The Art of Starting Over
Sometimes you need to go backwards before you can go forwards.
When you are doing or creating hard things, a lot of the time you will find yourself at a peak of resistance.
This peak constitutes a choice between two options.
The first option is to keep going until you get past this resistance, and ultimately find yourself at the same crossroads in due time.
The second option is to start over, to toss in the towel on something that isn’t working, so you can create something that does.
The less common option: Starting Over
Starting over is a less common option, and a lot of the time you really do just need to keep going through resistance because progress or growth is equal to struggle.
Resistance is almost always equal to progress in some way or another, but it may also be a sign to start over(which could be quite progressive). Learning to know when to quit is a powerful thing, if you find your curiosity is fading or looking somewhere else that is usually a slight indicator that it may be time to start over. But not always. You’ll have to trial and error with this for yourself, sorry: your truth may be different than mine.
Start over on what? Well, that depends on you. In many cases I have created things that were at first in line with my curiosity, sometimes I become more curious about something else in relation to what I’m doing than the thing I’m doing itself.
So I start over on my knowledge gaps. I dive into what I don’t know and am curious about, I let myself be guided by this sense. This has worked for me quite well to know when I should try something new, but it’s also missing a logical side. For example: I created something that took me three years to create, and then my curiosity switched gears. I found that my old creation was not helping me anymore but rather it was pulling me back. So taking all of the many things I learned from my old creation I started with a blank canvas.
Switching up the canvas you’re painting on
Much like when an artist learns to paint, they don’t reuse the same canvas every time to preserve their past work, they grab a new canvas and put the other one aside, they use their past learnings to create new pieces of work and they continue in this process until their hands grow tired of doing so or until they croak.
Starting over is not as blank of a canvas as it seems. If you are starting over on creating something then you have some backlog of imagination and information. You can use this to create something better than before. It may feel painful to “start from scratch” — no one wants to lose progress. Even so, no one is ever really starting over, they are just backtracking so they can push ahead further.
Take this image I made for example:
Sometimes you really do just have to start over or go backward: so you can reach a further destination on your absolutely unique path.
A large part of starting over is accepting the fact that you can’t move forward while looking back.
This is to say: you are either going forwards, or you’re going backwards. If you are going backwards, make sure it’s so you can soon go forwards again.
hey! thanks for reading :) - your friend jack ♠️
If you want to create some cool sh*t yourself: then come explore the hub of curiosity and creation I’m making @ frikit.net. I have a book coming December 12th too, should be cool, signup here to make sure you don’t miss it.