You can't do everything at once, but you have to do SOMETHING

Thoughts on baby steps, creative overwhelm, and going before you're ready

Meg Hubbert

Aug 07, 2025

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✨Welcome to Follow Through—essays on showing up, staying the course, and building something that lasts.

💭 Thursday Thoughts

Did you know I was a theatre major in undergrad?

I earned my degree in Writing for Performance—summa cum laude (I’m a giant nerd, surprising no one 🤓)—and while my focus was on playwriting, I had to take a few general theatre classes to graduate.

One of them was called Theatre Foundations.

We’d start each class with a short yoga flow and something called “soft-focused exploration of space.” (Don’t ask. You had to be there.)

Bundled into those classes was one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned: go before you’re ready.

If you wait until you feel ready to start, you might never begin. And you almost certainly won’t finish.

That’s the mindfuck of being a creative person: you have all these big ideas living inside you, but sometimes they feel so big that you don’t know where to begin.

I like to think of my creativity like a pair of old wired headphones. Remember how those things used to magically knot themselves in your bag? My friends and I used to joke that there were tiny gnomes living in our backpacks, tangling the wires just to spite us.

The trick to untangling them was never brute force. The harder you pulled, the worse the knots got. You had to go slow. Start at one end. Keep a loose grip and gently work your way through until the wires gave way.

I have a suspicion that creativity is the same.

The more pressure you put on yourself to be brilliant on the first try, the more stuck you’ll feel. The tighter you grip, the more friction you’ll find.

And instead of accepting that untangling takes time, we procrastinate. We put it off. We hope that some magical day will arrive when the words finally come pouring out of us like water.

But those days are rare, and your work is too important to keep waiting.

So please, if you have a big dream living inside you, stop waiting for everything to feel clear.

Go before you’re ready.

Start messy.

Start small.

Just.

Fucking.

Start.

And if you're still hesitating, let me ask you this:

If not now, then when?

Consider this your invitation to start. Leave a comment and telling me one small, messy action you can take this week toward your big dream💖

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