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by
David Kadavy
Read between
July 30 - August 1, 2019
By the time I did realize it was an option to make my art – whether it was a painting, a website, or a snow removal business – I had decades of mental programming to undo. I had never considered doing anything other than what I was told. It was assumed that I would do my homework and not talk in class and fill out the proper standardized-test bubbles with a No. 2 pencil. Just what all of this would get me was unclear. It wasn’t until I found myself sitting in a beige cubicle that I ever thought to ask. When I did finally start following my own ideas, this mental programming served as walls of
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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.
“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 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.
The Self wishes to create, to evolve. The Ego likes things just the way they are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s impossible to predict exactly when a vacuum is ready to be punctured. Too early, and people aren’t ready for it. Not enough people are thinking that thing, so the thing is either taboo or too weird. Too late, and the vacuum has already been punctured or deflated. But there’s one compass that always has potential to lead you to an explosive idea: The Voice.
J. K. Rowling once recalled that, as she was writing the first Harry Potter book, she experienced the death of her mother, divorce, unemployment, and clinical depression, and she even considered suicide. “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life,” she said.
When we set out to do something, we naturally picture something big and grand, even if we have no experience at all.
As a result, one of two things happens: Either we do nothing more than fantasize, and never start, or we do start, but we lead ourselves into burnout.
When we charge head first toward building the fortress, we burn ourselves out. We may be inspired and energized for a few minutes, a few hours, or maybe even a week, but we quickly realize how far we are from achieving the vision in our mind. We’ve started once, but we’ll never start again.
To overcome the Fortress Fallacy, all you have to do is recognize that you tend to dream beyond your current abilities. Don’t let your own dream intimidate you into not starting, or lead you into burnout when you do start. Instead, like Evel Knievel’s dream of jumping over the Grand Canyon, let your dream be a guide.
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.
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.
I didn’t know what to write. Each letter I typed set off a chorus of laughter in my ears. I was still telling myself to publish the first post.
“All of us who do creative work…," he says, “we get into it because we have good taste…. But there’s a gap – that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good…. But your taste – the thing that got you into the game – your taste is still killer.”
If we never get started, we never get good, and you can’t get good without first being bad.
If you pay close attention, you’ll notice that you cheat yourself out of making your art all the time. Throughout this section of the book, we’ve seen it in action. We dream beyond our current skill level so we can convince ourselves we’re not ready to start. We tell ourselves we don’t have the time. We take pride in our identity as perfectionists. All these create valid reasons to not get started.
This is why putting goals on someone’s calendar helps that person achieve those goals. If you have to tell your app that, once again, you aren’t going to work on your novel, as planned, there’s no hiding the fact that you are cheating yourself. That’s why Goals worked so well it’s now used by millions of people. The app that Dan and I were working on, Timeful, was bought by Google, and now Goals is a feature on Google’s Calendar app.
You have to apply just the right amount of force in your commitments. If you make too small a commitment, you won’t gain enough momentum to keep moving. If you make too big a commitment, you’ll just end up cheating yourself.
Setting a timer to commit to a small work session is not to be confused with the “Pomodoro Technique,” which usually involves working for twenty-five minutes at a time, separated by five-minute breaks. The purpose of Motivational Judo is to gain enough momentum that you don’t need a break. When you set a short timer as a Motivational Judo technique, the short time frame is merely a decoy to get the ego to take a lunch break.
Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes didn’t worry about what it would take to create one of the top recipe sites on the Internet. She just posted her recipes one at a time. The site wasn’t even called Simply Recipes when she started – it was just her personal website. She didn’t have a fancy content-management system – she coded each page by hand. She worked with the skills she had and the motivation to take her mind off her illness. Momentum built as her site grew in popularity.
He started by writing on his blog for an hour each day before work. His blog led to several books, each one building momentum to write the next one, each one better than the last.
To get started, you need to find the fuel to break through the gravitational pull of the ego. If you follow your curiosity, you will be able to work longer and harder than anyone else. Your curiosities may seem to take you off course, but when they converge, you’ll be untouchable.
An explosive idea is powerful fuel for getting started. Ultimately, your work has to resonate with others. If you tap into the collective consciousness, others will immediately identify with your work. Fortunately, your own consciousness is a part of this collective consciousness. If you have the courage to listen to the voice inside your head, it will lead you to ideas that puncture the vacuum between the status quo and people’s true thoughts and desires.
When you face larger projects, you tend to expect them to be completed in a linear, step-by-step fashion. This causes a creative block, because it forces you to question each move you make.
Perfectionism can hold you back from starting and make you procrastinate. This is especially dangerous because it feels good to think of yourself as a perfectionist. Just as we tend to dream of projects beyond our current abilities, we tend to expect a higher level of quality than we’re currently capable of. By accepting that your early work won’t meet your standards, you can free yourself up for action. This freedom allows you to do the large volume of work required to get good at something, which, counterintuitively, leads to better and better work.
