“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” Vincent van Gogh
Can we talk about this great quote for a minute?
First of all, a caveat – there are legitimately things we cannot do. Not as many as we probably believe, but they do exist. Let’s not waste time and energy on those. We’re not talking about them. We’re talking about the ones we can do but think we can’t, for whatever reason.
There are any number of places the discouraging voice within may originate. Maybe we heard it first from a parent, a teacher, our peers, or someone else and their voices echo in our mind. Perhaps lack of self-confidence or natural tendencies toward pessimism are some of our personal challenges and it’s our own voice that undermines us most often. Possibly we’re simply too weary from life’s other demands to think we can do whatever “it” may be.
Identifying the origin of the voice might be helpful, but ultimately it may not be necessary. So let’s not worry over that for right now.
Knowing van Gogh struggled with mental illness and poverty, it’s a very safe bet that he knew all about discouragement and the voice within telling him he could not paint. But paint he did, creating about 2100 paintings in just over a decade, with around 860 oil paintings coming in the last two years of his life. That’s an average of more than two paintings a day! He may have known that voice, but he obviously knew how to silence it, as well.
He silenced it by acting.
It’s easy to get stuck in our heads trying to figure out why we think and feel the way we do, what’s holding us back, how we can overcome our insecurity or whatever else is holding us back, when sometimes the solution can start with a simple action.
In this case, maybe it would be smart to listen to Nike and “Just do it.” Or if that still feels like too much, maybe we can “Just start it.”
Even if “it” is less than perfect, less than we hoped, we will have silenced “the voice” by proving it wrong and we’ll have started momentum moving in our direction.