But let me put this another way, and via an example…

As I noted previously on this blog, over the last year I have built up a pretty respectable sound production studio in my basement. Mics, amps, cables, a recorder, an effects pedal, a looper pedal, and of course my synth. All of it is more than enough to make something interesting.  

And despite that great setup, can you guess what I do when I get stuck creatively?

I go online and I start window shopping for more equipment. Maybe a drum machine. Maybe a pickup for my violin. Maybe a better synth, or… gulp, add to cart: cha-ching!

In my mind, in that moment, any of it, all of it would mean more freedom and opportunity to do more stuff with sound and music… sure.  

And yet another truth hits bone: none of it will do the work for me.

What I know in my heart is that I just need to sit in the seat and do the work, play the notes, speak the words, and… just create. But having too much freedom to keep looking for something better, something additional, something else—all of it is entangling the effort of actually doing the thing itself.

I’m boxed in by being unbound by opportunity to try something else, rather than just looking at my gear and reminding myself: this is what you get, now make it work.

Just make the damn thing and post it.

Share it.

Push it out into the universe.

Will people judge it, love it, hate it, mock it, share it? With they laugh, cry, ignore, overlook, steal, copy, complain, and all too often respond in a hundred other unpredictable ways? Yeah. Of course they will. Heck, humans are messy and there is always someone out there who will make you question your very participation, let alone the product itself.

But look what is out there already. Everything! Unabashedly shared, no matter the quality or purpose. And worse:

Are influencers asking your permission to post to your feeds?

Are politicians asking for your blessing to push propaganda?

Are companies asking if its okay if they inundate you with advertising?

Of course not! No one else is asking, are they? They are making and flooding and just filling every space with their products.

Meanwhile, you are sitting there wondering if you are good enough, or if that thing that you put your whole soul into will be well-received—or if maybe you will just be laughed at by some random loser in his mom’s basement (who by the way, mocks and laughs at everything because he is incapable of making anything but mockery). 

So make something. Make it great. Make it how you want. Just make and share and participate in this great creative experiment, and maybe we’ll collectively overwhelm the world with beauty and hope and curiosity instead of all those other things.

Start small.

Start with the achievable and work your way up.

I have been planning this novel-length audio production, writing words, making scripts, composing music, mixing sounds, and—nothing firm has been done yet.

The big project is simply too overwhelming.

Oh sure, I see the forest, but I can’t seem to plant the trees. It all feels like I’m jumping into a new plan, a new skill, a new concept without knowing if any of it will even work—and more importantly if something critical will fail. And the result is paralysis incarnate.  

Something smaller has to come first.

In my case, maybe instead of trying to make a novel, I record some audio blogs first. Then maybe after I do that, I work on making a few one-pager short stories into encapsulated one-off samples of what I’m hoping to create on a larger scale. And then, maybe something else, and something else after that, and maybe… eventually, the real thing will fall into place.

I’m sure many great people have achieved great things in one fell swoop… but the rest of us may need to build up our stamina first.

Resistance is the force, says Pressfield, that keeps us from doing our work as creative people.

Today, I found my day full of resistance, derailed and amok.

I will spare the details of the chaos in this post, but needless to say that I ran up against a lot of external resistance in the hours when I would usually be creating something worthy of the concept.

And yet, here I am and I have opened my laptop late into the evening to fight the resistance that swelled up over this day and to finish off the waning minutes having done at least a little of something.

It is easy to get derailed, but it is important to find one’s way back to the tracks sooner than later. Resistance is tricky like that, always tempting you to take the easy route, go to bed having accomplished nothing, when all it takes is to resist right back.