August 22 2022
It sounds so dumb and overly simple, but it's absolutely true. It's one of those truths that you hate how true it is. You sit there, trying to ignore the truth, avoiding eye contact with the truth, turning up the volume on everything else hoping to drown out the truth that sits and stares at you, waiting for you to admit that it's there, waiting for you to begin.
The key to doing anything, is to begin doing it. To trick to getting good at anything, is to just start doing it. If there are other things you have to do first, then you have to do those things, but it's never too soon to just start the smallest little step.
The key to making dinner, when you're laying exhausted and fatigued, glued to the couch, struggling to motivate yourself to move, is to wiggle your fingers and toes, uncross your legs, sit upright, and stand.
Especially when it comes to creative projects, you can only ever be a success if you begin doing even the smallest little thing. The key to becoming an author is to start writing something and that something can be so so very very small and you just have to finish it.
The key to learning how to sing is to just start singing something at all and keep doing it. Yes, there are exercises you can do that can help. There are things you can study that will help. You should definitely do those things too. But there's nothing to gain from them if you never start singing.
The best advice I ever got was from a Maureen Johnson fan mail blog post about how to become an author. She said to be an author you have to do two things: Write and Live. You have to live your life, so that you have experiences and observations to draw upon. You have to have as many life experiences as you can. Be adventurous. But you also have to write. You will never write a good novel if you don't start by writing a bad novel. Don't begin with a magnum opus. Begin with a 500 word vignette about a bird eating some seeds that you saw while on a walk. Write a lot, write often, and always try to finish what you write. Have people you trust read it and give you feedback. Write under the assumption that the first ten things you finish will never even be published. Maybe your twentieth novel will succeed. But you have to write the first nineteen novels because you can reach that twentieth one.
That's how you get good at things. It's also how you increase your chances of success, if you're hoping to be published or go viral. Do it a lot. @tinysubversions did a talk a while back that I saw a recording on YouTube. In it, Darius says that the trick to going viral online is not to buy the best lottery ticket, it's to buy more lottery tickets. No matter how fantastic the numbers on your own ticket are, your chances of winning the lottery increase by having more tickets, not better tickets.
So it's all about writing a lot, and posting a lot, and just being persistent, and trying again, and again. Keep finishing things. Keep editing them. 90% of writing is editing the finished first draft into something better. Sometimes, it's so much better, it becomes unrecognizable.
You will lose your first 100 games of Go. Your first novel you write during NaNoWriMo will be a disaster. Your voice will crack the first time you try to reach that high note. My first NaNoWriMo novel was horrible. My first essays were obscenely bad. My first thirty poems were embarrassing. My first songs were grating. My first dishes were disgusting.
Sometimes, I find an old poem I wrote ten years ago, and rewrite it as something entirely new, inspired by the key things I liked about the original. Sometimes there was a nugget of good I just didn't know how to express yet. I never would have gotten to the better version if I'd never written it in the first place, before I had the skills to do it justice.
Trial and error is a painful and unpleasant experience, but it's unfortunately the best or even only way to learn some things. Social skills too. The only way to become charming and likable is to throw yourself into social situations, observe how people behave, try to figure out how things work, attempt to participate, fuck up, be totally embarrassed, feel terrible, and try to learn the pattern of where you went wrong, if it was even your fault, etc.
Most people's first ever relationship is not their Happily Ever After. Many people win their first hand of poker, but feel despondent when they lose the second one. A short-lived success is still something you learn from. It's how you get better. My first relationship felt like a perfect match until it ended 3 months in. But I could never have had a 3+ year relationship if I hadn't learned from the 3 month relationship. I don't think I'd even have had that first relationship if I hadn't been on a lot of bad first dates.
Sometimes, there are barriers. You can't start a medicine until it's prescribed. You can't start being a doctor until you go to med school. But those are not barriers to beginning. They are the first steps. They are the path to the bus to door to the vestibule to the second door to the stairs and stairs and stairs. You never get to the penthouse until you step out the door and onto the bus. The beginning is working on what you have to do to resolve those barriers and move on to the main meal.
I couldn't become a librarian without grad school, which I couldn't attend without my day job doing data entry, which I didn't get full-time until after I was working it part-time three days a week and working at a bakery cafe at 6am 3 days a week. The bakery was the first step to the library. The endless exhausting applications and interviews for jobs I didn't get were the first steps to the bakery. I never would have gotten to the library without working at the bakery. In fact, I present the bakery prominently on my resume. There's a lot of overlap between a bakery and a library.
Most of life is doing the shit you don't wanna do so you can get to the stuff you wanna do. Most of life is fucking up at shit you're bad at before you can get to the part where you're really really good at it.
There is a card game called Mao. You do not know the rules when you begin. Everyone ends their first game of Mao with a hand full of cards and being told they've lost with no understanding of why. It is acute observation and persistence that gets you an eventual victory and the title of "Mao Master." You'll never get there if you don't lose that first game when you don't even know what you're doing other than the fact that cards are involved. It can feel awful when it feels like everyone else knows the rules but you, and nobody will tell you the rules, but it's only by observing and failing and observing and trying again that you figure out the rules.
I think about this game a lot. It seems like a very silly game with a silly name and a silly premise but it truly changed my life when I figured out the rules. I saw the world differently.
Begin with something small, do it, finish it, and do the next thing.
I still struggle with autistic inertia. It's hard. Feeling stuck and unable to do anything. But the skill I learned in therapy that always helps the most is to break things down to the smallest components and then do the first one. The trick to doing laundry begin with getting out of bed begins with wiggling my fingers and getting off my sides.
The key is to begin.