The Heart to Start — thoughts

I’ve thought for a while about this issue of being unable to start, of getting stuck in the “idea” phase of every project, of every project basically staying in my mind, never started.

It’s now been a few months since that curiosity started to burn inside of me, asking to be let go and exposed, to at least be given a chance to exist. Slowly, I’ve realised that my problem is not the “idea” phase — I don’t even think I’m a perfectionist anymore — but mainly that I’m too scared to start. Too scared to fail and be considered a failure, too scared to expose something that I don’t consider “good enough”, but that is not the only thing.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone — Pablo Picasso

There is Art inside you

What a beautiful thing to start a book with, no?

I struggled a lot with the fear of not having anything to say, the feeling that nothing that I could produce would ever be of value to anyone besides myself and, yes, I constantly told myself that I wanted to write simply to deepen my understanding, but even Montaigne ended up publishing his Essays, and then decided to publish a second, and a third book. We all hope that our art touches someone in the same way it resonates with us.

Our humanity is what makes us all artists

If we tie it, to a quote that appears a bit later, I would say that the opposite is also true, creating art is what connects us to our humanity.

When we create our art, it’s a process of self-actualisation. Your true self is constantly in conflict with the expectations of the world around you. Is it okay to do this? Will this make someone mad? Will I embarrass myself? Will I be stripped of my “best behaved” award?

Art is Self-Actualisation

This one took a while to understand, I had to go back to the book to actually be able to write down my thoughts on it.

The author here defends that realising one’s art, bringing it to reality, is the only way to become your true self, to be truly aligned with who you are.

It then goes on to talk about how to actually connect with the which is inside of you, and basically goes back to a concept that I’ve been ruminating for the past few months: Curiosity.

It came up a few months ago in conversation with a friend, talking about our experiences and the feeling of not having a north star, of not knowing where I was heading in life, his answer was quite simple : “I guess you can now do whatever your curiosity tells you”. This completely threw me off for a few weeks, my curiosity? It seemed as if I had completely forgotten that life was not about strict plans, goals or a “north-star”. I had completely forgotten the joy of letting myself drift off into whatever subject interested me, of deep diving into random things and trying new experiences.

Even if you’re not the best in the world at any one of those curiosities, chances are you’re the best in the world at your particular combination of curiosities.

Then this idea of writing, of creating something for the simple joy of doing it, of seeing my thoughts appear into a piece of paper appeared in my mind.

I wanted to write about my passions at work, the books I read, the suffering I endured, … This was nearly a year ago.

Winning by beginning

Let’s go back to the idea of “starting” now, you’ve told me all this nice things about that which is inside of me, how to connect to it, curiosity, etc. If it’s all that strong, what is it that keeps from starting?

I really despise bullet-point lists for this type of thing, but here is a list of what was preventing me from starting:

Fortress Fallacy

I’ve never written anything. We’ve all had to do essays when we were young, and I think I’ve read more books that weeks there are in a year on 2025, but apart from writing on my journal and infinite lines of code, I’ve never truly tried to “create” something. (Does coding count as creating? Does programming qualify as art ?)

it’s as if we imagine that we will build a giant fortress when we’ve never laid a single brick in our lives

That reading a lot that was preventing me to stop (in part), I wanted to create something as beautiful as some of the things I had read. I was dreaming of the end of the journey, and not letting myself be guided by that dream.

Inflate the Investment

A very basic idea that I had already applied to multiple parts of my life, you do not need to clean the whole kitchen, you can simply put the dishes into the washing machine.

The act of reducing the required investment of an action, usually leads to more being invested onto it, simply due to the fact that you build momentum with that first action.

If you take the pressure off yourself and let yourself make a tiny start, you often make way more progress than you could have imagined.

And to close up for now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

Perfectionism

It’s just ego.

I do not need to be perfect, I do not need to fulfil the expectations of anyone, no one has expectations on my art but myself.

My ego was, as the author says, cradling me in the warm blanket of my own high standards, telling me that it was okay not to start, not to create because my art was not going to be good enough anyway.

Closing notes

And I think that’s mostly it for this book, there are some really nice tools and techniques to get started, but I like to let some things left for anyone that might read this to discover it by themselves.

Definitely an impacting book, without too much science or studies supporting it, it speaks to our humanity and our need to create, while telling us that what we create is enough, that it is valid.

I was on my way to do multiple revisions of this article and instead, sent it with a second read, could it better ? For sure, but I guess I have to show that I’ve learned something from the book.