David Kadavy - The Heart To Start: Win the Inner War & Let Your Art Shine

Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty

Short Reads

How to Write a Book

Make Money Writing on the STEEM Blockchain

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The first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

Ill start off by introducing the elephant in the room: You dont need this book to get started. If you can put this book down and start creating your art, then thats exactly what you should do. Write your first novel, record your first album, or build your first company. If youre capable of starting now, I hope youre flipping through the first few pages of this book, and havent spent your hard-earned cash. It was nice talking to you, and Id love to see what you make.

For me, its never been that simple. Ive been an independent creator for ten years now, making a living from writing, podcasting, and teaching what I learn along the way. I still remember the first time I met a real starter. He was an older neighborhood kid who was running a snow removal business. As he sipped on a Coca Cola at my high school graduation party, I couldnt stop drilling him with questions. How did you rebuild the engine on that truck? How did you install the snow plow? How did you find your customers? He kept shrugging his shoulders and giving me the same frustrating answer: I just did it.

As I started working for myself more than a decade ago, I was hearing this story, in the form of advice, over and over again. It seemed to be all anyone in Silicon Valley could tell me. There was no end to the number of books I could read, speeches I could watch, or podcasts I could listen to that all told me the same thing: Just get started. Its good advice if you can follow it, but I was always left wondering: Yeah, but how do I start?

In the fall of 2016 I settled into my sound studio and logged onto Skype. As I waited for the call to connect, I took a deep breath to calm my racing heart. I was about to interview one of my heroes for my podcast, Love Your Work. Like the neighbor kid, James Altucher is a real starter. Hes started more than twenty companies. Hes written eighteen books, including the Wall Street Journal bestseller Choose Yourself. He hosts a top-ranked podcast, on which he has interviewed Coolio, Sir Richard Branson, and Sara Blakely.

I go into each interview hoping to get a superpower from my guest. I wanted to find out how James became so prolific. He seemed like the best person I could ask about starting.

Yet as I talked to James, I grew frustrated. It seemed as if he never struggled with starting. He talked about starting one of his many businesses. He said he simply wrote a short business plan and emailed it to people. I asked him about finding the courage to share his embarrassing stories online did he ever worry about what other people would think? He said he didnt. I asked him about whittling his possessions down to fifteen things, throwing away even his college diploma. Did he ever wonder if he was going crazy? No, never.

I wasnt finding what I was looking for, so I lost my patience. This is something I want to figure out about you, James, I interrupted. I think what holds a lot of people back a lot of times is they dont think big. And if they do start thinking big, they start to question themselves. So Im wondering: Is this an inherent thing to you, or was there any particular period of time where you didnt think that way and you started to?

James paused for a moment. I always thought I could do anything, he said. I was in second grade, writing books that I thought were going to get published and be bestsellers. I always thought that nothing stood in my way.

It didnt look like I would be getting Jamess superpower. If he always thought he could do anything, what could he teach someone like me? I still had another forty-five minutes with him, so I resolved to dig deeper. I feel likea lot of people, I said, have these little glimpses of ideas or dreams or fantasies in their heads and then it just goes right over them. They dont realize that the thing that they just fantasized about is something that they could actually go ahead and do.

Then James pointed out something that should have been obvious. You follow a lot of ideas. You said youre from Omaha, Nebraska. But now youre sitting in Colombiadoing a podcast with me and Im six-thousand miles from you. Youre doing this amazing science-fiction thing right now. So let me ask you a question: Did you just suddenly quit your job and move from Omaha to Colombia? Like, what happened?

James had a point. Here I was grilling him about starting, but I had clearly made many starts myself. I had started companies, written a bestselling book, and started my podcast. Several weeks prior to our conversation, like James, I had also sold all of my possessions. I moved to South America.

Unlike James, I did not always believe I could do anything. In fact, it was as if anything didnt exist. Growing up, each book I read, each movie I watched, and each Nintendo game I played may as well have been one of the crab apples growing on the tree in the backyard. It was part of the natural environment. It grew from another species. It never dawned on me that these things were made by mortal humans like me. I never imagined that my work could be less like the bleary-eyed, early-morning processions to school and more like the summers I passed drawing or reading in my room. As far as I could tell, it never dawned on anyone in the quiet cul-de-sac where I grew up except maybe for the kid with the snow plow.

By the time I did realize it was an option to make my art whether it was a painting, a website, or a snow removal business I had decades of mental programming to undo. I had never considered doing anything other than what I was told. It was assumed that I would do my homework and not talk in class and fill out the proper standardized-test bubbles with a No. 2 pencil. Just what all of this would get me was unclear. It wasnt until I found myself sitting in a beige cubicle that I ever thought to ask.

When I did finally start following my own ideas, this mental programming served as walls of a labyrinth of fears and mental distortions. I feared the judgment of others. I doubted my abilities. I struggled with motivation. I escaped into distractions.

Im sure James has faced these same obstacles to starting, but somehow he has made overcoming them look easy. It reminds me of the motivation for writing my first book, Design for Hackers. A friend told me that every time he asked a designer how to make a beautiful website or logo design, he always got a shoulder shrug, and an unsatisfying response: I guess you have it, or you dont.