Being Too Ambitious Is a Clever Form of Self-Sabotage

The reason you might be having trouble with your practice in the long run—if you were capable of building a practice in the short run—is nearly always because you are afraid. The fear, the resistance, is very insidious. It doesn’t leave a lot of fingerprints, but the person who manages to make a movie short that blows everyone away but can’t raise

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One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one.

When you believe the work before you is the single piece that will forever define you, it’s difficult to let it go. The urge for perfection is overwhelming. It’s too much. We are frozen, and sometimes end up convincing ourselves that discarding the entire work is the only way to move forward. The only art the world gets to enjoy is from creators wh

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We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off—because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards. Someth... See more