The Heart To Start: Stop Procrastinating & Start Creating

by David Kadavy

“I feel like…a lot of people,” I said, “have these little glimpses of ideas or dreams or fantasies in their heads and then it just goes right over them. They don’t realize that the thing that they just fantasized about is something that they could actually go ahead and do.”

People who believe they can learn, actually can (“growth mindset”). People who don’t believe they can learn, struggle to learn (“fixed mindset”). We used to believe that the brain stopped changing at a certain age, but now we know it never stops changing.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. —Pablo Picasso

“no matter who you are, you really are the only person with that voice. And that is the thing to really lean into, even if it’s weird.”

When we create our art, it’s a process of self-actualization. Your true self is constantly in conflict with the expectations of the world around you.

When our true self doesn’t get a chance to follow its desires – when it doesn’t get the creative exercise necessary to arm it with a vocabulary in which to express itself – it acts out in strange ways.

The only way to become your true self is to find the art inside you and make it real.

Your ego fears your art because if you follow your art, you will self-actualize. You will become your true self. But to do so, you will experience failure, and rejection, and fear.

We expect our process as a beginner to be like the process of a master.