HARD BEGINNINGS
EPISODE 033: HARD BEGINNINGS
Beginnings are hard but our creative lives depend on them. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe knew a thing or two about getting things done. Not only did he live behind a legacy of astonishing prolific creativity but he left us words that suggest his secret: Begin. Begin with courage and boldness, without any guarantee of success. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe knew a thing or two about getting things done, creatively speaking. His entry on Wikipedia begins with an abbreviated credit to his prolific work ethic, saying: "His works include: four novels; epic and lyric poetry; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; and treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him have survived."
I like to think I’m prolific, but this guy makes me feel lazy and creatively impotent. He was not only creative in the sense we most often use that word these days, meaning innovative, but he was creative in the more down-to-earth kind of way that simply means he created things.
So many things.
So if you were asking around and wanted some advice from someone with unimpeachable credibility in this arena, you could do much worse than asking Goethe. Of course, Goethe’s been dead almost 180 years or so now, but this is the advantage of being a dead writer, if your words have any value they tend to stick around, and if you’re lucky they’ll escape being credited to Mark Twain on a motivational poster or internet meme.
Perhaps if you’ve never heard of Goethe, you’ve still seen his words, writ large in Papyrus font, or God help him, Comic Sans, across a photograph of a sunset, and reminding us "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” Expressing a similar notion with greater economy, he also said "Courage is the commitment to begin without any guarantee of success.”
The through-line in both these quotes can be found in the one word they have in common. Begin.
What I love about Goethe is that he acknowledges not only the necessity but the difficulty of Starting. He’s not just handing out platitudes. He acknowledges the need for boldness, courage, and commitment. Because he acknowledges the need to not only begin but to do so without any guarantee of success, he’s also pointing to the reality that every worthwhile creative effort begins in uncertainty and risk.
In another place he says "Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.” and elsewhere: "Everything is hard before it is easy.” I haven’t read a biography on Goethe but I get the sense that this was a man who wasn’t afraid to get dirt under his nails, write a lot of crappy first drafts, and work through a great many bad ideas before he uncovered within them something like a good idea. Or maybe he was afraid, but he did it anyways. People who don’t desperately need courage don’t usually talk about it the way he did.
Why I bring Johann Wolfgang von Goethe into this conversation is because I think he nails it when he identifies the start of our creative efforts as the pivotal point in our process, and the one most needing boldness and courage, because it’s where so many of us get hung up and stalled.
In the long list of obstacles we have to overcome in any creative work, if we don’t get past the first one - the actual beginning - we won’t have the chance to overcome the others. But why is starting so damn hard for so many of us? There are probably as many answers to that question as there are people asking it, but if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on 3 reasons: that we haven’t got the whole project or idea figured out yet, that in it’s entirety it’s too big, too overwhelming, and we don’t even know where to begin, and third: we’re just plain scared of failing. It might be one of those, and it might be all 3. Likely it’s a mix of them with a few more thrown in, and all of them come from a misunderstanding of the creative process.
When I said “creative process” did you roll your eyes at me? I don’t mean it preciously, and I don’t mean it in that fuzzy way that’s hard to define. I mean the way we make things. How we begin, how we work through challenges, how we combine ideas - the whole messy thing. But messy as it is, there are commonalities in the way we make new things, and I think if we become more comfortable with them, we will become more comfortable with starting our work, and less stalled by the most common reasons we delay beginning some new thing and getting to work, the first of which is not having a detailed blueprint before we start.
If you were building a house you’d want that blueprint. You’d want things mapped out. But building the house isn’t the start I’m talking about. The blueprint is. You don’t begin a blueprint with a blueprint already in hand. You begin with a dream, with a handful of What-ifs, and some ideas that might not ever make it into the plans but are needed to get the ball rolling, ideas–like Goethe suggests–that might be eventually beaten, or given up, but are needed to start a winning game.
That’s the first thing I want to remind you, if you’re standing on the threshold of some new thing: don’t wait until you’ve got it all figured out. Don’t wait until it’s all clear and the blue print is in front of you. There will be times for blue-prints later, though even they are prone to re-drawing as the making of that thing unfolds, as new ideas come and problems are over-come. Waiting until it’s all figured out feels right, responsible, like maybe you’re not even waiting, but have already started on phase one, the thinking-it-all-through stage.
Maybe.
But perhaps you should ask yourself how long you’ve been at this stage if’s not actually just a delay tactic. I don’t mean an intentional willingness to not begin. Good intentions or otherwise, you could be waiting a long time for clarity that usually only comes after you have begun the real work. The book, the album, the new series of whatever things you put into a series in whatever form of creativity that’s yours. And here’s the thing, even when it all does seem clear, it almost never is. The thing you begin is almost never the thing that you finish. Not in the details, but often not even in the overall vision and broad-strokes execution Why? Because no plan survives contact with reality. If everything we create eventually becomes the thing it becomes, through evolution and mistakes, discoveries, and unforeseen solutions to unexpected problems, we had better get moving on discovering what that’s going to be. Waiting until we’re crystal clear is a trap.
The second reason we might not get started with the kind of boldness Goethe is urging us toward is being overwhelmed by the sheer size of it. Write a book. Record an album. Renovate that house. Build that game or that new course you’ve been meaning to make. Almost anything we make, in the end, feels like an accomplishment, like we just completed that one big thing. But we don’t build it like that. We complete 3000 small things. One step at a time. I have never–quote–written a book–end quote. I have however sat down to draft an outline. I’ve sat down to write a chapter. And when sitting down to write a chapter is too daunting a task, I’ve sat down to write the first sentence of a chapter. Not even a good first sentence, in fact. It’s often a really crappy first sentence.
