The only way to do or learn or create something new or exciting and alive is to allow yourself to get messy. There has to be a safe space for you to get in there and mess it all up. If you’re trying to do everything perfectly, that is the last place where something unique or different or scary or big can be born: everything that grows naturally is born in the dark.
If there’s something you’re struggling to create, in what ways can you create an indestructible safe-house for you to workshop your stuff and blow things up a little? Say things wrong? Be less fabulous than the most-perfect-polished version of the ideal outcome? That place is your permission slip. If you are constantly holding yourself to some external standard (even within your own head), that thing you are trying to create will never get the chance to grow – because the grow-juice of your attention isn’t watering the thing itself: it’s getting dumped all over some idea of “doing it right” or “making it good.” If you’re creating something – you don’t even really know what it is, or will be, yet. That’s the magic of it. It’s not all up to you. Stop telling it what to be before it shows you.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever heard was: “Don’t plan something in order to do it right. Plan something in order to have a good time.” The pleasure and the joy of creation is all that keeps it naturally growing into its next evolution, and the next, and the next. If the joy disappears, or evaporates, or is simply choked out of the process, you’ll find you won’t get anywhere. Creation is rooted in pleasure, not duty. Devotion to the beauty of what you’re creating is more powerful than some weird externalized discipline system, checklist of to-dos, or requirements from a 3rd party. The love for what you make is exactly what brings it into the world.
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