Maybe. But maybe not, too. Would starting yesterday have been better? Yes.

And yet, keeping the focus on other times won’t change anything. You are here, today, now. Forget the rest and do what you can.

The best way to start? A failure. Try something easy and fail. Right off the bat. Find where you could get the solution, but don’t look at it.

Keep that for tomorrow. If it was indeed an easy task, your brain will have assimilated it by then and maybe even found the solution on its own. If it hasn’t, at least the failure will be well-stored in your memory, so you never make it again.

Criticize yourself

I don’t mean to go all dark and start thinking life sucks. What you need is to understand yourself.

You cannot go forward without knowing who you are. How can you expect to become better if you don’t even know how “good” you are now?

You will need to become self-aware. You will need to look within your experiences, the times you disappointed others and/or yourself. You need to find what you want to get rid of. Just as you need to find what you want to develop further.

Will today be enough to do that? Definitely not. Sorry, but if it were that easy, you’d have done it years ago already. The rest of the world would have, too.

Yet, if you spend a few minutes today, you’ll have spent more time on it than the vast majority of the world. And you’ll have started opening doors.

Those doors will be waiting for you to investigate them tomorrow. And the day after. And the one after. For the rest of your life. More doors will open as you dig deeper. And as you develop self-awareness, you will find more ideas to develop.

Start and reflect today. It’s only the beginning of a wild and fulfilling journey.

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Mathias Barra is a French polyglot living in Japan, who has learned 6 languages and dabbled in many others. Being a curious child full of wonders is how he keeps on learning and can’t stop sharing every tiny idea or discovery.