Starting Before You’re Ready

Somewhere along the way in the creative journey, many of us learned this rule:

Don’t start until you know what you’re making.

The sentiment comes from a good place, usually. Ideally, we want to be efficient about how we use our time and space. And we also want to be mindful of our supplies and energetic capacity. But in my experience the best ideas are the ones that you discover in the middle of the doing something else.

For a long time, this rule was a huge trigger. The longer I sat on an idea, waiting for the right moment, the right conditions, the right sequence—the more the energy behind it faded as reasons to why it wouldn't work would pop up one after another.

One small variable wouldn’t feel “perfect,” or something else had to happen first, or I’d tell myself I’d start once I felt more certain.

Eventually, starting began to feel heavy, and excitement transformed into pressure.

This moment of clarity hit me in the shower—when my brain finally stopped trying to optimize everything.

I thought about why starting anything feels so loaded, and I realize something simple:

You really can’t plan for something you’ve never done before. You don’t know what your project will look like until you move through the process of making it. It's all about experience, iteration and embodiment.

If you think about it, this is how most things are made. They didn’t invent cars in their final form the first time around. There were early versions that barely worked, designs that felt clunky or impractical, and countless adjustments made along the way.

No one waited to build a car until they could see the finished version clearly in their mind. They learned by building, testing, and responding to what wasn’t working and what worked.

You don’t arrive at the thing fully formed, you uncover it by moving forward, asking questions, and improving one imperfect iteration at a time.

The old belief says:
“I need clarity before I begin.”

The new belief sounds more like:
“Clarity comes from experience.”

The golden moment appears when you notice what pulls at you once you’re already inside the process.

If perfection is what’s stopping you

If you feel hesitant to start creative journaling because you want your spreads or art to look right, cohesive, intentional, finished—

One of the best ways to interrupt that pattern is doing something like a wreck-this-journal style challenge, or adding constraints to your art and crafts projects.

Here are some books to start playing with: ✨ Books for Creative Challenges (This is an affiliate link. If you purchase through it, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.)

When the goal is interaction, play, and curiosity instead of outcome, something shifts.

You start discovering:

• which textures you like touching
• which prompts energize you (and which don’t)
• which colors and materials you keep reaching for
• that journaling bridges to something you didn't expect

If you’ve already started, but still feel stuck

If you’ve made creative journal spreads before but still find yourself overthinking each page, constraints can help rewire the pattern.

That’s why I created the Journal Constraint Cards.

By reducing the number of decisions long enough for intuition to step in, it allows you to focus on one rule only, but giving you total freedom in other ways.

What’s really being practiced here

Every time you begin without knowing the outcome, you’re teaching your nervous system something new: That starting doesn’t have to mean pressure. You also learn that uncertainty is normal and that you’re allowed to learn by doing.

This is a life changing creative reprogramming in its simplest form.

Next time you feel stuck, try replacing the old thought with this one:

I don’t need to know what this will become yet.
I just need to begin and see what happens.