A Chair and a Will to Act

Taking First Steps Toward Accomplishing Your Creative Idea

Police cars roared into our neighborhood at dawn. There were three of them, lights spinning, sirens wailing. The source of the ruckus was a man in his mid-fifties. He’d been pacing in circles for hours atop the flat roof of a half-finished house. It was unclear what his motives were. Was he up there to get a tan, better cell reception, commit suicide? All anyone knew for sure was that he refused to come down, and he was carrying a pizza. “Crazy dude’s got himself a large pepperoni,” is what one of the side-lined roofers told me.

It was unsettling to see the man pacing around up there, just a slip and a fall away from tragedy. But in some sense, don’t we all occasionally find ourselves pacing in circles, “thinking” about accomplishing something rather than “doing” something about it? I’m not a guy who walks around with pizzas on the rooftops of partially constructed houses, but still, as a poetical metaphor, at least, I know full well what avoidance behavior is about.

As a songwriter, I’ve been trained in the art of moving forward against my tendency to avoid taking the first steps that every song that’s ever been written requires. It’s easy to understand my motives for taking them. I feel tremendous joy in manifesting the fruits of my imagination. I create because I want more of that feeling.

Why Do We Procrastinate?

Think back to something you’ve created; a piece of art, a business plan, a poem, a fantastic meal — or even a deep conversation with a friend or loved one. You’ve likely had a similarly joyful experience. Even now, there might be something you’ve been dreaming about bringing into reality, something that you have yet to take a single action towards fulfilling. You know from experience how good it feels to create. So, the question is, why do we so often avoid taking the first steps toward pursuing our creative goals?

I’ll give you a hint. It’s not a lack of time that holds us back, even though that’s one of the first excuses we allow ourselves to indulge in. Nor is it a lack of resources or a lack of talent. Those, too, are among the most common excuses of people who have trouble getting started on their goals. (I’m often one of them.)

Let’s examine each one.

1.) No time.

I don’t buy it. It only takes a moment to get going.

2.) Lack of resources

I don’t buy this one either. Getting hold of a pencil and paper, doing a Web search, or making a phone call are decisive first steps that almost everyone can afford.

3.) Lack of talent 

Nope. This holds zero weight. First steps are simple enough that they’re not reliant on talent.

Whether working on my own projects or helping others accomplish their goals, I’ve found that not taking those ridiculously simple first steps almost always comes down to a fear of rejection. To one extent or another, it’s a fear we share with every other human being.

No one wants to experience the shame of failure. Shame is anathema to the human condition. No one wants to dream big only to find that the results of their dreams are, in fact, puny. And so, to avoid that unpleasant possibility, we pace around our dreams just like the man on the roof, without ever taking any concrete actions to manifest them. That way, (we imagine) we can avoid the disappointment of failure. Ultimately though, we come to realize that not having pursued our goals is the only real failure.

Just Sit Down and Begin

The thing I’ve discovered after many years of trial and error is that to write, to paint, to strike up a difficult conversation, to create anything, you need to do this one thing, and excuse me for its seeming simplicity:

You need to sit in a chair and get moving — not in muddled circles like our man on the roof — but moving with an inner-directed will.

I’m not talking about sitting down with a great idea or sitting down with a fearless attitude; I mean — just sit down and begin. That’s it. A chair and a decisive will to act are your principal tools.

In my case, that means taking my guitar out of its case, grabbing a pen and paper, and putting my butt in a chair to begin working. In your case, it might be sitting down to find out what the yoga class times are at your local Y, dialing your mother to start that deep conversation (a truly creative endeavor!), doing a Google search for the nearest art supply store, or sitting down with your own pen and paper to begin any number of things. I know it sounds artless, even a bit absurd, to reduce a creative process to something so basic, but nonetheless, it’s how things get done.

To defy the negative voice inside us, the one that makes us procrastinate for months or years on end, the voice that would have us believe that we have no right to create, that what we are likely to come up with will be so devastatingly boring to others (and worse, shaming to ourselves), we need to deconstruct our creative urge down to a primal physical act: one of sitting down to commence the process of creation. Once we do that, the floodgates of our creative spirit will begin to open.

And here’s why it works: the moment you sit and commit anything to paper, it exists outside of you. And at that moment, voila! You’re in a conversation with it. It has an opinion, a perspective, one you may like and want to continue with, or one you might disagree with and want to debate, or one you hate and want to obliterate and begin again. No matter; you’re off and running.

Silencing the Negative Voice

Best of all, this new conversation drowns out another. Whenever I’ve taken this small but essential action towards accomplishing my goals, my negative, internal voice stops being so negative. It’ll say something like:

Peter, I see you’re really into this. You’ve proved it by getting to work — instead of aimlessly pacing around your idea. I’m gonna slide over and let you do your thing.

On the other hand, if I were to fearfully mull over whether I should begin doing something, that negative voice would be all over me, filling my mind with every sort of anxiety. The other thing that happens when we sit down to accomplish a creative goal is that having something important to say becomes completely irrelevant. Worse, that need for ‘greatness’ or ‘profundity’ often becomes an insurmountable impediment. 

Creativity is an overused word. We all know what it is, but it’s incredibly hard to define. It’s also nearly impossible to say if something is truly creative or merely imitative. I’ve begun to sense that creativity is synonymous with spirituality. 

Here’s how I explain it. 

A thought arises. The thought is — as all thoughts are — entirely without substance. It exists but in a sort of non-place. Then, as I think more about my idea, I deepen my understanding of it. I’ve added a kind of language now around my idea (language expressed only in thought at this stage) that gives it a modicum of form, even as it remains locked within the confines of my imagination. Finally, as I begin to act, there comes an inflection point where my idea begins to move from its nascent state into a state of reality. 

This is precisely what we accomplish when we take those first steps I’ve been talking so much about; a phone call is made, a person engages in conversation, a seminal line is drawn, a first chord is chosen, a first word is written down. These are all mundane actions, but if you consider what’s really happening, it’s nothing short of miraculous. The first manifestation of what was previously no more than a dream has left the world of thought and entered the physical world! 

So, next time you feel the urge to create something, resist the temptation to walk around a rooftop with a pepperoni pizza in your hands. If you’re hungry, OK, eat a couple slices, but do it on the ground floor. And when you’ve finished eating, wash your hands, sit down, and start delving into the first stages of whatever it is you dream of creating. 

You’ll have done very little, but you’ll have accomplished a whole lot.