Today I was struck by intimidation twice. And smart folks say that lightning doesn't strike twice. Yeah, right. First it was in the morning when I took out white empty sheet of paper and decided to draw, the other time when opened a document to write about cupcakes. Though the first attack was solved by filling the space with huge baobab and after that with two more. With the second hit I didn't have this easiness. I can't write BAOBAB and expect that it will hold the pressure of empty white space on the screen, or can I? Most likely it is more of 'if pigs could fly' case. Cursor doesn't like my lack of words and is not a big fan of BAOBAB too. It is flashing like yellow street light at night forcing me to choose 'should I stop' or 'should I go'.
How you avoid this torture, the intimidation of the big white paper/screen? Cutting paper in half? And that half in half? No paper, no intimidation. Ha, good one. Won't work. Actually, you don't have to take that drastically measures, no need to cut your screen in quarters either. It's not about the size (though sometimes it is), it's about solving the problem with infinity, cutting million by million and downsizing the amount of various possibilities.
Take for instance cupcake design (that my writing won't be only about BAOBAB). It's billions of ways how to go with it. And that's where intimidation gets you like the big scary with black cloak inquisitor while you secretly do your witchcraft (if witchcraft were true we definitely would be cursed by the melting on the stick like a marshmallow witch with bad weather forever. Hello grey sky!).
It's obvious (and proven many times) that it's easier to choose between one and two, than between phone number long options. It's just simply too much to process all the possible designs, and it's not even worth it to go into probability theory to try to count how many different solution you have to pass through your brain. You will go crazy by the end of getting the last number out of your formula. Secret lies in going bold and quick, taking big chunks and don't picking them like not so hungry bird a cookie.
Cupcakes. 107,000,000. Wedding cupcakes. 21,900,000. Violet wedding cupcakes. 5, 430,000. Violet flower wedding cupcakes. 1,200,000. Intimidation gets smaller by the blink of a second. Almost Big Bang inwards. Don't hesitate and don't linger, just cut, cut, cut until you will have the room to breath and do your work. With cupcakes I didn't even thought about all dark-gothic-emo-even-darker or straight-out-your-favorite-video-game-or-movie designs (though I sometimes wonder if i wasn't wrong with this. The groom managed to put a Batman's costume during the wedding so even too crazy ideas would have slipped just perfectly).
Still sitting and looking at big white paper or your yellow light in the street of words and not convinced that beating intimidation is doable? Look at me as the survivor, writing something random as BAOBAB and writing everything else about the cupcakes. But I didn't mention the most important one, you have to trust yourself that whatever you choose to pursuit and whatever you leave behind is the best choice you can do. Even if it will be cleared out in the future that it wasn't and you should have known better. But no one knows the future, so shut up, big white paper. BAOBAB.
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