The Power of Starting Badly

The blank page is where most good intentions go to die. We sit before the unstarted thing — the project, the email, the work we've been avoiding — waiting to begin well, and the waiting becomes its own form of never beginning. The single most useful thing I've learned about getting anything done is to give up on starting well and simply start badly.

Perfect beginnings are a trap

The wish to begin well is really the fear of beginning poorly, and it is paralyzing because the first attempt at anything is almost always bad. If you'll only start once you can do it right, you will mostly not start at all. The standard meant to ensure quality instead ensures inaction, and the project dies in the gap between the intention and the impossible perfect first move.

A bad start is still a start

The thing about a terrible first draft, a clumsy first attempt, an ugly first version is that it exists — and you cannot improve something that isn't there. Once there's a bad version on the page, the work changes from the terror of creation to the manageable task of revision. Editing a mess is infinitely easier than facing a blank, and the mess is the only way to get something to edit.

Momentum is built, not summoned

Starting badly also breaks the spell of resistance. The hardest part of almost anything is the very beginning, and lowering the bar to "just do it badly" makes that beginning small enough to clear. Once you're moving, the work pulls you along; the quality rises as you go. You were never going to think your way into momentum. You had to act your way into it, badly, first.

Give yourself permission to do it poorly. Write the bad sentence, make the rough attempt, ship the ugly first version. Starting badly is not the enemy of good work. It is, almost always, the only door that good work has ever walked through.