“You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

The thing about cycling (or anything, really) is that anyone can do it, but to get really good at it you’ve got to do it a lot. Do the 10,000 hours of paying your dues in sweat equity and your conditioning is sound, your creative use of gears makes hill climbs easier, and you stop thinking about the cars zipping past you at high speeds inches from your left shoulder (or you find better routes). In short, you learn the tricks of the trade and gain some muscle memory for having done the work. But there’s no getting around that wobbly start.

The thing about writing every day is that you gain that same muscle memory, expressed through paragraphs of prose you didn’t know were in your head when you started. Is a blog enough when you look back on the content created? We know the answer when we begin to ask the question—there’s more to do for us. It’s not just this, friend, whatever our this may be. We should get to it already. It’s those wobbly starts that scare us. How can we possibly make it up that hill if we’re so wobbly on the flat? How can we finish a novel when we barely have time to finish a blog?

The hill will be there when it’s time to climb the hill. For now just start peddling and gaining momentum and see where life can bring us. Starting is enough in the beginning, pretty soon we’re surprising ourselves with things like average speed and elevation gain in cycling, or word count, better phrasing and such in writing. We aspire to climb to greater heights in the things we wish to be great at and find joy in the process, that we may begin again tomorrow with even loftier goals.

The trick is to get out of our own head and start. We really should. Who cares if we’re a bit wobbly in the beginning anyway? Soon we’ll find some momentum. The fact that we’re thinking about climbing that hill means we’re ready to attempt it. When we really think about it, the only thing wobbly is the excuse for not starting now. So what is your hill and what are you waiting for?