Get Going, Start Creating

Introduction

It’s once again the new year.

And with it, another year’s worth of New Year’s resolutions have come to die at our feet, replaced by new ones definitely get done.

Maybe you’ll get started on a few of them. Maybe you’ll never get started at all. This article is for the latter: for the projects that never see the light of day.

For me, I remember setting the following goals at the start of 2023:

1. Start Worth the Wake’s YouTube channel
2. Organize your desktop files
3. Post a piano cover

While 2. and 3. are stuck in infinite hiatus, nothing has been posted on my YouTube channel at all. The most I’ve done so far is:

1. Think about starting the channel
2. Brainstorm what I want the channel to look like
3. (???)

But when I look back at how much time I “spent” on it, it felt like I put a lot of effort and time. So what happened?

What’s Keeping Me From Starting?

If you dive deep into the heart of procrastination, you’ll find many reasons as to why you might be hindered from starting a task or project, or learning a new skill. In fact, I can list several off of the top of my head (and with the help of the website Solving Procrastination¹):

1. Fear of failure
2. Lack or loss of motivation; constant search of stimulation or “fun” things
3. Not knowing enough or not having enough resources
4. Being a perfectionist
5. Unclear or vague goals
6. Setting unreasonable expectations
7. Focusing too much on the end result
8. Overwhelm; decision paralysis
9. Comparing yourself with others
10. Fear of judgment
11. Underestimating the time it takes to see improvement
12. Getting distracted by other WIPs, “shiny thing syndrome”

Examining my own pitfalls, while the real reason why I couldn’t commit is a combination of factors, the underlying factor seems to be fear of judgment and failure. Combined with wanting things to be perfect, or “good enough”, at the outset, this resulted in overplanning my channel before it even began and wasting time on “administrative” tasks without actually creating anything of substance.

Embrace Mediocrity (Sometimes)

I always had excuses when it came to getting started: “I’m not ready yet.” was a common one.

I couldn’t start my YouTube channel because I needed to have a more powerful machine to create videos. Needed a better microphone, more storage. I didn’t have a good place to film. I didn’t know how to edit videos. I hadn’t done enough brainstorming on what I wanted to post. I hadn’t found your unique voice or niche yet. I needed to finish X, Y, and Z first.

These were all to give me comfort in delaying the creation of any videos—arguably, the most important part to any channel. For most of these excuses, I could find reasonable alternatives to get started. I had a decent laptop, a good phone, and a basic eye for design accumulated from my younger years playing around with Canva and Photoshop and admiring Tumblr users’ graphics. And finding your voice or niche often comes down to experimenting, repetition, and practice.

Not everyone is lucky enough to say that—to have their basic needs and more met. Still, there was always something or other that kept me from achieving my goals. Because I was afraid of posting something subpar, I never posted.

Allowing Yourself to Fail

You’ve heard of “don’t be afraid to fail” as being crucial to learning anything new. Sure, failing can sometimes be beneficial because you can learn from your mistakes. But it’s much harder to put that into practice and believe that’s true, or to not be too hard on yourself.

When I say “embrace mediocrity”, I don’t mean that you should never work towards improving any aspect of yourself. Rather, it is the ability to allow yourself to fail during your growth, while simultaneously setting yourself up for success.

Key Ingredients for Success

There are some factors that contribute to the success of a project. Consider the following:

1. You should have a supportive environment that doesn’t treat failure as the be-all, end-all. Criticism, when warranted, should be constructive. Ideally, such an environment should also recognize your successes.
2. Your environment should allow yourself to be a beginner: it should not have high stakes attached to the end result.
3. You should have some sort of feedback from yourself or others to understand where you failed, and suggest how you can do better.
4. Start with a detailed plan, including risk management. Consider what could go wrong and how you could tackle those problems. A plan, whether it be a simple outline or not, is crucial, but be careful not to overdo it at this stage.
5. There needs to be some sort of dedication, or willingness to work towards the end result. Whether it be internal or external motivation, ask yourself why you want to start this project.
6. Consider your resources. There are times where your current resources simply aren’t enough, but other times where you can make do. These could be people, technology, or skills.

Luck and circumstance are outside of your control. What you can control is the likelihood of progress, instead of waiting for luck or inspiration to come around.

In the context of my own projects I do in my spare time, such as trying to get a YouTube channel off the ground, embracing mediocrity means that I can make mistakes and do a terrible job because the stakes are not high (see 2. above), and because doing something is better than not doing it at all. It’s about slowly building yourself an identity, and through repeated actions, you become closer to that identity².

One of my long-term goals is to become better at drawing. Setting aside the idea of deliberate practice, making terrible art is better than not making any art at all. Even if it’s terrible, it made me happy that I’ve created something that wasn’t there before, and that regardless of progress, I am moving towards the direction I want to go in, which is forwards. Focus on the journey, and the rest will settle, perhaps in unexpected ways.

Self-Improvement and Self-Worth

Embracing mediocrity isn’t to say you should accept your shortcomings as they are, but to disconnect your skillset from your inherent worth.

As an example, I’ve always been awkward when it comes to social situations. It used to be that I couldn’t start a conversation with anyone, back when I was too comfortable with not socializing at all for more reasons than one. Still to this day, I often feel awkward, have trouble initiating conversations (unless with a select group of close friends), and suck at group conversations.

Social skills, in general, are an area I’m eager to improve. There are many motivations to wanting to improve yourself, and I’m not in a position to say which motivations are “good” and which are “bad”. However, it can be harmful for your only motivation to improve to be “I’m not good enough, therefore I need to do X and X before I am worth [whatever you see your ideal self as being or having]”. This is reflected in Lynette Adkin’s video³, you are not a self-improvement project, where Lynette argues that the first step in self-improvement is acknowledging that you have inherent worth.

