The Heart To Start: Stop Procrastinating & Start Creating

by David Kadavy

There Is Art Inside You

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

“I’m going to do my thing. That’s the one thing nobody else can do.”

Art Is Self-Actualization

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty. —Maya Angelou

you have to listen to that chatter. Not to heed its advice, but to tell it why it’s dead wrong.

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

Your Ego Fears Your Art

You feel love or affection or lust for an idea, but what if it rejects you?

the discomfort you endure pursuing your art is better than being delusional.

Curiosity First

I needed a strategy to fight against distractions.

commencement address Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005.

Curiosity is powerful fuel for motivation.

Sometimes it feels as if every good idea is taken. But if you follow your curiosities, they’ll eventually converge into something completely original.

You have to listen to the voice in your head and pursue its ideas.

It’s better to be right one time out of a hundred than to be right zero times out of zero.

The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. —Eli Wiesel

Art is telepathy.

Besides your curiosity, the voice in your head, and the feeling in your body, there’s one more powerful fuel source for finding the heart to start.

I made sure to connect with The Pump and get myself into the right mood for my writing sessions.

That Which Pulls You Through is the thing that is so strong it can fuel you through the inevitable discomfort of making your art real.

To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act. —Anatole France

Fortress Fallacy, because it’s as if we imagine that we will build a giant fortress when we’ve never laid a single brick in our lives.

I did it by accepting that I wasn’t going to achieve the vision in my mind right away.

let your dream be a guide.

Instead of building a fortress, start with a cottage.

When you Inflate the Investment, you prevent yourself from starting in the moment because you assume it’s too big a commitment. You assume you don’t have enough time. As a result, you cause yourself to procrastinate with something that’s a smaller commitment.

By giving myself permission to make a small investment in my art, I sometimes build momentum

take the pressure off yourself and let yourself make a tiny start,

The Linear Work Distortion is the false belief that creative work is a neat, step-by-step process, wherein the final product steadily reveals itself. In fact, that’s not how creative work really happens. It’s often messy, and iterative.

given myself Permission to Suck.

we fool ourselves into not starting. We dream of building a fortress when we should be starting with a cottage. We fool ourselves into procrastinating by exaggerating how much time we really need. We create mental blocks by imagining our work will follow a linear progression.

If we never get started, we never get good, and you can’t get good without first being bad.

With Motivational Judo, you use the force of your own ego to kickstart your project and keep yourself moving.

Setting a timer for a short work session is just one potential Motivational Judo move.

The right Motivational Judo move for me and David Marquet is a ridiculously easy goal.

each start is important. Each start helped me learn how to make the next start better.

Try to identify what makes your work important to you. It will fuel you when nothing else can.