You just got finished building your website. You made your first blog post. You bought your first DSLR and you’re telling everyone you are now officially a professional “insert craft”.
How exciting?
You did what everyone says is the hardest part, you started.
Is starting the hardest part? I imagine there are significantly more ideas that never manifest into the physical world versus concepts that start but shortly thereafter dissolve. So, good job, you did it.
Now you have a blog that no one reads, you have a youtube channel no one goes to, people aren’t calling you back to take more photos.
Dammit this part sucks and it kind of hurts your feelings.
Don’t worry that is perfectly normal. You are going to suck so bad at the beginning. I am going to be really vulnerable with you.
I am most certain that my blog post sucks. Out of 90 or so blogs and 20 unpublished stories I only have a couple that I look back on and I am not mortified to re-read. Hell there are even a handful of attempts at published articles which have all failed to get picked up.
Yet here I am, still writing. Why am I still going if I know I suck. I can assure you it is not an over inflated ego.
I want to get better. I know I will get better. I am not sure how good I will get, but it is impossible to not build at least a little muscle if you do a few pushups every day.
Starting is hard and it is terrifying to tell the world that you are now a “insert craft”, and to finally put yourself out there. It is also exhilarating to do so. The excitement is going to help you build momentum at the beginning of your new path, but once that wanes what happens?
You start to realize you suck. That is because you’re not a dummy and to paraphrase Ira Glass,
You get into the thing because you have good taste and after the excitement wears off the good taste that got you into the thing, well it tells you that you’re just not very good.
Just don’t quit. Give yourself time to get better. Everyone you are comparing yourself too has had a head start. They just worked through the bad.
