It’s said the hardest part is to begin.
For me, it’s also the slowest.
It takes so much internal manoeuvring to not only take the fledgeling thing seriously, but to then navigate the uncertainty, false starts, and clumsiness inherent to starting something new.
So often we’re only privy to someone’s finished thing, which can easily give the impression that starting is easy or efficient for other people.
Perhaps it is. Some people flit between projects and are astoundingly prolific. But in such instances, we tend to overlook that they might have entire teams, budgets and leverage behind them, not to mention energy and drive that varies from our own.
As the majority of my projects are labours of love (i.e unfunded!), I’ve come to accept that this means they are often slow to begin as I work within my limited resources and time.
For me, berating myself with comparison or expectations only makes it harder to begin. Instead, rather counterintuitively, embracing being slow to start is what leads me to finally make a start.
Having just launched my new podcast and newsletter,
, after months—years, even!—of delay, I wanted to share the step-by-step process of how I not only began this thing, but came to be okay with beginning it slowly.My hope is that this peek into my creative process will inspire you to find your own way to begin your thing.
11 STEPS FOR ANYONE SLOW TO START
Step 1: Enter a space of nothingness
Before we can begin something, we need to let ourselves desire something.
Often we are too busy to really hear our own desires. We might be constantly moving and attending to things, without actually knowing what it is we want.
We have to do the uncomfortable work of sitting in a space of nothingness to allow our desire—that quiet current within—to surface.
After publishing my first book (which was the conclusion of an almost decade-long project) I allowed myself to bop about in the space of nothingness for a couple of years. It felt a bit like languishing, a bit like regressing, a bit like disappearing. I didn’t know what was next—but eventually, as things became more and more quiet, I was able to hear it.
Step 2: Reflect on previous endings
The morning is all about the night before, and I’d say it’s the same for ideas.
Everything has its ebb and flow, and as such, we can often detect the beginning of something in the ending of what came before it.
My book I Didn’t Do The Thing Today concludes that we need more connection, kindness, and curiosity in our days—and after lingering in the space of nothingness, I was eventually able to see that my new project begins with just that. It was obvious that after spending more than half a decade looking at our working lives, I would now turn my attention to our social lives.
We can learn to find new beginnings in any ending. As Fred Rogers put it, “Often when you think you're at the end of something, you're at the beginning of something else.”
Step 3: Feather and weather
Once the idea for my podcast had emerged from the space of nothingness, I then proceeded to do nothing!
Sure, I told people about it. I commissioned my talented friend Rachel Derum to do the cover design back in January. I reached out to the estate of the poet Kenneth Koch to get permission to use an extract of this poem for the title.
All of this is what my friend and writer
Step 4: Start because you must
While I was feathering and weathering for over eight months, slow hum of panic began to rise. What if someone else has the same idea and beats me to it?
The thing about ideas is they don’t belong to us. As
put in her book Big Magic, ideas are living, conscious beings that float around looking for someone to bring them to life.If we don’t act, ideas find another conduit (to reference Gilbert again, this can happen even through a kiss!)
I still didn’t feel ready, but the prospect of not beginning had finally become worse than the prospect of beginning.
You start because you must, not because you feel ready. As the actor Hugh Laurie puts it, “It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.”
Step 5: Face the awful beginning
Once you eventually begin, you must confront all that is imperfect in the beginning.
The writer Philip Roth described the “awful beginning” in an interview: “I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive.”
Part of why my creative process takes years is that I have to percolate on something until a thread feels alive, and that’s where I’ll finally start.
Roth goes on to explain that six months of writing will often only result in less than a page of phrases or paragraphs that have “some life in it.”
And that’s the awful thing about beginnings—so much of those early stages of doing something are discarded. But they are crucial in the building of experiences.
For me, this looked like putting together timelines, pitch decks and research that has not actually been used, but are the very things that led to the creation of the first episode.
The real work of beginning is not about efficiency, but rather being okay with not knowing where something might end up.
Step 6: Engage in freewheeling play
After the awful beginning, we can find ourselves in what Roth terms “months of freewheeling play.”
This is the part where we start to feel good, energised, and excited again by the idea and the progress we are (finally!) making.
