Start now.
My favorite mantra is the hardest to follow—get to work.
I’m revisiting this mantra of mine because the parable of the pottery class has been making the rounds on social media. I’ll share a quick version of it here:
A pottery teacher divided their class into two groups of students. One group was instructed to make one pot per day and the other group was to spend all semester perfecting one pot. The first group got right to work, while the second group began to research, plan, and design. Upon completion of the course, the prolific group of students produced the best work, receiving the highest grades.
The lessons here are:
1) get to work
2) be prolific—progress over perfection
3) practicing quantity leads to quality
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.” —Chuck Close
Starting is hard. We want to wait until we have all the tools, have done all the preparations, have a Plan B, a security blanket, enough money saved up, or until it’s perfectly perfect.
But, if I haven’t started, I don’t have any experience. And if I don’t have experience, how can I expect it to be “perfect” (or even close) at the outset?
Imagine trying to do one set of 10 perfect pull-ups without ever having worked out before. You cannot simply watch tutorials online and expect to nail it the first time. With every attempt, you become better and stronger.
What if you wanted to bake bread from scratch, despite no experience baking? You improve with every loaf of bread you bake because you’re adjusting the recipe, temperature, resting time, etc.
What about ballet? Can you be on-pointe day 1 if you’ve never danced? Probably not.
No amount of thinking, planning, designing, pondering, conversing, or researching will prepare you better than hands-on experience. I could probably get an Olympic gold medal if over-planning were a sport—I constantly work on ways to dive right in. As Chuck said above, the result usually arises out of the experience itself, not the waiting or planning.
Even the very best and most talented folks had to start somewhere. Salvador Dali experimented with Pointillism and Impressionism until he landed on his defining style of Surrealism. His early works were not bad, per se, but they did not shape art history. It wasn’t until he discovered his own voice that he created groundbreaking work, like The Persistence of Memory.
Despite making art for many years now, I always get this paralysis when looking at a blank canvas or page, and have to throw some marks on it to get going.1 I wanted to be an artist for most of my life, but was afraid because I didn’t have any confidence in my abilities. But I hadn’t even tried! I thought I should wait until I had something to say.
I also wanted to be a good writer. I am not. The very fact that you’re reading my writing right now is because I decided to work out my fears by forcing myself to practice.
One day in 2006, I started a sketchbook practice. A few years later, I did a 365 “Shape a Day” project in which I drew each day for a year. The work didn’t matter as much as the routine and dedication. I proved to myself that I could do something for an entire year. These days, Duolingo has taken its place!2
I’ve experimented with different pens, papers, markers, paints, sculpture, tufting, and more recently, weaving. It took about seven years for me to get to a place where I felt a real connection to my work—and confidence in it. I’m not saying it will take everyone that long to get where they want, but even the journey can be very rewarding. I wouldn’t have gotten very far if I’d sat around for seven years thinking about drawing. I had to push myself to make art, to find new ways of expression, and to experiment with a variety of mediums. It was only possible through being prolific and having a regular practice.
I make a lot of “bad” work.3 I think bad work is necessary; Many people do. It helps you overcome the fear of making bad work. Of failure. Make bad work on purpose as an experiment. You never know what you will learn.
I often revisit older drawings to see my progress.4 They act like a visual timeline—a diary. I remember where I was, what I was doing, where we lived. The evolution of my work is also an evolution of me. And, to be honest, even the work I don’t like sometimes grows on me, so I’ve also learned not to throw anything away. I now have proof to show myself that the instant urge to rip up that “bad” drawing—albeit satisfying in the moment—is less productive. And so these urges get stuffed away in a drawer along with the drawing.
Even if you’re not a creative, this is all still applicable. Failure is part of an entrepreneurial journey. It’s part of parenting. It’s part of living. The more you fail, the less frequently you let it bowl you over. I have failed so many times at so many things, it’s impossible to tally. Failed businesses, failed relationships, parenting mistakes, terrible poems, failed attempts to break habits, failed haircuts! Failing sucks, but the learning is 🤌. I‘ve racked up more failures than successes, and yet I don’t view myself as a failure. My successes have been qualitative, spectacular, and life-changing.
I used to be the in the group of students who worked on just one pot. I’m now a proud member of the prolific group because I know that if I keep going, each pot will teach me something, and at least one of those pots is going to be exceptional.
I shared some of my methods for busting through procrastination in a previous post here.
984-day streak as of today!
“Bad art” is subjective.
A delightful surprise of doing this is that sometimes my past self inspires my current self. View all my sketchbooks here.
The hardest is to start something; you're worried over the the things you don't have; you're worried over what might not happen. We're experts in stopping progress before it even starts
Your writing is SO good!