JUNE 2024 – Learning how to unfold complicated tasks into simple, actionable steps is so key for progress. Take any large goal you’ve ever had. Was there an easy to follow road map for it or did you have to improvise and figure things out along the way? I swear so much of the internal resistance I feel for being creative daily comes from not knowing where to start. And the bigger the goal, the bigger the push back that my mind is able to muster. Before I’ve even figured out what the first step(s) would be towards getting where I want to go, I’ve thought of a dozen reasons why the ultimate goal would not work out or is a mistake.
Figuring out how to disarm this reaction and convince yourself of the validity of an ambition then becomes a necessary skill to develop. I’ve read other creatives making the suggestion to just do something, anything towards a goal and that will help break down the resistance, no matter how small the first step is. And I like this approach, but when the goal is something that I actually don’t know how to do, that makes it less of a no brainer to act and more of an exercise in resilience and problem solving. And that is where things can get tricky.
What to do? Seek expert advice? Trial and error? Give up and do something else? I tend to favor a combination of expert advice and trial and error myself, but the point I am driving at here is that it is important to know that when going into large goals it is going to get messy. Compromises will need to be made, there will be loads of uncertainty, and while it would be awesome if there was a step by step set of instructions on how to get to where you’re going, it is almost never like that in life. And that if you are a perfectionist and expecting life or your pursuits to have a simple step by step guide like origami, you are in for a rude awakening. And how well you thrive in that chaos will determine how much work you are able to produce.
This whole post is a reminder to myself (who might be at that stage of the creative process at the moment, haha) of this reality and a friendly suggestion to you fair reader to be patient, keep trying, and expect it to be a rocky road at times to get to where you want to go. And you better get used to taking chances and backtracking if things don’t work out. As it is inevitable that you will end up there, likely more often than you’d like.
Picked up and started reading the book ‘The Devil in the White City’ by Erik Larson this month. It is a genre, true crime, that I have never read before and it feels very different than any other book that I’ve read before. It lavishes the audience with facts and descriptive text of the setting to establish the world in which it was written (nineteenth century Chicago) and I quite like the narrative style, it is refreshing. It feels like reading non-fiction though so it has been slow going, but the story is building and I’m keen to see how the plot gets woven together as thus far the stage has just been set.
Cheers all!
~ CS
