How Trying to “Go Big” Can Keep You From Starting—and Finishing—Your Projects

You know how it feels to get a good, even a great, idea. It’s a light blinking on, illuminating a whole room you didn’t know was there. It feels exciting and real. OMG. This is it!

And then…you hit some friction. You can’t seem to get to it, or you can’t seem to finish the thing, or get it to the stage you need to in order to make it actually happen. Where did all that spark and excitement go? 

If you feel a growing frustration over all the things you haven’t yet shared or finished or even started, and somehow can’t seem to do it, you’re not alone. You might think you need more time, more money, more creativity—more something—and that causes you to stall out. 

Blocks happen to the best of us—but there are ways to bust through them that don’t involve banging our heads against the wall, which I typically advise against. 

In this article, I’ll walk you through a few ways to unblock the flow so that you can start, and finish, the projects you’re most committed to.

Don't go in to "do something great".

In her book The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp recounts the story of when the New York City Ballet essentially gave her a blank check to create a dance. She told herself she was essentially going to “hit a home run out of Yankee Stadium.” 

She now knows that the lack of limits on her resources AND her outsized goal caused the project to go sideways. She did not knock it out of the park; in fact, she admits it wasn’t her favorite or best work. “Whom the gods wish to destroy,” she writes, “they give endless resources.” 

Forget “Go big or go home.” Heading into any creative endeavor needing to be the best, break the record, or change the world is a recipe for stress and despair. Your efforts don’t have to be huge to be worthwhile. And wanting to have an impact on the world is not the same as having one. 

If we let the ego run rampant, it will cloud our judgment, resist change and get so attached to the work that we’ll be less flexible and more defensive. Your work will thrive when you serve the work, not when you serve your need to feel a certain way (wanted, admired, important). 

Creativity is as much about the process as the final product. So that means engaging in the process, over and over again. It does not mean trying to “nail it” on the first go. 

In a blog post called “How Creative Geniuses Come Up With Great Ideas,” author James Clear tells the story of Markus Zusak, who rewrote the first part of The Book Thief nearly 200 times until he had it right. It ended up a smashing success, and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 230 weeks. Because he did it right? Sure. After doing it “wrong” over and over. And over.

TRY IT: Work (and rework) the craft. Take something you’re working on and rework it. Don’t worry about messing it up; go right in and disrupt it, change it, revise, reenvision. See how many versions you can create, then go back and recreate them. Don’t worry about the outcome—let the process lead you. The only way to improve your craft is by understanding every aspect of it and what it’s capable of—not by trying to make it neat and clean and perfect. 

Embrace your limits.

“It’s tempting to believe that the quantity and quality of our creative productivity would increase exponentially if only we could afford everything we’ve imagined,” Tharp writes, “but I’ve seen too many artists dry up the moment they had enough money in the bank.”

She learned the hard way with her New York City Ballet project. But this also goes for the “more time” fallacy, too (which is more likely the problem we have, as most of us aren’t struggling under the burden of blank checks).

We think that if only we had more time, we’d be better able to start or complete a project. “Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world,” says Tharp, “and I’ll show you a writer who never delivers.”

This points to the real reason we procrastinate our work and why we get stuck: Because we want to believe we have time enough for everything, and can’t face the fact that we do not. “It’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do,” writes Oliver Burkeman in 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

He calls this the paradox of limitation: “The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control…the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.” Instead, Burkeman says, when we confront the facts of our limitations and work with them, instead of against them, “the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.”

TRY IT: Give your schedule a reality check. To embrace this kind of freedom, we need to face the limits of what we can reasonably, feasibly do. Look at your schedule. Now, look at your to-do list. Be honest: What can you actually accomplish today, tomorrow, even the rest of this week? Not in an ideal world where you have an unlimited attention span and zero distractions; in this world. 

Now think about the project you want to, wish to, spend time on. Is there maybe an hour or two somewhere in there you can block to do some work? What can you say no to that would give you more of the time you want? What hard limits are you working with, and how can you work with them?

Let yourself get bored.

