This week I started writing an elaborate post on the importance of starting more than you can finish. Without giving too much away, the thesis of the article is that it pays to start as many things as your heart desires, irrespective of whether you have the will or ability to finish them all. This, you might find, runs contrary to conventional wisdom, especially in an age where we eschew quitting and venerate perseverance above all else.
If you're a regular reader of my posts, or at least if you plan to revisit my blog in the next few weeks, then you've got this aforementioned article to look forward to in all its glory. The reason you're not reading said article right now, is that while I was writing it, I came across another tangential but related idea, a much simpler idea, and one that sets the stage for the article I was going to write – on the importance and practice of showing up.
I realised then, that I was inadvertently putting that proverbial cart before the horse in writing an article about starting more than you can finish, when I'd hardly devoted space to the importance of showing up, to begin with. So, I thought it best to pivot, which allows me to simultaneously explore that idea in this post and set up the original idea for a future post. This has gone meta enough, so here goes…
Starting is just about one of the most difficult things a person can do. High school physics – by way of Newton's first law of motion – teaches us that going from being stationary to being in motion requires external intervention, which is to say that a body at rest will simply remain at rest unless acted upon. Similarly, an uninitiated project will simply remain like so, unless some sort of considerable impetus causes it to be initiated. This is all to say that going from ground zero on a project, or writing the first chapter of a novel, or drawing the first character of a comic, or composing the first verse of a song, or laying down that first part of any piece of art may be the most difficult part of the entire process.
And yet, paradoxically, it is easily the most crucial part because without it, nothing else can exist. If you don't start the song, or comic, or novel, or painting, then the song, or comic, or novel, or painting cannot exist. If you don't start it, you never get a chance to finish it.
So how do we start it? One idea is to simply show up. This is the part that messes with one's intuition. The intuitive idea is to wait for inspiration to strike before starting something. Once that lightbulb lights up, it takes you to all sorts of places and kickstarts the entire project, or so we tend to believe. Except, we have it backwards. We have to show up for inspiration to strike. This might mean doodling on a blank page, or writing the date and project title on a blank word processor file, or strumming a few bars of a generic chord progression. This is when the magic starts to happen. Sometimes.
The truth is the magic doesn't always happen immediately or right after showing up, at least in my experience. In fact, the first fruits tend to be sour. The first few lines of the song and the first few sentences and pages of the write-up tend to require extensive revisions. But that's okay. As the old expression goes, you can't edit a blank page. But you know what you can do? Turn bad writing into something marginally less bad. And if you manage to do this enough times, through the necessary amount of iterations, that bad first draft or verse or comic might turn into something good. And this is all made possible by the mere act of showing up.
PS: Just a reminder that my latest record, All Behind is out now, everywhere. You can listen to it on several platforms. Please share it with a friend, share it with your social networks, and consider subscribing to the newsletter (below), my YouTube channel, or wherever else you listen to music.