“your calling will never demand that it be the way you pay your mortgage. It is simply begging you for some amount of expression in your life.”
Tara Mohr
Have you ever wanted to start something, but found yourself thinking, “It’s too late?”
Whether you feel you’ve missed the curve on a certain trend, you feel there is too much competition or market saturation; you feel you’re too old, or you feel you can’t devote the time and effort needed to make it happen, this is a feeling I think we can all relate to in one way or another.
A recent time I experienced this was when I thought, yet again, about trying to finish a novel. I’ve finished National Novel Writing Month a couple of times and ended up with a few shitty first drafts, but that’s always been where the process has ended for me. Part of this is practical; between kids, work, studying, and life, I have next to no spare time. But there is also the thought: I’m too late; it’s so much time to spend on something not work- or family-related; the learning curve feels too complex; I should have done this ten years ago; does the world really need another bad novel? And so on, and so on.
At the same time, when I ask myself what I’d regret more: trying and “failing” or never trying, the answer is obvious. And this is the rub with this kind of belief: it holds us back from pursuing creative interests and passions and stops us before we’ve even started.
This is a shame, because whatever the outcome of a new creative project, there are many benefits we can gain from starting one: personal growth, greater mental and emotional well-being, the potential for new opportunities and connections, the things we don’t expect that end up contributing to our lives.
When I look at writing a novel in those terms, I feel a lot more optimistic than when I look at it purely from a time/money/market perspective. Those things do matter if you want to make money from your project out of the gate, but as coach Tara Mohr says, “your calling will never demand that it be the way you pay your mortgage. It is simply begging you for some amount of expression in your life.” Also, I know that if I feel like I should have started 10 years ago now, I’m really going to feel that way in another 10 years, so there’s no time like the present 🙂
If you’ve been wanting to start a new creative project, but feel it is too late, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Why do you think it is too late? What is the belief underpinning that thought?
- Are you placing constraints on this project (such as needing a certain amount of time or money in order to do it) that don’t really need to be there? (Sometimes we feel it is too late because we have a vision in our heads of what a project would look like if it were done “properly” (which is often a codeword for perfectly).
- What is another way you can approach it that relieves those constraints?
- How would you feel differently about this project if you approached it as an experiment rather than with a fixed outcome in mind?
- What would it look like to start by spending just 10 minutes a day on this project? When could you do that? How would it feel?
- Knowing that the time will pass anyway, how will you feel in a year if you start this project today, and how will you feel if you look back and you haven’t?
If there is one thing I want you to take away from this post, it’s in the title: it’s never too late to begin. There might be lots of reasons not to start something new, but this isn’t one of them.
What’s the first step you can take to begin today?