This one seems wholly counterintuitive. After all, isn’t the goal to live a life teeming with passion and meaning? Where would boredom fit in to creative endeavor, and why? 

You may think that boredom is optional, thanks to Netflix, TikTok, the internet. Boredom isn’t going anywhere; it’s part of the human condition—and is closely linked to your creative potential.

Philosopher and teacher Mark Hawkins, PhD, author of The Power of Boredom: Why boredom is essential for creating a meaningful life, defines creativity as the innate human impulse to share something of our own. The thing that stands in our way? “Our unwillingness to be bored and our penchant for constant distraction,” Hawkins writes. “Creativity withers and dies with constant busyness, but boredom is the mother of the creative act.”

When we’re bored, he says, our minds are not engaged in any one thing, and our unconscious mind has a chance to roam a bit—thus, giving a great idea a chance to show up, seemingly out of the blue. “By being bored, we allow the space for new ideas and breakthroughs to come.”

TRY IT: Get bored on purpose. Boredom and creative work have this in common: You must choose them. It’s easy to simply allow distraction and endless scrolling to fill our attention. But to truly capture your most creative ideas, you must be willing to give them the space to emerge. 

When you feel that slow drag of boredom creep in, let it. Sit (or lie) there and let it flow up and around you in a bland tide. Go for a walk without listening to a book. Let your brain wander. It will naturally resist boredom so much that, in lieu of any outside distraction, it will seek to engage in something, anything, to escape it—and if you let it, that’s where your genius will emerge.

Don’t try to “grind it out” for hours on end.

While I like the idea of creativity as a muscle that gets stronger with use, I like to think of it as a kind of energetic circulatory system, which, much like the lymphatic system, needs you to move in order for it to function optimally.

If you’re a fan of The Artist’s Way, then you know Julia Cameron’s popular approach to nurturing your inner artist via morning pages, where you pour out a few pages of unfiltered thoughts every day. I know a writer who hops out of bed and walks for five miles, every single day. Often twice. 

Creativity requires action and movement. If you want momentum, you must create it. That’s why sitting and struggling at a screen, forcing yourself to “be” creative isn’t the best way to access creativity. And the attending guilt, shame, and effort associated with it will just drain you even more.

When I get stuck or my attention wears thin, I shift gears, go for a walk, do an errand that requires I leave the house. Sometimes even clear out a closet or a few drawers (which feels kind of amazing). Even 30 minutes away from the desk is enough to recalibrate my creativity and reset my focus. Walking has been shown again and again to activate the brain and body, aiding in the release of hormones and neurotransmitters that both awaken and calm. It’s never a bad idea.

TRY IT: Prime the pump. Movement begets movement. And so in order to get your brain moving, you need to move your body. Sometimes doing a simple and mindless chore is just enough activity for creative thoughts to arise. Or, go harder: Vigorous exercise gets your heart pumping, which circulates blood to the brain where you need it, opening up your entire vascular system to fresh energy. It also creates a sense of calm in the body that’s conducive to creative work.

Look for what's working.

In the workshops and programs I lead, I employ an approach called The Gateless Method, which I’m trained and certified in. What makes it different from other approaches is that we do not rely on criticism to guide our work. Quite the opposite: We look at what’s working, what we love about what we’ve made. We separate the work from the person which makes the process feel safer, so that the work can be about the work—not about you.

We tend to look for flaws and weaknesses in our work; things we can “fix.” But in this approach, we train ourselves to look for what’s working and why it’s working. If I tell you everything that’s wrong with something you made, you won’t know what direction to move in; you’ll only be worried about going the “wrong” way.

What this method does is train you to see what’s strong, unique, powerful. That way, rather than depend on someone else to tell you what’s good, you gain not just confidence in your work, but sovereignty, which allows you to make the changes that serve the work rather than please other people.

You can’t force or fix your way to better work. You can remove blocks, support growth, and give yourself room to do the work in a way that encourages it to be its best—and to look for what’s working, because that’s how your ideas and projects will take root, break ground, and ultimately, finally, bloom.