It's hard to do things you've never done before. In essence it's a form of pure improvisation. Every action you take when you're doing the new thing is just the best course you can come up with based solely on just the limited information your senses are bringing in. That may sound like a description of doing anything but it's not. When you do anything it's true that you improvise action based on your reasoning about the information brought in by your senses. But for most things you do, you have the benefit of having done them many times before. So in addition to all this sense data, you also have a large bank of recalled information to draw from. Memories of the former you doing this same thing previously. How did it go last time? What did I do then? What went wrong? You're at a great advantage in this case.

There is such a powerful difference between doing a thing you've done before and doing a thing you've never done that you can actually feel it. And it feels terrible. When you approach a new and unfamiliar task what do you feel? Physically you may notice a pitting sensation in your stomach and your hands might start to sweat. Is this a life and death situation? Maybe, but chances are good that it is not for most people. But still your nervous system reacts with a similar intensity. In a life and death situation you'd probably get a big shot of adrenaline which might help you through the discomfort of all those other things. But for mundane new tasks, like using a table saw for the first time, or framing a wall or submitting code to a large codebase you're still pretty unfamiliar with, you don't get the adrenaline but you do get the discomfort. If you push through this physical discomfort eventually your nerves will calm and you'll feel fine. But you have to break through it to feel that, and the second time you won't feel the physical discomfort as much.

The natural aversion to a new task is not just physical. Suppose you're building a house for the first time or you're trying to write your first piece of large software, or a book or a song. You may find it mentally difficult to get started most days. You may sit down at your kitchen table with a coffee and make a plan for exactly what you're going to do to work on your project and then keep making that plan, then revise the plan, then make another pot of coffee, then finally just decide to write a blog post about all this friction you're feeling toward the work you want to do. That's pretty normal. Steven Pressfield wrote a whole book about overcoming this phenomenon called "The War of Art" which I encourage you to read. Essentially his solution is to just bear down and push yourself toward the work or task, consistently and (as he puts it) "professionally" and have "faith" in the power of "angels" or "the muse" to deliver you to a divine result. I think he's right but am less inclined toward his mythical imagery.

I want to identify another interesting aspect of this phenomenon. A mental trick you can play on yourself that's so subtle that you may not notice it at first. Supposing you're taking Pressfield's advise and you're attacking your work "like a professional". You set a time that you must begin, 8:00 am say. Then you set a schedule of Monday through Friday to work. So everyday Monday through Friday beginning at 8 am you sit down and you get to work. But do you really work? If you're writing a book are you typing words? If you're writing software are you revising, scrutinizing and or debugging code? If you're building a house, are you cutting and fasting wood and other materials together into the shape of a house? If you're not doing those things then you're not working.

"But I'm going to do that, I'm just planning right now, I can't do the work without a plan." You say. True enough, but then you must be honest with yourself and say "I'm planning" not "I'm working" and feel the consequences of that small difference in self talk. It won't feel good. You won't feel quite like you accomplished anything, whereas if you lie and say "I'm working" when really you're planning or studying then you might be able to fool yourself into short term self satisfaction.

It's important to identify what this is, this is the same thing that Pressfield calls "Resistance" creeping up to prevent you from working. Pressfield personifies resistance as some other-worldly demon that stands in opposition to the holy angels of creativity, the muses. I find it a lot more productive to identify it as an extension of the physical resistance I characterized above. It's not something divine that requires divine intervention to overcome. It's a mental resistance that at the level of brain chemistry and neurology is physical in nature as well. We just feel changes in our brain differently than changes in our body. For example when something threatens you, it may make you either angry or scared. That doesn't feel like anything physically. It's just emotion. When something surprises you playfully you laugh and you think it's funny, that's not a physical sensation either, that's emotional. And it feels different in that it doesn't feel like anything at all, it's just your reality changing because your brain doesn't feel itself. You and your whole reality is just whatever your brain is "feeling" (emotionally) right now all the time. But it is real and it is fleeting just like the physical symptoms we identified above.

So back to resistance. When you encounter a new challenge and you feel the physical resistance, the nervousness, sweaty palms, increased heart rate, pitting stomach. You know you can push through. When you get the mental resistance, it's much harder to push through because your whole reality is based around your mental state, it's not a simple task to think 2 things at once. To think "I've never done this I better figure out how before I do" and to simultaneously think "I've never done this and if I do it now then next time I'll have a better idea how to do it so I better get busy doing it". This is why I think Pressfield is inclined to invoke the idea of "faith" it's a powerful idea that's well suited to this problem. To have faith is to have a strong belief in someone or something. That's the dictionary definition. I would add to that definition that for it to be "faith", that which you are believing in must also be unproven. This is important because if you believe in gravity, that is not faith. If you believe that when you touch fire you will get burned, that too is not faith. Faith must be centered around something unproven and unprovable. Such as faith in God. To know that you've never done a thing before, and to not know all the things that will happen and to push on and do it anyway believing that you will succeed. That is obviously faith. What is not obvious is that the other option; to say "I've not done this and I better learn before I try" is also faith, but it's faith in your ability to learn a priori, faith in whoever or whatever you're using to educate yourself. And most destructively it's deferring the work. It's a rejection of life and experience. You're saying to yourself, "I have faith not in my life and my experience and my intelligence, but I have faith in that which some one else has done, and has experienced. I have faith in my teacher's intelligence and I will lean on them and their life rather than live my own." And what is worse is that this other option is not even an option. When you've finished being taught then eventually it comes time for you to do this new thing yourself. And after all the time and energy you put into "learning" you're still right back where you started doing this new thing for the first time without any previous experience to draw from and a choice to either have faith or to balk and keep thinking about it. So ultimately when approaching something new you have a choice. Either you do it, or you just think about doing it. Only the former will teach how it's done. It's important to have "faith" in life. The alternative is not really an option anyway.

I want to talk about one final thing. That of results. We've identified that the only way to learn anything is to go and do it. But it's important to recognize that even when we have "faith" this will still be a painful process. Viz. it's going to suck the first time. You'll make mistake after mistake. It will be costly, and frustrating. The end result will be flawed and imperfect. But you must identify that this flawed and imperfect result is so much better than perfect. It's the best possible result and more importantly it's real and not imagined. There is a relation here to the topics of making in opposition to buying that I want to explore more in the future but for the sake of time I'll defer that.

If you had a perfect result the first time you do something then you probably had a very dull time experiencing that work which produced the result. It's hard to talk about this in abstract terms so let's use another example. Suppose you're baking a cake for the very first time. You have all your ingredients which cost money and are thus precious in this way. And you have your recipe so you know at least conceptually what you need to do to make a cake. And you put all the ingredients together and you make the batter and you put the batter in a pan and the pan in the oven and some time later you take it out at the exact right time and it's a perfect cake. This cake is as good as you can possibly make it using the ingredients and equipment available and nothing surprising happens and you didn't learn anything from the experience. That's sounds awful, what a boring thing to have spent time doing. Suppose instead you want to make a cake and you don't have a recipe, you just have some ingredients that you think perhaps might make a cake and a notion of how to combine them. Now you're really doing something, you combine the four and sugar and you add the eggs and you taste is and it's a bit dry so you reach for some milk when you think "What if I use cream instead" so you add cream and you taste it and you think that's better but the flavor is boring. So you look around for something to add but you don't have any cocoa or vanilla but you do have nutmeg and orange zest so you add those, unsure of how it will taste. Then just before you put it in the pan inspiration strikes and you think "Walnuts might be great in this cake" so you add some crushed walnuts and you bake it at a temperature that you believe might be the right temp for some length of time based on feedback from the cake as you check it repeatedly while it's baking. Then after it's "done" (or what you think might be done) you take it out and you let it cool and later you taste it and... It's a little dry, and it's not quite sweet enough but the orange and nutmeg and walnut is a very tasty flavor and the cream added a satisfying richness that you've not tasted in a cake before.

Wow! What an experience! So many new things and even a chance at creativity. And now you know that you need more milk the next time and more sugar. You also learned that you like the addition of cream and the taste combo of orange and nutmeg. Your flawed and imperfect cake is better than the perfect cake from a recipe, and you're more inclined to make it again because you're curious about your ideas to improve it. You invested your time and your precious resources in an act of faith and you emerged with a mediocre cake and a wealth of knowledge about how to not make a cake. In the former perfect recipe example you invested just as much (you put faith in the recipe) and all you got was a perfect cake. So flawed is better than perfect. Flaws teach.