When You Find It Hard to Begin
This one minute piece will help you overcome your first obstacle.
You are likely reading this article if you are experiencing the overwhelming (and extremely common) feeling that you’d love to begin a creative project, but haven’t quite put the pen or keyboard into action!
The likeliest reasons why this might be so are as follows:
- fear of failure
- lack of time/energy
- unreasonable expectations
I spent about four years procrastinating from beginning my latest music project Back Room Scene. Instead of just starting, I found every excuse for not sitting down writing a song and putting it out there. In our over-saturated fast-paced marketplace of creative arts, we establish an expectation on ourselves to get things right the first time or it’s no use. We decided immediately that we needed to go ‘full time / all out’ on our project or else we would not be as successful… and finally fear overwhelms us, so we go and make a sandwich and spend the rest of the day sad we didn’t get anywhere.
If you’re in this phase (and it is a phase) of creativity, then the only way forward is to push onwards with the smallest amount of time, energy and imagination that you have — or, give up. Find just 5–10 minutes to begin writing each day, whether that’s a lyric or music idea, an article or the first chapter of your novel. Find five minutes. As you become more excited and more passionate you will begin making more and more time, and before you know it, you will be out of this horrible phase and deep into the joy of the art form that you love so dearly.
