Noble Lies (We Tell Ourselves)
Don’t prepare. Begin.
Remember, our enemy is not lack of preparation; it’s not the difficulty of the project or the state of the marketplace or the emptiness of our bank account.
The enemy is Resistance.
The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.
Start before you’re ready.
One of my million reasons was that I needed more time to develop my new site. I can’t code for shit, yet deliberately chose a complicated framework in the hopes that I could learn. I could, sure—but I wasn’t.
I actually do this more than I like to admit. Whatever success I have, I owe it to jumping in the deep end. It’s part of my nature, I can’t change it and don’t want to. So now it’s more about gaining the wisdom to choose the right pools. I put the new site on Tumblr almost out of spite, because it requires no maintenance and is therefore completely out of my way. People aren’t coming here for the responsive CSS, they come for the writing or not at all.
Which leads me to another reason, a way more insidious one: A growing dissatisfaction with what I don’t know, and not wanting to sound like the majority of bloggers who think they do. A fear that I haven’t gone deep enough, that I haven’t taken enough care in my words. It supersaturates the text, everything I’ve written for months. Years.
There’s something sort of charitable about that, right? A position of non-interference? It’s better to bring nothing than to take?
Noble lies. If you can fool yourself so elaborately, the world deserves more from your cunning.
