This is an excerpt from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield that illustrates what I have been saying to friends and family alike. You have to get started. It will help.
I washed up in New York a couple of decades ago, making twenty bucks a night driving a cab and running away fulltime from doing my work. One night, alone in my $110-amonth sublet, I hit bottom in terms of having diverted myself into so many phony channels so many times that I couldn’t rationalize it for one more evening.
I dragged out my ancient Smith-Corona, dreading the experience as pointless, fruitless, meaningless, not to say the most painful exercise I could think of. For two hours I made myself sit there, torturing out some trash that I chucked immediately into the shitcan.
That was enough. I put the machine away. I went back to the kitchen. In the sink sat ten days of dishes. For some reason I had enough excess energy that I decided to wash them. The warm water felt pretty good. The soap and sponge were doing their thing. A pile of clean plates began rising in the drying rack. To my amazement I realized I was whistling.
It hit me that I had turned a corner.
I was okay.
I would be okay from here on.
Do you understand? I hadn’t written anything good. It might be years before I would, if I ever did at all. That didn’t matter.
What counted was that I had, after years of running from it, actually sat down and done my work.
Fight through the frustrations, disappointments, and obstacles. Get started on that goal. It might seem too big and too hard, do it anyway!
Go GO GO!!!
Image Credit: Black Coffy