I feel like quitting.

Not all the time. But at least once a day.

But in his book, the War of Art, Steven Pressfield told me to use feelings like that like a compass.

The Resistance we feel when we try to do creative work is wonderfully predictable in that it always becomes greatest when we’re confronting the things that we really should be doing but are afraid of for some reason. For me, it also gets really loud right before I have a creative breakthrough, too.

No matter how often I think about this and reassure myself of this truth, it’s still difficult to act in the face of such overwhelming emotion.

“This is hard. This hurts. Do something else. Check your email. Go to the bathroom. Check your email again. Clean up your desk. Have a snack.”

My inner voice has a great way of coming up with really important, really urgent other things to do whenever I’m uncomfortable.

And every time, it seems like the brilliant idea I’ve been wrestling to get to is beyond my current level of endurance. It feels like it’s probably a million miles away. And it’s hard to steel yourself to walk another million miles when you’re already tired and frustrated.

But in most of these cases, success wasn’t a million miles away. Usually it was just a few minutes farther down the path than I thought I could make it.

And like a reward for hanging in there just a little longer than I thought I could stand, the idea, or inspiration, or answer I was searching for appears out of nowhere.

For some projects, though, you really have to go the distance with the Resistance. It’s at work for a long time before the reward comes. Seth Godin calls this The Dip.

But endurance is like a muscle and by straining every day the thing that’s telling us to give up, we can increase our stamina and thereby hold out just a little longer next time. And hopefully we’ll be that much more ready when a bigger, scarier, more rewarding task comes along tomorrow.

As it always does.

I think one of the most important things I’ve learned in my short and winding road that has been my professional career so far is to always be playing.

What do I mean by playing? Like playing video games?

At all of the jobs I’ve had, there have always been occasional times when there isn’t something super urgent to do. I’m a curious guy, so during these times I like to experiment with something I’ve seen that I think looks interesting. Maybe it’s a tool, or a new process, or a more efficient way of handling email.

While I was at NASA, I spent some downtime learning about wikis, even though at the time I wasn’t sure I’d ever use the stuff I was learning. It was just something that looked interesting that I thought I wanted to know more about. Pretty soon I was finishing my work as fast as I could so that I’d have a few minutes at the end of the day to keep experimenting with wikis.

I eventually got good enough at designing wikis that that became a major part of my job. I even got to speak at that particular wiki developers annual conference. But all of it just started as messing around.

Play is how I got started learning Photoshop. And Illustrator. And web design. All of these have helped me tremendously in my current career as a graphic designer and freelance presentation designer.

So by playing I mean experimenting in an unstructured, informal way with things I’m interested in that aren’t necessarily currently part of my current job. I look for things I think I might enjoy doing if it eventually became part of my job.

The funny thing is that no one ever gave me permission to look into these things. I just realized my job afforded me a little freedom to choose how to spend my time and I used it to try doing something I thought might be useful, or at the very least, fun. I think this practice more than any other is one I can point to and say, “That’s why I’m where I am now. That made a huge difference.”

I don’t know if it’ll work for you, too, but it might be worth a shot.

Have you seen the new soda fountains? The ones with the touchscreen that let you mix all kinds of syrups with something like a gazillion possible flavor combinations?

I remember when I first saw those fountains thinking they were really cool. Unlimited options! But after trying them out a few times, I quickly realized something unfortunate. With great freedom comes great potential for creating something pretty terrible. Cherry Coke is awesome. Strawberry Sprite? Not a fan.

PowerPoint (or any piece of software for that matter) gives you lots of control over every aspect of your file. This is great. It allows for some incredible things. But it also means you can do a lot of things that you probably don’t really want to do. Things that won’t taste good to your audience. Strawberry Sprite slides.

Fortunately, when you’re using the new soda machines, you can always revert back to the tried and tested flavors that we know work. Classic Coke. Barq’s. Mr. Pibb. (At least some people think Mr. Pibb tastes good.)

The PowerPoint equivalent of tried and tested ready-made soda flavors is the presentation template. PowerPoint comes pre-loaded with lots of these. The trouble is that many of these templates produce Strawberry Sprite slides.

We assume that these templates were created by people who knew how to create great slides. But the truth is the modern slide full of bullets on one side and a small image on the other were created by the original developers of PowerPoint back in the 1980s, who weren’t trained in creating effective presentation visuals.

So, is PowerPoint a poor tool because it lets you do things you probably shouldn’t do? Not any more than the new soda fountains are poor for giving you the ability to create something you won’t like.

It’s good to have the flexibility to do whatever we want. But we need to make sure that we’re aware of what works and what doesn’t so we can avoid creating slide that taste like Strawberry Sprite.

Certain professions require lots of training and certification. Doctors. Hostage negotiators. Nuclear physicists. I’d really rather they know what they’re doing.

But for most pursuits there isn’t that level of risk hanging in the balance. In most cases the best way to get started is just to get started. Give it a shot. See what happens.

There’s really no benefit to delaying, since experience really is the best teacher. Taking more time to prepare really just delays success.

What are you delaying getting started on? Why? Can you start today?

Paperman is the animated short that was released by Walt Disney Animation along with Wreck-It Ralph last year. It was released for free on YouTube just a few days ago.

The cute and touching short is beautiful and features a brand new animation process which is a hybrid of traditional hand-drawn animation techniques and modern computer generated imagery. You can read more about the technique here.

The thing that excites me about the short, though, is the idea that rather than supplanting them, new technologies can be used to enhance and supplement more traditional techniques. I love the look of the old, hand-drawn Disney films, and this definitely hearkens back to that time, while doing things that would be very difficult without the help of computers.

Like Common Craft’s hand-drawn explanation videos or artists who can turn vector graphics into physical objects, I’d love to see presentation designers experiment with hybrid techniques like this rather than just creating the computer-generated shapes and word art that are native to PowerPoint.

Do you know of some examples of presentations that incorporate both old and new techniques? I hope you’ll share them in the comments.