I have this (at least by the sound of it: if totally different, maybe something is helped by this anyway) (and had it for for 35 odd years). I was told I can ‘achieve anything’ during my childhood which, somehow is a signal to my brain to pick the things I definitely can do and leave the harder things because it might actually show I cannot ‘achieve anything’ (duh, ofcourse I can’t, but it is not a rational or even conscious thing anyway).
Luckily I found a mechanism to cope with that very early on; I build a ‘story’ around the task/project/thing that I want to do but also ‘prove to my brain’ I am ‘all that’ (so I don’t simply don’t do it as is the first instinct); basically to narrate that this is only the first step and it will probably be crap, but it will become that shiny perfection that was promised later on through iteration.
I do this with everything; cooking, software dev (where it is actually the normal way things work), hardware, management, sports, etc. Some things go ‘perfect’ the first time, most obviously do not, but they either become irrelevant or get better (and even perfect for some definition).
That way, I am mentally shielded from not doing them in the first place because of my mental block. This used to be (in my teens) an actual narrative with myself where I told myself a story how something would go; starting really badly and insignificant as possible and then building out that narrative up to castles in the sky. Coming back down I would then be able to start the journey at the bottom while genuinely believing I would get to the top ‘in some time’ (it really does not matter if you do; the starting and iterating matters the most imho). Now the process is automatic, but it still has that same feeling to start with; I will never get over it but I managed to cope.
Luckily I found a mechanism to cope with that very early on; I build a ‘story’ around the task/project/thing that I want to do but also ‘prove to my brain’ I am ‘all that’ (so I don’t simply don’t do it as is the first instinct); basically to narrate that this is only the first step and it will probably be crap, but it will become that shiny perfection that was promised later on through iteration.
I do this with everything; cooking, software dev (where it is actually the normal way things work), hardware, management, sports, etc. Some things go ‘perfect’ the first time, most obviously do not, but they either become irrelevant or get better (and even perfect for some definition).
That way, I am mentally shielded from not doing them in the first place because of my mental block. This used to be (in my teens) an actual narrative with myself where I told myself a story how something would go; starting really badly and insignificant as possible and then building out that narrative up to castles in the sky. Coming back down I would then be able to start the journey at the bottom while genuinely believing I would get to the top ‘in some time’ (it really does not matter if you do; the starting and iterating matters the most imho). Now the process is automatic, but it still has that same feeling to start with; I will never get over it but I managed to cope.