But, see, Goethe, doesn’t talk about starting well. He doesn’t beg us to start correctly or brilliantly, but simply, to start. And when he does qualify it, it’s to start boldly. With courage. Wait, what? Why courage, Goethe? Because you’re going to need it, because making anything is an audacious, presumptuous, perilous task if it’s worth making at all, and few of us get it right on the first try. That doesn’t matter. It matters that we begin. And beginning is easier when you don’t confuse the process of making the thing, with the thing itself. No matter how you do it, that takes courage.
One day there will be a book where there is none, or a painting, or a new vaccine. But for now that’s not your task. Your task is to take the first step, and with each step you’ll learn something about what’s working and what is not. And you’ll stumble forward, into each subsequent step, each of them shrouded in darkness when you begin. It usually only makes sense when you look back. Looking forward it just looks overwhelming. So don’t look any further than that next step. Focus on that. And if you don’t know precisely where to begin, then almost anything, while not a step in the right direction is a step in a direction that can be corrected, or it’s a step that helps you see your direction. I’ve started most of my 32 books with sentences that didn’t appear in the final book. Writing them was not a commitment to keeping them, but it was a commitment to beginning.
Finally, there’s the fear of failing, which is something we often acknowledge but never define. In my younger days I did a lot of rock climbing before I had one too many reminders about the price of true failure in that sport. Failure was not falling. We fell all the time. We’d scrape our knees and sprain some things, but the ropes we used stopped us from hitting the ground. That would be failure and there were plenty of ways to get there if you weren’t paying attention. But falling wasn’t what we feared, though none of us liked it much. It was still scary. But there’s a difference between falling and failing, and I would argue that in our creative work we have much less true failure to worry about. We might fall plenty. It might often be scary as hell, especially when you’re being vulnerable with your work and baring your heart to the world. But failure? I’m not so sure. You only fail when you can’t or won’t try again.
Once again, Goethe hits the nail on the head when he pushes us toward courage. No one that makes anything new does so without falling, and often, failing in the momentary sense of the word. But if we’re open to it, our creative failures are a much more faithful teacher than our immediate successes will ever be. Not only that, many of the efforts we make in which we give too much attention to avoiding failure, will result in playing it safe, hedging our bets, and practically guaranteeing that we fail to make something of substance. Obedience to the fear of failure is the fastest way to mediocrity, but It’s also a pretty quick way to quench that fire in your heart and diminish your dreams. I can almost hear our friend Johann whispering: “Dream no small dreams, for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”
Beginnings are hard. Even harder when we feel the pressure to begin correctly, all at once, and without the possibility of falling or failure. I wish I could say it all gets so much easier as you do this for longer, but I haven’t found that to be the case. In fact the longer I do this and pursue a life of everyday creativity, the more I feel I have to lose.
The solution to all this is not to make beginnings easy. There’s no hack for that. And it’s not to do only those things that are small and easily accomplished or come with no risk. It’s to start ugly. To begin our work sooner, bolder, and more welcoming of the inevitable missteps and mistakes. To start as rough and as tentative as we need to. It’s to acknowledge that everything in life begins as a sketch, a prototype, or a crappy first draft because those things are not merely inevitable but valuable. Even necessary. Baby steps. Ugly little teetering steps that look more promising of falling down on a well-padded diapered-bottom than of anything we’d call walking or running.
I don’t want to overdo the metaphor here, I’ve got a whole new book for that. It’s called Start Ugly, The Unexpected Path to Everyday Creativity, and I’ll introduce it to you soon.
What I do want is to remind you that there are things in life that we don’t dismiss just because they begin difficult, or small, incomplete, or as only a hint of what they will become. Instead we acknowledge that their task is to become. And that is the task of every person who has ever made anything at all, or engaged in any creative effort: to start and not only to bring the thing into the world but to facilitate the becoming. A book is not made in a day. But then neither was its author.
Creation is never instant.
It’s a process of becoming. It doesn’t matter that you get it into the world clean and tidy, it doesn’t matter if it takes longer than you thought. And most certainly will not matter if it takes you a few false starts or even if you have no real idea of where it’s all heading. What matters is that you be bold in starting. That you be courageous enough to begin a process you will most certainly guide, but whose end might often be foggy or unknown. It matters that you do not delay the one part of the process that is entirely and only up to you: that you begin. Only then will you gain clarity, and see where it’s all going.
You’re not alone in finding it hard to start, in thinking that you’ll make a stronger start when you’ve got it all figured out, when the time is right, when the muses show up, or you feel better about your chances of success. You’re not the only one wishing it were magic. There is magic, or something like it in the creative process, certainly the way I feel when I’m creating and things are going well, that feels magic.
And so does starting. Goethe says the magic is in boldness. But I don’t care if you’re bold or timid, if you feel brave or chicken-shit, or you experience the strange alchemy of creativity that can allows us to feel all that at the same time, the magic is in beginning. Let’s get started.
Thank you so much for joining me for another episodes of A Beautiful Anarchy. I continue to be so humbled by your notes and reviews, the idea that these words and the few minutes we spend together most weeks is as important to you as you tell me it is, means the world to me. Most days it kind of blows my mind. Thank you for that. Very soon I’ll be releasing two new books. The first is called Start Ugly and it’s a deeper look at what we explored today. The second is for fans of this podcast and a chance for those of you that want printed copies of these episodes: it’s called The Problem with Muses, Notes on EveryDay Creativity. The first people to know about this release will be those who’ve asked me to send them On The Make, the dispatch I send by email every 4 weeks when I don’t publish the podcast. If you’re not yet getting that, you can join us by going to aBeautifulAnarchy.com scrolling down to the bottom where it says Escape Your Rut and telling me where to send it. I’ll start sending On The Make right away, and I’ll also send you a copy of my eBook, Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back. Thanks again for listening, now go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0