I always start out thinking whatever I’m about to write is going to be really horrible, so I make it so illegible that few people beside Tom Hanks & that chick from the Da Vinci Code could read it.

After filling up the first 3 pages with enough grammar issues and misspellings to make my 7th grade english teacher blush (Hi Ms. Dennis!), I get on a roll. Then, 1.8 grande extra hot vanilla lattes later, I’ll open up my MacBook and type my notebook scribblings into this program that blacks out the screen and makes my computer look like something you would have used back in the early ‘90s.

After typing and staring at the screen for an eternity, I’ll finally give up and email what I have to my sister. Not my baby sister, the other one. My baby sister just tells me “It’s great!” and “I’m so proud of you!”. She’s a lot like my mom in that way.

My other sister, the one with a little bit of the middle child syndrome thing going on, she has no problem at all responding with things like “Huh? I don’t get it.” or “I’m not sure you should say that…you do know mom & dad are going to read this, right?” And we’ll go back and forth a little bit before her ADD kicks in and she finally says “It’s ok. Just go ahead and post it.”

There will be sometimes when I think I’ve written something really deep and meaningful that might even change the world a little but nobody leaves a comment or a tweet or anything and I feel like a failure and think that I just need to go get an application to work at Denny’s, but the nearest Denny’s is over an hour away, so I just obsessively check Google Analytics to make sure my website hasn’t crashed or something.

And then there are other times when I’ll write something that I’m kinda scared to post because it’s really personal and I’m not even sure I want my parents reading it, much less the entire world. But I realize that I haven’t posted anything in a few weeks and that’s apparently a big no-no in the blogging world so I’ll close my eyes and click the “publish” button anyway.

It’s these scary posts I kinda wish would slide under the radar that seem to get a gazillion comments (ok, 8. But still.) and then my dad will text me about how he thinks it was my greatest post ever and then I’ll freeze up because I wonder if I’ll ever be able to do anything like that again.

So I’ll stop writing for a few days. I’ll decide to wait until I get really inspired or have some sort of ground breaking realization to write about. A few days turns into a few weeks and the longer I don’t write, the harder it becomes to start writing again.

There might be a counselor or somebody who will someday diagnose me with something fancy sounding like “paralyzing perfectionism” because I’m not sure why I haven’t learned this lesson, but all I really have to do is pick up the pen.

Sure, the first several pages usually come out looking like something a 3 year old would scribble on the wall with a magic marker. But once I get to that fourth or fifth or sixth page, something happens and words appear. Words that become sentences.

Sentences begging to be read, even if only by a few people. And even if an even smaller number of people relate to the sentences or find some sort of meaning or inspiration in them, they still had to be written. They’re supposed to exist in this world.

But these words, the ones that form those sentences, they never show up on page one.

It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to create, there’s no shortcut to truly inspired work. Don’t worry if you have to throw away a few pages first.

Just start creating.

Bo is currently living in Orange Beach, Alabama trying to come up with ways to fund a sailing trip around the world. If you’d like to be a part of the adventure, learn more here.