The Heart To Start: Stop Procrastinating & Start Creating

by David Kadavy

The first step to controlling your world is to control your culture….

I feared the judgment of others. I doubted my abilities. I struggled with motivation. I escaped into distractions.

I The Laws of Art

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1 There Is Art Inside You

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

All my life, I had wanted to create. Some people want to be parents. Some people want to make lots of money. I just wanted to make stuff. I had set up all of my life, and I continue to set up all of my life, to prioritize that one thing.

In the course of our lives, we build kinetic energy.

This brings us to the first law of art: There Is Art Inside You.

that “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.”

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

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the automation of jobs will move what we call “work” up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Instead of spending our time and energy on tasks that can be automated, we can reconnect with our humanity – and our humanity is what makes us all artists.

2 Art Is Self-Actualization

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

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. Is it okay to do this? Will this make someone mad? Will I embarrass myself? Will I be stripped of my “best behaved” award?

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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 art is the best expression possible of who you really are. You make art when you take your passions, your interests, and even your compassion for others, and combine them to make something uniquely yours.

Self-actualization through art isn’t a neat and orderly process. The doing often comes first. It’s only later that you realize what it means.

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illustrates, the mere act of making your art can lead to surprising self-discoveries. This is all the more reason to just get started.

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3 Your Ego Fears Your Art

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The Self wishes to create, to evolve. The Ego likes things just the way they are. —Steven Pressfield

When it comes to making our art, we are no different. When you’re too scared to start, it’s because you don’t want to get hurt. You feel love or affection or lust for an idea, but what if it rejects you? What if your chemistry experiment blows up in your face, or your startup pitch falls flat, or nobody reads your blog post?

Have you ever noticed that people with the biggest egos are actually the most scared and insecure?

“Human beings, when we don’t feel like we’re enough – we will sometimes go to the inferior or to the superior complexes. And bullying is the superior complex. It’s trying to generate some kind of strength and power through intimidation, through causing fear in others, through beating somebody down.”

Ego doesn’t just make you act arrogant or criticize others. Ego also causes you to make excuses for yourself.

“The reason ego exists is comfort.”

If you put your art out there, it might not be any good. So the ego will come up with excuses to not start. You’re still doing research, you don’t have the time, or there’s a crack on your laptop screen. Whatever excuses your ego comes up with, they’ll never be about you. They’ll always be about some outside force. But the excuses really come from inside.

In any artistic endeavor, you’ll always face resistance.

This is the third law of art: Your Ego Fears Your Art. If you start making your art, you’re going to expose your self to discomfort. You’ll have to resist distractions to do the work, you’ll have to struggle through doing work that doesn’t yet meet your standards, and you’ll have to face criticism to make your work better. It’s the ego’s job to protect you from this discomfort. Over time, the distance between the ego and the self gets bigger and bigger. Then you just have a big pocket of air, with a lot of tension between the shell that is the ego and the little mound that is the self. Nobody is ever going to have a perfect alignment of ego and self. We’re all full of hot air from time to time. This will ebb and flow over our lifetimes. You have to build the skill of recognizing when your ego is taking over. You have to build the skill of fixing it when it does.

It’s more comfortable to work where you can blame things that go wrong on a coworker, your boss, your boss’s boss, or even The Board. When you’re on your own, you quickly learn that only you are responsible for your own success or failure.

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.

The same way a rocket needs to escape the gravitational pull of Earth to get into space, your art needs to escape the pull of ego to get into the world. You’re going to need some serious fuel to make that happen.

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II Finding the Fuel

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4 Curiosity First

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It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength…What is done in love is well done. —Vincent Van Gogh

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One of the best forms of that fuel is your own curiosity. If you learn how to connect with your curiosity, not only will it propel you through the hard work of getting started, it will be there to keep you moving.

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You have to find the right balance between exploitation and exploration.

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But if you follow your curiosities, they’ll eventually converge into something completely original.

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I had the knowledge, and I understood the audience. I could speak their language,

5 The Voice

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If you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. —C.S. Lewis

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Yes, they’re all cultural sensations that came out of big ideas. But almost every big idea does the same thing: Big ideas tap into the collective consciousness. Fortunately, your own consciousness is part of the collective consciousness.

As society progresses, a vacuum grows between the status quo and the true desires of people in the world. The more distance that grows between what people are really thinking and what is actually going on, the more powerful that vacuum becomes. Seth Godin talked about this in more detail in his book Unleashing the Ideavirus: If something is going to go “viral,” he explained, it has to puncture a “vacuum.”

This is what happens when you puncture a vacuum. You tap into the thoughts of not just one person but many people. All that pressure propels your idea. It makes people share it.

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But one factor is absolutely critical to doing something notable: You have to listen to the voice in your head and pursue its ideas.

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Keep pursuing the ideas The Voice gives you, even if most of them may not work out. It’s better to be right one time out of a hundred than to be right zero times out of zero.

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6 Go for ‘The Pump’

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

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I won’t fool myself into thinking I had a productive day because I was busy deciding what to eat for breakfast, or having coffee with someone randomly introduced to me.

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That’s why it’s not just important to connect with The Pump to know when you’re onto a good idea. It’s also important to get yourself into the right mood, so you can transfer that feeling to your audience.