Stop daydreaming. Start making bad work.

Do ideas constantly appear in your mind, things you feel you should pursue, only for you to keep putting them off because you are afraid the result will not live up to your expectations?

Or perhaps you have an idea and immediately start imagining what it will feel like once it succeeds.

You picture the flowers, applause and excitement. Your mind fills with a sense of achievement, as though the imagined success has already happened.

Then the brief rush fades.

You are left wondering where to begin and what to do next. Eventually, the idea goes nowhere.

Later, you watch people around you pursue clear goals, take action and achieve one thing after another. You regret your inaction and blame yourself for never following through.

Then the inner conflict begins.

You lose motivation, feel increasingly drained and become trapped in the same cycle.

I call this ‘chronic daydreaming’.

I know it well because this is exactly how I behave.

I underestimate how difficult and complicated it can be to accomplish something. At the same time, I worry that what I create will fall short of expectations or lead nowhere, so I delay starting.

I often assume I should be able to do things easily. I have no idea where that confidence comes from.

But whenever I finally begin, I discover that the work is rarely as effortless as I imagined. More often than not, it is difficult and demanding.

Writing is one example.

Before I began writing seriously, I thought it was simply a matter of turning thoughts into words.

Once I started, I realised how difficult it is to write something logical, fluent and engaging. I often found myself staring at a blank document, unsure how to begin.

I also tend to dismiss small and imperfect attempts.

When I see someone learning a new skill or beginning a project, their early work can look simple or clumsy.

Because I am afraid my own work will look just as bad, I choose not to begin.

Then, some time later, the person whose work I once dismissed has already achieved something meaningful.

Meanwhile, I am still entertaining myself with fantasies and have created nothing.

When I look at people who have succeeded, I also make excuses for myself.

I tell myself they had the right environment, resources or opportunities, and that these advantages made their success possible.

In doing so, I rationalise both their achievements and my own lack of action.

But many accomplished people began as ordinary people.

Their resources and opportunities were often found, created or fought for through small acts of initiative. Their results were built one step at a time.

At the beginning of this year, I watched the Chinese variety show Happy Friends. One scene stayed with me.

The singer Zhang Yuan was playing an electric guitar. When the camera moved closer, I noticed that the hand pressing the strings was trembling.

Even a professional singer with years of performance experience could feel nervous and perform imperfectly when doing something unfamiliar.

But he still took the first step.

That was when I began to understand:

You do not wait until everything is ready before you begin.

You begin first, make a pile of bad work, and improve it step by step until you gradually become skilled.

Understanding that I needed to do bad work first was only a shift in mindset.

When it came to how to begin and what action to take, my thoughts were still chaotic.

So I developed three approaches to help myself resist chronic daydreaming.

Whenever we have an idea or goal, we often want to achieve everything at once and create a permanent solution immediately.

We also imagine that the moment we begin, we should impress everyone.

Otherwise, we would rather not begin at all.

These thoughts become barriers to action.

Instead, divide the process into three steps: Goal → Minimum action → Fixed trigger

Then follow them almost mechanically.

Define the task, make the action measurable and reduce the mental energy spent deciding what to do each time.

Through repetition, action can gradually become automatic.

The first step is to turn the goal into a clear task that can actually be completed, rather than leaving it as a vague and distant ambition.

“I want to write.”

“I want to become a content creator.”

“I want to improve my communication skills.”

These are all broad goals.

They overwhelm the mind and give us endless reasons to delay.

But when the goal becomes “write 300 words today”, “organise three content ideas” or “summarise one article I have read”, it becomes something you can do immediately.

The second, and perhaps most important, step is to make the action as small as possible.

We often procrastinate because the task we have set ourselves is too large.

In The Awakening of Cognition, author Zhou Ling writes that we should place ourselves near the edge of our comfort zone, inside what he calls the stretch zone. This is where skills can improve most effectively.

If we push ourselves straight into the difficulty zone, instinct begins to resist.

Take writing as an example.

Perhaps your goal is to write 300 words every day.

But when you sit down, your mind is blank and you cannot produce a single sentence.

That may mean 300 words is currently too difficult.

Reduce the task to 100 words a day.

It does not matter how bad those words are. Write them first.

Every small action creates some form of progress.

