Nobody commits anymore.
Not just because it’s hard to commit, but because it’s easy to bail.
When picking a vendor, picking a university, picking a home, even picking a mate, technology dissolves loyalty. With instant access to an unlimited reservoir of choices, every additional option makes it harder and harder to stick with something.
The problem, then, is not just our fear of commitment – it’s our surplus of escape routes.
If we want to paint ourselves into an accountable corner, if we want to become known for our commitment, the only answer is to burn the ships, practice some serious restraint and play for keeps.
Otherwise we’re just another question mark in people’s minds.
You’ve chosen an uncertain path. You’ve adopted an inconvenient lifestyle. You’ve embarked upon an unconventional journey. You’ve felt the voice inside you growing more urgent. You’ve committed yourself enough so you can’t turn back.
IN SHORT: You’ve decided to play for keeps.
This is the critical crossroads – the emotional turning point – in the life of every young artist.
And I’ve been there myself.
From my latest book, Writing is the Basis of All Wealth, here’s a list of suggestions to help you along the way:
1. Miles Davis didn’t make many hit records. He sold the experience of seeing him in person, and he changed music forever. But that was decades ago. Now everything is different. “Today almost everything we encounter has been recorded and played back,” writes Rian Hughes in Culture, “and very little of what we experience is actually live. Yet live is how life happens, and live was the only way, before technology permitted reproduction, life happened.” The challenge is figure out how your art creates a breathing the same air experience for your fans. From live events to streaming online, making hit records isn’t as important as it used to be. When was the last time you made art in public?
2. Life was here first. The artistic landscape is littered with the corpses of people whose life was solely about executing their will. People who selfishly ignored their families, neglected their health and abandon their communities, in the name of art. And while their body of work was impressive, their body in a coffin, wasn’t. In a recent podcast interview, Ben Stiller explained, “Life doesn’t happen on its own when you just go and work all the time.” It’s a helpful reminder that whatever balance you strike, staying devoted to the project of building a life is just as important as the art you make from it. We have to create a life anchored by regular experiences of meaningfulness outside of our work. Are you living a life worth rendering?
3. Be open to criticism, but not defeated by it. To not be critical of your own work is to not be human. It’s part of the job description. At the same time, you don’t want to criticize the work to the point that you scare yourself out of creating it. Please don’t interrupt me while I’m beating the shit out of myself, as some artists are prone to say. Fortunately, if you can confront yourself without condemning yourself, if you can meet yourself without turning away, and if you can take stock without making a judgment, your art will get better without getting under your skin. It all depends on how willing you are to face your own work with a critical eye. What pieces are you afraid to go back and look at?
4. You can’t be an inactivist. Art is something you have to do every day, otherwise you get too far from it and forget what it’s about. That’s one of the reasons you make things – to find out why you made them. Leonard Cohen once told American Songwriter, “You have to redeem the day so it does not go down in debt.” As an artist, whatever bargain you make with yourself, be sure it’s enough to meet your daily quota of usefulness. That will validate your existence. That will keep you on top of your game. And even if you don’t score big today, there will always be tomorrow. What did you create yesterday?
5. Your entire career is an act of entrepreneurship. And as such, part of your job is to search beyond your current professional boundaries. To risk rejection by exploring new artistic worlds instead of courting acceptance by following already explored paths. Julia Cameron teaches her writing students to recite the following affirmation, “I am not going to limit myself just because people won’t accept the fact that I can do something else.” If that means trying a new genre, so be it. If that means working for a new audience so be it. And if that means moving across the country to a city where you don’t know anybody, so be it. Art without risk, isn’t. When was the last time you did something for the first time?
6. Start with design in mind. Design isn’t a veneer we apply after the hard work is done – design is the hard work. It starts on day one and it’s part of everything. In the words of the great Alan Fletcher, “Design is to conscious effort to impose meaningful and beautiful order, surround the spirit with flesh and make the pragmatic poetic. It’s the intelligent equation between purpose and construction.” No matter what medium you use, we’re all designers. And the same way that you build remarkability into your ideas before they go public, you also build design into your ideas before they get finished. Choose to champion the beautiful. Invest as much energy as possible in making your art a beautiful organism. Are you making something you would put in your coffin?
REMEMBER: When you’re ready to play for keeps, your work will never be the same.
Make the decision today.
Show the world that your art isn’t just another expensive hobby.
The real beauty is when we can be ugly together.
When we can join each other in a safe space of honesty and imperfection and give voice to the darkest, most perverse sides of ourselves. Somewhere we can set shame aside and let vulnerability meet vulgarity, without the fear of being judged.
We might do coffee with friends. Have dinner club with colleagues. Share at storytelling open mic nights. Attend quarterly meetup groups. Write weekly letters to family members or post on online message boards with digital pals.
All are good options.
The point is, it’s less important where, how or with whom we do it – and more important that we do it. Regularly. Because without this emotional release, without this outlet for our most primitive hostilities and human tendencies, we fail to acknowledge, appease and articulate our shadow.
If we don’t go crazy, we might go crazy.
