Last time I was here in Nashville, I met this musician who told me how he usually doesn’t get done with work until 2 or 3 in the morning, but he’s always up at 7am, wide awake and ready to “git it.”
I listened to him with roiling envy inside. I wanted to be like that.
At the time, it seemed I had no motivation. All I had was a thin stack of work-for-hire, easily put off and easily dealt with, and the idea for this project that I wasn’t sure would work.
Now, I have all the motivation I need…enough to where it wakes me up a full hour earlier than my musician friend. Nonetheless, I’m fighting it off. Not for the first time, my inner monologue has become like…well, like this:
(And in advance, I’m sorry if I’m being pushy here. It’s only because I’m saying all this to myself.)
1) Nobody wants what I have to offer.
Sometimes I don’t care. But on the kind of day I’ve just described, neutral to negative feedback is a great reason to not do anything at all.
The thing is that we, as humans, are usually limited in our imagination by what we’ve already seen. Even those of us who consider ourselves creative…creativity often takes the form of a slightly better version of something that already exists. Which is fine. But if your idea is something that you’ve never seen anyone make or do before, be aware that people are going to look at it the way they looked at the horseless carriage, with their faces screwed up skeptically.
(Bring a camera. These facial expressions are great to repurpose as internet memes.)
“Say what?”
“Won’t it be dangerous?”
“What’s the purpose?”
2) “What IS the purpose?” (see above)
Noah was told to build an ark because it was going to rain. He knew the purpose, but even the purpose probably seemed fishy to him. Especially when he’s spending–what, like decades?–building this gigantic wooden thing that was going to be used for something that, according to some scholars, might not have even existed before. …Meaning rain.
I feel like that often, even when I’m working on something important to me. How do I know when it’s going to be done? How will I even know it’s successful?
All I know is there’s an inner imperative, scratching to be let out, ruining the furniture.
3) Someone else already did it.
For heaven’s sake. Of course they did. In my case, the chain of unoriginality goes all the way back to John Steinbeck…and it probably precedes him.
Who preceded you? Was it the Wright Brothers or Michelangelo or Joni Mitchell, plus all the people who came before and since?
If you’re not willing to do a creative endeavor because someone else did it better, or (in your opinion) perfectly, you’re missing the point of creativity. It’s not to do something no one’s ever done–it’s to do something that needs to be done again. People always need to be reminded of what they already know. And thank God for that!
4) It’s too late.
Well, it might be.
So what?
You might have already accepted the promotion at the job you hate, gotten married to the spouse who thought of your creativity as a “phase,” bought the house, had the kids… I don’t know.
Whatever you’re putting in front of yourself as the reason it’s too late, it’s unlikely that your creativity is going to take “no” for an answer.
If it does, watch out. It will turn on you. Creativity denied tends to get crazy on you…Fatal Attraction style.
5) I don’t know how to do it.
Well, duh. Of course you don’t. That’s what makes it a creative endeavor.
I recently interviewed a gentleman who runs a mentorship program for “boys of color from low-income environments” (his words, okay?). He says that deplorable statistics among these boys are the result of a fear of making mistakes. They are so afraid of trying something worthwhile and failing at it, that they choose instead to “succeed” at a lifestyle that ultimately destroys them.
Failure is essential to success, he says; to get past the insecurity around it, he asks the boys (and himself) this question:
Do I want to be the kind of man that shies away from that anxiety, or do I want to be the guy that pushes through?
6) It won’t work.
I don’t know if it’s even worth talking through this one. I just know that the rock-bottom basis of my unwillingness to get started is the absolute conviction that I’ll never be able to pull it off.
That conviction is, in fact, true. But it’s also not true. One of my idols, This American Life host Ira Glass, explains how.
What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.
It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
(Sigh. Don’t you kind of want him to end with a benediction or something?)
Flickr photo (cc) by bitmask
