Creative? Neurodivergent? Here’s Why You Need to Finally Finish Things

Okay, let's get into it.

[gentle music] Here's the scene.

You get the idea.

It drops right in.

It feels so exciting.

And then nothing.

You reach for your phone, you scroll, you suddenly feel compelled to reorganize your sock drawer.

You do literally anything else, and then you don't get started on it.

You tell yourself you're a failure, you're not disciplined enough, you're not talented enough, you're not ready to do it, you're not good enough.

It's probably nothing at all.

It's probably not even a good idea at all.

And then it dies.

We've all been there [laughs] with so many things.

It's the worst when you have an idea, and then you see someone else doing it and executing it happily, and you're like, "Ugh." Right? But what if this isn't a character flaw? What if there's nothing wrong with you? What if it's simply physics? Newton's first law says an object at rest stays at rest.

An object in motion stays in motion until acted upon by an outside force.

So this law is about inertia, the tendency of things to resist changing their state, and this is what's happening with your creative practice.

It has inertia.

So as long as you can get started for five minutes, 10 minutes, longer, pick...

it picks up steam, you will continue to pick up steam.

There is actually a neuroscience behind stuckness, right? Wild, huh? The brain's reward system runs on dopamine.

Dopamine makes you want to do something, makes you want to go to the gym, makes you want to clean out the fridge, not just feel good after.

And for a lot of creative folks, especially those who have ADHD, who have neurodivergence, a baseline dopamine signal for non-urgent, non-novel tasks is too weak to motivate us.

So essentially the brain goes on strike.

It's neurochemistry.

It's not you being lazy or a failure.