Every artist was first an amateur.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

CREATIVITY

WHAT THIS MEANS

Skill has a beginning, and the beginning is always clumsy. Whatever you admire in someone’s finished work is standing on a long stretch of early attempts that nobody kept. The gap you feel between what you can do and what you want to do is not proof that you lack the gift. It is the ordinary distance every practised hand has already walked.

So let the first version be bad on purpose. Pick the thing you have been putting off until you were good enough, and give it an hour badly this week. Count the hours rather than the results for a while.

A QUESTION TO SIT WITH

Where are you unwilling to look like a beginner?

MORE IN LEARNING & CURIOSITY

Free, with nothing to buy inside it.