The frustration, boredom, or resentment you might feel now is just your intuition’s way of telling you that there’s a turn up ahead.
The author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn once said that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Choose wisely.
The things that made you weird as a kid make you great today. – JAMES VICTORE.
To become a creator, you have to be willing to forge healthy, supportive relationships with amazing new people and reexamine any toxic relationships you’re already in. The author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn once said that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Choose wisely.
Whatever else you take away from this chapter, remember that you’ll get better only once you stop fiddling and start making. Quality will come over time, but only if you make a lot of stuff while minimizing self-criticism and not letting yourself fritter away valuable minutes optimizing a workflow with no actual work flowing through it.
What is truly possible for you? Whatever your answer is, whatever success, accomplishment, or fulfillment you’ve only imagined might be within your reach, let’s pause to acknowledge that you’re likely thinking too small. We all do that at first. Small is comfortable and familiar. It feels safe – even though it’s anything but.
When you bring your genuine self to bear on what you do and how you do it, you can’t help but stand apart from everyone else. There is only one you – you are the highest value you can contribute.
Rebellion is always a reaction. That means it’s just another form of control – you are controlled by the thing you are rebelling against. It’s not a choice; it’s a trap.
So at the beginning, go gently. If you’re just getting started with your creative practice, start small.
Except on a rare day with extenuating circumstances, I’ll follow my meditation with a three-minute gratitude and visualization practice. I begin with my eyes closed and make a short list of three genuine and heartfelt moments I’m grateful to have had in my life – and I relive them as if watching the experience through my own eyes and feeling those moments as fully as possible.
Then I transition into visualizing myself in a world where I have just achieved my three most important goals. I live through the feelings that come along with each achievement, imagining all of it in as much detail as possible: sounds, smells, emotions. What would it look, feel, taste, smell, and sound like to accomplish those goals?
What does a session plan look like? It can be a note scribbled on a whiteboard to stoke a brainstorm with a creative collaborator. A to-do in an app. A sketch. A snapshot. The amount of detail depends on the stakes and the players involved. Ideally, a session plan sets out a piece of work you can manageably tackle in the time you have available. Again, estimating this properly takes experience.
No, a calling is an intuitive hint, a tug we experience when we’re doing something that feels right: This is awesome! I’m going to keep doing this and see where it takes me.
All schools are prep schools in a way. They prepare you for Industrial Age careers. Your teachers and parents meant well, but our educational system was designed using a twentieth-century factory as a model, with efficiency in mind, not creativity or diversity of thought.
Another critical element is to keep your plan 100 percent creative. Stay out of the back office. Creative work always requires noncreative work to support it: setting up software, testing tools, learning new skills, and so on. Don’t get sucked in. Never let the admin get ahead of the real work, the making and the doing.
The more you narrow your creative focus, the faster you will learn and the more effective your work will become.
At this stage in my life, it’s become impossible to ignore the fact that the good days – when I’m feeling great and doing my best work – have common elements. For one thing, they’re intentional. On those days, I’m in the driver’s seat, with clear objectives in mind and a plan for achieving them, even if the objective is simply taking time to think through a problem.
Turning an idea in your head into a tangible reality is one of life’s great satisfactions, whether the end result is a story, a photograph, a meal, or a business.
When we create, we give of ourselves freely, adding value and expecting nothing in return.
If we keep using our creative energy by making new things day after day, month after month, something incredible happens. We feel better: awake, fulfilled, whole. By creating regularly, we access a new source of vitality.