The Heart To Start: Win the Inner War & Let Your Art Shine

parts, but it can also be the fuel to get you started. Elise Bauer was fighting a
mysterious illness. She had a flu that wouldn’t go away. She was in bed for
months. If that wasn’t enough, her close friend and roommate died of cancer.
Elise had had a promising career in tech – she had worked at Apple – but now
she had spent much of her life’s savings trying to recover from this illness.
She had to leave San Francisco and live with her parents at the age of forty-
two. “I felt like a complete failure,” she told me when I interviewed her for

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Love Your Work.
But Elise was able to pull through. Her parents were great cooks. As Elise
regained her strength, she helped out in the kitchen. She started posting the
recipes online, in hand-coded HTML pages.
Elise started getting better, but then she suffered a relapse. She used those
recipes to keep going. She told herself: “I’m just going to keep my mind
focused on everything that is good and joyful and loving and wonderful in
this world and in my life, and see what I can do to bring some of that to other
people.”
Today, Elise’s recipe site, Simply Recipes, is one of the most popular recipe
sites on the Internet. She has personally posted more than 1,600 recipes on the
site, one by one. And the illness that kept her in bed has long passed.
When you’re looking for the heart to start, That Which Pulls You Through
might not immediately be clear. Maybe it will get you started, like it did for
Elise Bauer, but you might not find out what it is until the going gets tough.
When things aren’t going your way, pay close attention to the things you tell
yourself to keep moving. The more in touch you are with That Which Pulls
You Through, the stronger the fuel you can find to get started and the steadier
you can be throughout your journey.
It might seem as if That Which Pulls You Through has to come from a painful
experience, but it can also come from generosity. As author Seth Godin told
me, “Generosity is an excellent antidote to fear. If you’re doing this on behalf
of someone you care about, the fear takes a back seat.” Notice that Elise
Bauer wasn’t simply reacting to her illness. She wanted to take the good
things and “bring some of that to other people.”
As I said, I probably couldn’t repeat the performance of writing my last book.
I’m not going through that kind of pain, and a decade as an independent
creator has hardened me: I’m not as afraid of embarrassment. But I still have
something to pull me through. Throughout writing this book, whenever I’ve
thought for a moment that it was too hard, or not worth it, I’ve remembered
the twenty-five-year-old who didn’t recognize the person he saw in the mirror.
I remember how close he came to not following his dreams, and I’m quickly
filled with an urgency to prevent anyone else from making the mistake he
almost made – the mistake of never even starting.

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Throughout this book, we’ve learned about the forces that threaten to keep
your art inside you, and we’ve found many sources of fuel that can kickstart
your journey and keep you going to the finish line. In the next section of this
book, we’ll look at the many final mental obstacles that can keep you from
finding the heart to start, and learn what you can do to overcome them.

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S E C T I O N I I I
W I N N I N G B Y B E G I N N I N G

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C H A P T E R 8