The mindset I’ve been trying to focus on is to not change because of others, but because of what those changes can add to my relationship to myself and with others. To change myself in ways that will encourage new and interesting experiences, and finding more joy in everyday life.

I want to become better at social skills because I’d like to have deeper, interesting conversations with people. Not because I am worth less for the lack of it.

Systems for Success

In recent years, I’ve come across more content on why systems are better than goals. I personally believe that the two should be used in tandem: systems for the short-term focus, and goals for the long-term direction. This way, goals are allowed to be vague, and can be centered around who you want to be in the future. Whereas, your systems—that is, what you do as a habit, what you do consistently—will propel you towards your goals, and are often written in much more detail.

A part of Atomic Habits that I tend to agree with are that habits, or consistent small steps, can get you to where you want to be as effectively, if not more effectively, than setting goals. The additional benefit of a habit is that it can be so small, so specific and easy to follow, so low in its expectations, that you know exactly what you are supposed to do.

This is setting yourself up for success. Habits can help increase the chances of success. A goal of “be more healthy” is harder to achieve because it isn’t specific enough to act upon it. Long-term goals that are too specific, or ones you cannot control are also an issue. But if you aim to drink two glasses of water every day, and do a 7-minute HIIT workout, you’ll be more hydrated and healthier by the end of the year. Every bit counts, even when you miss a day or two (or many).

And now, all you have to do as a beginner to the craft is to combine the two together: be (somewhat) consistent with your practice, all the while allowing yourself to be bad at it. When you are first learning, quantity does beat quality.

Private Creation & Public Feedback

There are some skills that generally recommend a teacher, coach, or mentor, especially at the expert levels. Having a teacher means you won’t be spending time unlearning bad techniques (e.g. in piano lessons) or injure yourself in the process (e.g. a fitness coach). Most importantly, they provide valuable feedback on how to improve.

Regardless of whether you have a mentor, feedback is key towards cultivating an ideal environment to success. If you are trying to self-teach yourself a skill, or are revising while studying for school, there are, broadly, three avenues to obtaining feedback, with some considerations for each:

1. Public Feedback: Posting your work online to garner feedback. You’ll have a variety of people, some with expertise, who can give you either valid or invalid criticism (you may invite some critiques that are uncalled for). You may feel like part of a community.
2. Private Feedback: Joining a small community, doing a one-to-one with a mentor, or asking for feedback from a list of people on an invite-only list (e.g. a private Twitter feed). Chances are, these communities are more carefully curated and feedback is welcome. However, there could be less variety of perspectives and you may feel “locked in” to a group’s mindset.
3. Private Creation: i.e. “self-feedback”. You create outputs or practice your skills, track some metrics, and measure yourself against them. Not everything should be public, and there can be pressure when you post something publicly, such as unwarranted criticism. However, it can be lonely, there is much less qualified feedback or guidance (you are obtaining feedback from yourself, a beginner, and/or a limited amount and of various quality from looking up tips and pitfalls online), and less accountability to do the work. It also relies on good metrics to be chosen.

All three have their pros and cons, and should be combined to achieve the best balance. Self-feedback, especially, is integral to most learning processes, since at the end of the day, others can teach, but it’s on you to do the work.

Worth the Make.

I started writing articles mostly to learn how to think more critically, and learn how to put all my thoughts into words in a convincing way. But reading self-improvement articles, customizing my Notion dashboard (whoops) and even writing down my opinions can only go so far. To grow, and to not have my writings become empty words, I have to put my thoughts and goals into practice.

The impetus of this blog has always been to drive myself to do more things, regardless of how skilled I am at that thing. A beginner documenting her journey, with all its successes and failures. During the initial brainstorm, I realized that I wanted to extend this invitation to other beginners as well.

One of my goals for 2024 is to launch a project I’d like to call Worth the Make. The concept of Worth the Make has always been the end goal of the Worth the Wake project, to be its beating heart. The core of Worth the Make is its LAB⁴ projects: self-contained, short-term projects or challenges made by a beginner (that’s me!), for beginners. It’s not about getting good, but about having fun exploring new things. Subjects will lean towards creative endeavours but not limited to them. Some topics I’ve come up with include:

1. Drawing fundamentals
2. How do you research?
3. Learning how to play chess
4. Deep-dives into a random Wikipedia article
5. Setting up an email list (for my blog)…

The fun part? I’m developing the idea to be set up as a community challenge. Partaking in any journey is more fun when there’s other people, after all, and I think self-improvement can benefit from the same. And just like any new system, I’ll be building and improving upon this every iteration until I can find the best way to fulfill this end goal.

If you’re interested, be sure to keep an eye out on my YouTube channel for the announcement video! Looking forward to seeing you all there,

— Kharis (Worth the Wake) 🌻

Appendix

References

References are material I referenced in a specific part of the article, or formed a majority basis of my research.

1. Solving Procrastination. https://solvingprocrastination.com/why-people-procrastinate/#What_is_procrastination. (While procrastination can’t be solved, this website digs into the various factors that contribute to it.) ↩︎
2. Clear, James. Atomic Habits. ↩︎
3. Lynette Adkins. you are not a self-improvement project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvjSwkYaz1k&list=PLYG6ifwiExz2sOU3uNiGx4tQ6lhMCNIba&index=1&pp=gAQBiAQB ↩︎
4. A LAB can stand for “laboratory”, like a lab project. The use of “LAB” is not unique, but it’s easy to say and write. Internally, LAB is an acronym for “Learn. Apply. Build.”, though I’ve come to discover someone else had that idea already and thus have decided to use this sparingly in posts. ↩︎

Media

1. Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash