This morning, I arrived at my violin lesson as ‘someone who is trying to learn to play the violin’. I emerged a fully-fledged fiddle player.
As I played in harmony with my teacher, playing a tune I barely knew, at a tempo she set, I felt something shift in me. After a year and a half of lessons, resistance, sporadic practice, and conviction that I was never going to feel like a real player…today, everything fell into place, and I knew that I am a musician.
Now, she will tell me that I’ve always been able to say that, since the first lesson I had. But I didn’t feel it. I was always *trying*.
And we all know what Yoda has to say about trying….
It’s been the same with my writing journey. I’d written at least 150 blog posts, and published a book before I could even begin to consider myself a writer without cringing slightly inside. But I was always a writer.
If you want to be something, just take the first, smallest step in the right direction, and you are the thing you want to be. Want to be a musician? Get the instrument and have a lesson. Play the instrument. You don’t have to be good. You just need to play.
Want to be a writer? Write something. Publish it on the internet. Boom, you’re a writer.
Don’t ‘try’ to be a writer, musician, or whatever else you want to be. Do. Do something. There is no try
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