While it’s wonderful to indulge in this part—this delicious moment of flow!—it’s important to watch for where we might get ahead of ourselves. We might make unrealistic promises or set unachievable timelines.
So while we should play, we should also remember ‘Hofstadter’s law’, coined by the author Douglas Hofstadter: things always take longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.
Step 7: Traverse the messy middle
Inevitably, after a period of play comes the crisis—this is where we turn against our material, the project, and might even begin to hate the thing.
There is always a part in the creative process where we wish to give up entirely—but that part is integral if we want to create something worthwhile.
The very resentment towards the thing is what transforms it. If we were content all the way along, we wouldn’t improve, we wouldn’t strive. We need something to rub up against—and so the vital thing is to keep showing up and learning as we go.
As a friend reminded me during my own recent messy middle: learning is the best part of any job.
Step 8: Play the fool
What the messy middle is often revealing to us is what we don’t know. We have the desire and the ideas, but not the skills. We have the taste, but not the talent—and we are full of doubt.
The antidote is to be okay with being a beginner—over and over. In my case, this consisted of daily reminders that I might have made podcasts before, but I hadn’t made this podcast. As Meister Eckhart said, we must “be willing to be a beginner every single morning.”
This is where it is important to play the fool—ask foolish questions, ask for help, risk feeling foolish.
Being the fool that rushes in provides us with the experience to finally see what is missing or not working, and then continue to learn and grow, eventually to the point that we feel confident in our knowledge and experience, and our ability to pick ourselves back up from failure.
And perhaps it’s important to keep in mind that as a fool—as a beginner—we will make mistakes. But the wonderful thing is that we can begin again every single morning.
Step 9: Take the final rollercoaster
In the week before I launched my new project, I had tunnel vision—the kind where the tunnel happened to be part of a rollercoaster of my own making!
I swerved in all directions—up, down, and then somehow dipped even further down My diary and notes from those days shows how I veered from almost giving up, to finally getting things over the line and into the world.
All to say, we will encounter many awful beginnings, many messy middles, many crises of confidence and there will no doubt come a day or a series of days where we encounter them all at once.
It’s dreadful and elating, but that rollercoaster feeling is often the sign that we are coming close to the end.
Step 10: Surrender
“I’m always amazed when I finish something,” wrote the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa.
“Amazed and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and begin doing something.”
I can relate to this very amazement and distress. Looking back on what led me to finish this new podcast, it wasn’t sheer discipline, motivation, or willpower. It was simply distracting my own doubt and perfectionism long enough to chip away at something.
As Pessoa put it, “What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will’s surrender. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit.”
Step 11: Enjoy things for a moment
When you finally meet the end of your beginning, there can be a numbness. You expect you’ll feel amazing, and maybe some people do, but many might relate to wandering around dazed as the adrenalin seeps through your body.
It can feel deflating—where are the kudos, the congratulations, the words of encouragement? Sure they, might come from your closest friends or a supportive partner or parent, but why isn’t that person saying anything?
The lesson here is that you cannot have the expectation that other people will tell you what you need to hear—you must cultivate a way to hear it within yourself.
Only we know the patience and perseverance it takes to put something into the world. You must learn to congratulate yourself, to sit with this ending, to not place so much on external recognition.
For now, do not rush towards a new beginning, simply enjoy for a moment all that has already begun—without worrying about where it might lead.
Follow my new beginning at asociallifewithfriends.com
Thanks Madeleine,
that was a wonderful little read with some good tips and reminders. Whilst meditating I sensed the words, ‘ Do what you love, but take out the need to impress anyone with it.’ You touch on this point at the end of your article.
I’m writing a novel and working on showing, not telling. Putting in the little details in an engaging way is not easy. My impatience to tell the story skims over all of the details that make for a captivating read. Thanks again!😊🙏🏽Das
Thank you for the words of wisdom you have managed to so elegantly place in this list.
Step 11 really resonated with me, and I think it’s wonderful to read about the importance of enjoying the small wins and good moments. As someone very new to writing on Substack, I’ve tried my best to enjoy every little moment and be grateful for the journey. ☺️