Planning a hike can be a big deal. You need to know how long the trail is and how much you’ll need to take. You might need a map and compass or GPS to figure out where you’re going. You might need extra gear to get through obstacles like cliffs or rivers to get to your goal. When it all comes down to it though, you really only need to know one thing about the trail to start.
Where the trailhead is
You can forget your gear. You can figure out where the trail goes when you get there. You can improvise when you get to obstacles when you get there. But you can’t start hiking until you know where the trailhead is.
There are a lot of projects sitting in my Google Docs and Evernote. I haven’t started them because I don’t know the way through. I don’t know what obstacles I’ll hit or where exactly they’ll end up. But I have the one thing I need. I have the trailhead. I have the starting point in that Doc or note. I want to know exactly what path the project will take and what it looks like at the end before I even start. But I can’t know.
Just like Google Earth and photos on Facebook and hundreds of trip reports won’t tell you exactly how your hike will go, there’s no way to know exactly how a new project will go.
You can’t know. That’s the point.
It’s an adventure.
And that’s why we do it.