Begin With(out) Fear
It can be scary to start something. Not always, but sometimes. The fear and anxiety can overwhelm. You might have felt that way one time or another. I certainly have. If you’ve wound up there, what do you do? Me, I procrastinate. I check Twitter again to see if there’s anything urgent I need to respond to, I do meal planning for next week—anything except what I “want” to do. It’s maddening.
But then there are the words of my very wise German uncle: Move towards your fear. He was a large figure in my life, a professor at Fordham and Columbia Universities, a figure of note associated with the great Edwards Deming, and one of the core goals of his work with Deming was improving organizational performance.
One of their core principles is, Drive Out Fear.
Although obvious, it bears stating simply: fear impairs performance. The corollary is: drive out fear, and performance improves. State that as a positive goal and you get something like: Be Fearless, not Fear Driven.
In the unlikely event ever get a tattoo (I know how uncool I am) it will be this:
The first draft of anything is shit.— Ernest Hemingway
Now, this quote* is motivating to me. It is a refutation of the idea that fear of failure is reason to avoid the doing of things, not just first drafts, but anything. Why? Because you get an second draft. You can have a third, or fourth—as many as you want.
In one sense, everything is a first draft until the moment it isn’t. Maybe the first draft of your second revision still has faults, but that’s okay. It’s a first draft. Keep going!
Whether you’re beginning a huge project or in the middle of revising, you can always fail. And that’s okay. The evolution towards non-shit anything is incremental. Good writing is the product of bad writing revised.
So, write badly, be proud you got that done, and move on.
* the quote is excerpted from advice given by Hemingway to Arnold Samuelson, an aspiring writer:
Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself.
