Starting your creative project: Why you are putting your energy in the wrong place
✍️ How to overcome the fear and get started?
You know you have a gift for the world, you can feel your unrealised potential, and yet, whenever you try to work on that dream project you are utterly paralysed and left stuck trying to manifest what your gift is.
I know your pain friend.
How many times have you heard or even said to yourself Stop procrastinating and start creating! Yet, you know it’s not that simple.
In this short blog I’ll share with you three creative insights on:
How I almost didn’t start this blog
The investment Irony - Why you are putting your energy in the wrong places
The Fortress Fallacy - How focussing on the big picture is hurting your progress
😩 The Investment Irony
It took me 11 months to actually sit down and write this blog.
At the end of last year, after completing my dissertation, I wanted to keep writing. But the more I thought about writing … the more I THOUGHT about writing.
I did very little actual writing and spent lots of time reading and watching videos about blogging, template designs and setting up web domains.
I wanted it to be perfect and brilliant and… nothing happened.
No one judged me like I thought they would… because they had nothing to read.
No one had the new insights I wanted to share… because I never shared anything.
I realised I was going through something lots of creatives go through, and I’ve started calling it the 'Investment Irony'.
Where we spend significant amounts of time and energy in the wrong places because we feel we are not in the right place or at the right time, and the irony is, it costs us more time and more energy.
Instead of actually writing, I put all my attention on what the website looked like, optimal formatting, how to lead magnet, how to turn 1 blog into 10 pieces of content and so on….
I was investing all of my energy into things that felt like I was working on my writing dreams, but actually they were the main hindrance of my progress.
After significant effort and no real movement towards my actual goal of publishing a blog, I felt doubt and frustration every time I sat down to write, that I began associating writing with fear and failure.
I didn’t set out to write a blog, I set out to create an entire blog catalogue with a ready made community of 15000 subscribers.
Instead of putting my attention and energy on writing, I made large investments in all of the peripheral areas of writing practice and received nothing but negative returns. I was investing heavily in my dream and vision but losing faith in myself and my capacity… ‘The Investment Irony’.
“Don’t get it right, get it written ”
🏰 The Fortress Fallacy
Not only were these false efforts stopping me, but the scale and magnitude of what I wanted to do felt so overwhelming. I had nearly 200 notes for posts ideas but not a single developed draft.
Best selling author David Kadavy talks about this at length in his book ‘The Heart to Start’: a glowing manifesto on many of the problems contemporary creatives face.
One key principle is ‘The Fortress Fallacy’.
Ever sat down to [insert massive creative project here]… and after a few moments became paralysed? You had an intention to write a book but never finished a chapter? You wanted to learn the piano but it sits there covered in dust?
In David’s concept of The Fortress Fallacy, one of two things happen:
We do nothing but fantasise about our dreams and never start.
Or we do start, but start with such big ideas and visions, that we quickly get overwhelmed and burnout, then we never start again.
“It’s as if we imagine that we will build a giant fortress when we’ve never even laid a single brick in our lives”
“When we fantasize about the fortress in our mind, we can actually get pleasure out of it. This becomes a source of procrastination. If we believe we’re going to make a grand masterpiece, we can justify not starting. Our egos will fool us into thinking that we need to do more research, or that we just need to carve out a few months of free time to rent a cabin in the woods. Meanwhile, we live inside the dangerous joy of our daydreams.”
I think creatives often end up taking on new identities, we become to ourselves, ‘someone that will do the thing… someday’ and it can become much safer to live there.
So what can we take away from these two things?
Investing energy into your project is good, but if you are not seeing growth, recalibrate your investment.
Dreaming about your grand vision is great; but if it’s at the expense of taking actual steps forwards, not so great.
How can we overcome The Fortress Fallacy and The Investment Irony?
Below are my key takeaways that I have used to start this blog and which you can add to your creative practice to help you find more fulfillment and progress in your work.
“To overcome the Fortress Fallacy, all you have to do is recognize that you tend to dream beyond your current abilities. Don’t let your own dream intimidate you into not starting, or lead you into burnout when you do start. Instead… let your dream be a guide.”
🎨 Takeaways - For Your Toolkit
🧱 Don’t build castles, lay bricks
Kadavy suggests you have to change your expectations by concentrating on ‘building a cottage before your Fortress’.
If you go to the gym, you don’t start by trying to lift the heaviest weights and beat a world record. You find a weight that is reasonably comfortable and within your capacity to lift, and gradually increase the amount of reps and incrementally increase the weight. This is known in fitness as progressive overload.
Yet in creativity we basically say “I’ve never run before but I have this feeling I can run a marathon.” Then without any training we go out and run 10 miles, get incredibly tired and sore and decide “I’m just not good enough, I could never do that”
Lower your bar and progressively overload your creativity
TASK: commit to one small action, that is within your means, get consistent with it and build from there. Don’t set out to write a book, set out to write for 10 minutes, then add more reps.
For me: this was writing 100 words every morning for 3 months.
📈 Invest in the right places
Make sure you are investing your energy in the right place. Get to the heart of what it is you want to do and focus on that.
TASK: Make a list of all of the areas you think you have to work on to get your project going. Cross off everything that isn’t the very first thing that needs to happen…. Break that down into small chunks. Never have more than 3 things on your To Do List for you project. Put everything else on a To Don’t List
For Me: write 100 words a day, connect two ideas, write a draft.
🎯 Action is the only answer
It’s ok to suck at things. Embrace being a beginner and begin. ‘Beginning is winning’ Work from where you are at. Everything else is just ego.
The people that arrive in a gym with very little experience and start lifting for their ego’s…get their emotions and their bodies injured quickly and publicly. Embrace the beginners mindset.
TASK: Choose one action that would significantly let you know you were moving closer to your goal
For me: post one blog article
My ✅ To Do / ❌ Don’t List
You can grab a copy of this Notion To Do/Don’t List Here
If this blog resonated for you or was helpful in anyway feel free to let me know.
Reach out and let me know what you’re working on and what your main challenge in right now and I’ll be sure to get back to you.
