There’s Always An Excuse Not To Start

The page will stay empty, unless you fill it up with words.

There’s always an excuse not to start.

You have that creative project on the backburner, because you are just too tired after work. Netflix calls. You flip through your phone one more time, wasting time on social media.

Here are a few things I need to start, because they have been germinating in the creative part of my mind, but continually delay, because it’s hard to start:

• building that stock portfolio, for the future.
• starting that children’s book, for which I have the germ of an idea.
• writing and sending out proposals for my second book.
• writing words-putting words out into the world.

Meanwhile that book article poem painting dish letter proposal goes unwritten, or undone.

There’s always tomorrow, you, and I, might say.

And tomorrow comes with all its stresses and pressures and “I’m tired” and let me just scroll through Twitter and Facebook one more time.

There is always an excuse not to start. Inertial forces favour the status quo. At rest, you tend to stay at rest. In a state of Netflix and chill, you will indeed watch Netflix, and be chill-on a couch.

Somewhere in the lightning life of the mind, you know you can do more, and be more. So just start. The first word, the first pen or brushstroke, is always the hardest.

This is no bulleted list of productivity “hacks” to get you started. Just start.

#JustStart

Matthew Oldridge is in the middle of starting…something, always.