The Heart To Start: Stop Procrastinating & Start Creating

by David Kadavy

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.

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.

“I’ve never found a bully that was doing amazing things with their life…. Successful, happy, well-emotionally-balanced people don’t have time to shit on somebody else.”

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.

Many techno-optimists dream of us one day having brain-to-brain connections. I could have a thought, and that would cause you to have the same thought. But we already have this technology. Writing is just one way of doing this. Each word represents an idea or a thing you can put in someone else’s mind. But I’ll take Stephen’s description one step further: Not only is writing telepathy. Art is telepathy.

“Generosity is an excellent antidote to fear. If you’re doing this on behalf of someone you care about, the fear takes a back seat.”

the 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. We want to open a Michelin-star restaurant, but we still haven’t gone past microwave nachos. We want to write a novel, but we’ve never written anything longer than a quick email. We want to direct a feature film, but we’ve never tried anything beyond posting a video of our cat on Facebook.

When we fantasize about the fortress in our mind, we can actually get pleasure out of it. This becomes a source of procrastination.

When we charge head first toward building the fortress, we burn ourselves out.

start small, and over time, you’ll build closer and closer to that dream. Dream of a Michelin-star restaurant, but start with a dinner party. Dream of a novel, but start with a short story. Dream of a feature film, but start with a short film. Instead of building a fortress, start with a cottage.

you have many little pockets of time throughout the day when you could start making your art.

Change your perception of what it takes to get started. Your art will not only fill the tiny spaces in your life, it will expand and grow into a body of work.

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.

If we never get started, we never get good, and you can’t get good without first being bad. To overcome perfectionism and get started, you need to accept that your first attempts will not be up to your standards. You have to give yourself Permission to Suck.

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