Learn To Love Sitting In The Mess

Nothing ever killed more dreams than waiting until you feel ‘ready’. 

The desire to be perfect stops you in your tracks before you’ve even begun. It holds you prisoner in the chains of theory when you actually need to be dancing through the fields of practice.

Wanting to feel comfortable before you start, or waiting for the ‘right’ time cripples your abilities. It robs you of the joy of creating.

“But I’m not ready!” you’ll say. Not so.

By the time you feel ready you’re almost certainly way too late. So the trick is to overcome that false fear and dive in anyway.

Unfortunately, this is hard. 

So I want to share a couple of ideas on how to do it.

The first helpful thing is to bolster your logic:

Gall’s Law states that complex systems that work always evolved out of simple systems that work. This shows that your desire to get perfect before you start is a dangerous sidetrack.

‘Perfect’ means that we try and fix all the details first — almost always arriving at a complex solution. But Gall’s Law says that can never be the answer. The trick instead is to start simple and humbly allow our approach to be updated as we learn as we go on.

Ultimately, though, convincing yourself that this is the right logical choice (true though it is) can only achieve so much. The emotional side of things is the bigger blockage.

Diving in like this is always going to feel uncomfortable. The trick is not to make it comfortable (that’s never going to happen). But rather to get ok with feeling that discomfort. You need to cultivate the courage to dive in in the first place; coupled with the willingness and patience to sit in the mess.

This isn’t easy.

But the more you’re able to do this — unfazed by the pain of everything being uncertain and ‘wrong’; undistracted by how everyone else seems to be doing things better — the more progress you’ll make.

This certainly applies to the physical and social success that our culture holds up as desirable. But just as much to success in the sense of your own individual definition of a ‘good life’. 

Courage and embracing uncertainty are those key mindsets that allow us to meet whatever life throws our way and treat it as an experiment. They allow us to course correct as we go — humble enough to realise that we’ll never find ‘The Answer’, bold enough to forge forward unceasingly despite that knowledge.

But this is not grim, clenched jaw determination. That can work for a short while, but you’ll soon run out of steam.

You need to tread this path lightly in order to stay the distance.

Dance your way through life with joy and acceptance. Firm when you need to be — yielding when that fits too. Comfortable sitting in the mess and playing creatively with that energy — rather than needing to force your way to an island of false, manufactured certainty on the other side.

Recognise that nothing is as pivotal, or as fixed, as your mind makes it seem in the moment.

Your mind will bombard you with doubts about your choice of how to start. “What if I’ve made an absolute howler and I’m screwing things up big time?”. “What if I’ve left out some really good ingredients?”. 

No problem either way.

This is not a one-way door. You shouldn’t be tied to this starting version forever — the whole point is to continually learn and adjust.

Don’t merely accept that you won’t be perfect — choose to actively embrace it. Invent a game where you score points for starting when you don’t feel ready… and you lose points every time you stop to get your ducks in a perfect row. Use that feeling of discomfort as a compass to tell you when you’re moving forward in the right direction rather than using excuses to stay stuck.

Of course you’ll have totally the wrong idea of what you need. That’s life. You need to give it a go, fail, notice, and adjust in order to end up where you need to be.