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Get Past Your Childhood Doubts by Simply Starting


You've got a web site idea, a mobile app concept, or just a loose video concept. You could let your mind shout you down and convince you how complicated those endeavors are, or you could take some inspiration from Van Gogh.

In an excellent post on motivation, adolescent development, and the curse of being so connected to nifty things, 37Signals' Signal vs. Noise blog ties together psychological research, the difficulty of getting started on something, and the realization that Vincent Van Gogh didn't start drawing until he was 27, starting from a place not all that different where most of us are with visual skills.

When we're in our early teens, we start to sense that our skills don't match up with what we want to see in the world, as Betty Edwards suggests. So we start criticizing our work and disowning it, and ...

This feeling continues into adulthood. We want to design a website or build an application but if our own toolset doesn't match up to the perceived skillset we never start. It doesn't help that the internet gives us nearly limitless exposure to amazing work, talented individuals, and excellent execution. It's easy to feel inadequate when you compare yourself to the very best, but even they weren't born with those skills and they wouldn't have them if they never started.

How do you get past your own self-defeating ideas of all the great stuff out there? What projects have you started out on paper or Post-Its that turned into something good and real?

The first step is to start [Signal vs. Noise]