After several weeks, you may be able to write 300 words a day. Eventually, those 300 words may even become interesting, moving and worth reading.

The third step is to create a fixed trigger.

This reduces the time and energy spent deciding when to act.

Often, we are capable of completing a task, but it remains vague because it has no clear starting point.

When we connect the action to a specific time or situation, it becomes more concrete.

A useful template is: When I am in a particular situation or reach a certain time, I will complete one specific minimum action.

Writing 100 words a day can still be easy to postpone.

In the morning, you tell yourself you will write at lunch.

At lunchtime, you feel tired and decide to write before bed.

At night, you tell yourself you will do it tomorrow.

Then you wake up the next morning and blame yourself for failing to write even 100 words.

The problem is often not that we are incapable of doing it.

We simply never decided when the task would begin.

But when the rule becomes “I will write 100 words every evening at 9 pm”, you no longer need to decide each day when to write.

Over time, daily writing or journalling begins to feel automatic.

Reflection may sound like overused advice, but I only recently realised that I had never truly practised it.

Even when I took action, I rarely stopped to think.

As a result, when learning a skill or working on a project, I often repeated the same process without understanding how to improve.

I focused on finishing tasks rather than developing ability.

When managing social media accounts, for example, I often become anxious about follower numbers and production speed.

I overlook the quality of the content itself.

I do not ask how it could be improved or what new techniques I could learn. I simply want to finish it quickly, publish it and move on.

Even after running an account for three or five years, you may still feel empty.

You become a machine that constantly produces content without learning anything from the process.

Meanwhile, when you look at people who began at the same time, you may notice that some have greatly improved their photography and editing, while others have developed far more compelling writing.

I recently realised that the same thing had happened with calligraphy.

I began learning calligraphy as a child, but I always waited for the teacher to tell me what to do.

The teacher would say that one stroke needed to lean further or another needed to be shorter, and I would follow the instruction.

But I never asked why the character should be written that way.

I never tried to understand the emotion of the original writer or the deeper principles behind the brushwork.

On paper, I may have ten years of calligraphy experience and my handwriting may look acceptable.

But much of it is simply muscle memory created through repetition.

There is nothing especially striking about it because I never understood the spirit behind the art.

Words written without that understanding have no soul.

In the chapter on metacognition in The Awakening of Cognition, Zhou Ling introduces the idea of “meta-time”.

Any moment in which we face a choice can be considered meta-time.

He argues that anxious people often lack awareness of it. They are used to acting without thinking and use constant busyness to reassure themselves.

The balance between thinking and doing becomes deeply uneven. They are unwilling to spend even a small amount of time reflecting and instead become trapped in the satisfaction of staying busy.

Without reflection, we can lose ourselves in the appearance of productivity.

Action alone does not create genuine growth.

Thoughtful action does.

After completing a task or project, deliberately spend a little time asking yourself three questions: What went well? What did not work? What could I improve next time? Write down the answers.

This turns vague impressions into something concrete and clear.

Without long-term thinking, chronic daydreaming simply becomes chronic inaction.

For many of us, the problem is not a lack of goals.

It is impatience.

We try something for three days and see no improvement, so we decide we are not capable.

We publish a few articles and receive little traffic, so we conclude that the direction is wrong.

Then we give up, choose another path, daydream again and abandon that too.

In this way, we remain forever at the starting line.

The people who eventually travel far are not always more intelligent or better resourced.

Often, they simply continue after others have stopped.

They stay committed to what they believe in and keep doing the work, even when it appears to be producing little progress.

Long-term thinking is another way of understanding time.

Results do not suddenly appear.

They accumulate quietly, one day at a time.

Do not worry too much about whether the first version is good.

Let it exist first.

A rough beginning is better than a perfect plan that never becomes real.

You have to trust that even when your effort feels insignificant, time is quietly adding to it.

The seed you planted with your own hands may one day grow into something magnificent.

Even while writing this article, I am still resisting my habit of chronic daydreaming.

I know the article is imperfect.

I know there are many places where it could be better.

But I still chose to write it first.

Only by making a pile of bad work can I create the possibility of eventually making something good.

So begin now.

Open your planner and write down one small thing you can act on today.

Perhaps you cannot make something good yet.

But surely you can make something bad.

Whatever happens, let it begin.