The goal is to pursue wholeness, not perfection. To admit that, despite our best efforts to keep our hands clean, humans can’t hide their hideousness forever. To decide that, eventually, the ugly has to come out. And to believe that, when we’re willing to share what’s most appalling about our lives, we’re always better because of it.
When times are tough, it’s a lot harder to believe our own bullshit.
Anyone can self-rationalize when there’s money in the bank, clients in the pipeline and projects in the works. That’s like riding a bicycle downhill and assuming our legs are strong.
But when the phone stops ringing, when the obligations start accumulating, and when we’re not sure where the next check is coming from, there’s only so much manure we can shovel. Eventually, we have to get radically honest with ourselves about what’s working and what’s not. And we have to wake up to what’s true about ourselves at the risk of seeing something we couldn’t see back when business was good.
Otherwise, under the weight of our own delusions — even if we’ve managed to convince the rest of the world that everything is going fine — we’ll know the reality. We’ll still have to look at ourselves in the mirror every morning.
And it might not be a pretty sight.
Most of the time, email is everyone else’s agenda for our time.
It’s the digital fidget we sit around waiting to react to, the easiest way to preserve the illusion of productivity and the constant distraction that prevents us from executing what matters most.
Then again, I’ve received emails that changed my perspective forever, like the man who commented how my entire career came from something in a trashcan. I’ve gotten emails that sparked product ideas and turned into real money, like the feedback from readers who asked me to publish digital books. And I’ll never forget the emails that lifted me out of the paralysis of inconsequentiality, like the woman who finally got the nerve to quit her job after hearing an embarrassing story from one of my presentations.
Like most things in life, it all comes down to choice.
The point is, email doesn’t have to be a beast to tame, not if we don’t want it to. Instead of whining about how overwhelming our inbox is, the alternative is to guiltlessly delete the irrelevant, quickly respond to the important, thankfully read the inspiring, and quietly get on with our lives.
Bing.
The other night I had dinner with a group of travel agents.
I was curious how the economic, technological and generational shifts were affecting their industry, so I asked what the future of their profession looked like.
And without skipping a beat, this one woman launched into a story that blew my mind. About a week ago, she was talking to the cashier at a local bakery. When the guy asked what she did for a living, Cindy said she was a travel agent.
The cashier replied, “I thought you all were dead!”
Proof once again, there’s nothing more frightening than the prospect of irrelevancy.
The only problem is, no one needs us. We’re a dying breed. Everything people used to need from us – information, answers, ideas and advice – is available to them right now, for free, in perfect form, forever.
It didn’t used to be that way. There was a time when we were vessels of knowledge. Pillars of wisdom. Narrators of the story of life. And paragons of experience that those who were hungry could climb mountains to pursue, even if only to touch the hem of our garment.
But now people just google stuff. Nobody needs to wonder, think, reflect, ask, create, mediate, listen or read. Just download, verify and repeat. Download, verify and repeat. And if we don’t do something to reverse this trend, our species is not going to make it. If the pendulum doesn’t start to swing the other way, we are not going to last.
Human beings are social creatures. We need to need each other. Our craving for belonging, connectedness and togetherness is no less essential that food, water or shelter.
But if we insist on ignoring, avoiding and circumventing each other – if we continue to solely depend on the pixels of digital surrogates instead of the perspective of actual people – we will continue to become less human by the hour.
Eventually, we’ll serve no purpose other than fleshy holsters for electronic devices.
We don’t need more access to information.
We need more access to each other.
It costs nothing to have a voice.
Actually, that’s not entirely true.
It costs your privacy, your safety, your vulnerability, your pride, your addiction to permission, your need for control, your ego, your time, your sweat, your blood, your reputation, your emotional labor, possibly your job, sometimes your relationships and, in a few devastating cases, your life.
But that’s it.
Over the years, I’ve done plenty of things for the wrong reasons.
For the money, for the resume, for the attention, for the approval, for the applause, for the footage, for the material, for the achievements and of course, for the need to prove myself.
But looking back, the experiences I’m most proud of, the projects I least regret and the investments that yielded the greatest dividends, were the things I did because I didn’t want to regret not doing them.
“I don’t want to die wondering,” as my friend Paul likes to say.
What a beautiful mantra.
Dreams weren’t meant to be sat on.
They’re not eggs and we’re not chickens.
When it comes to the birth of what’s in our hearts, time doesn’t always enable incubation. Sometimes it hinders execution. Sometimes patience isn’t a virtue. And sometimes what we think is strategic planning is just procrastination in disguise.
If that’s the case, we owe it to ourselves, to our hearts, to take decisive action. To do whatever the dream needs to evolve out of dream form and into reality form. To find people who can help us become who we need to be to handle that reality.
And while not every dream comes to fruition immediately, while it may take months or even years for certain dreams to prove their execution worth, we always need to be ready to crack it open.
Even if we’re not ready.
Confusion is expensive.
If people don’t know what to expect when they come to your door, the organization will burn piles of money trying to reeducate, reassure and reaffirm people who they are.
Smart companies start early. They build expectational clarity to buttress the transaction. That way, they create greater anticipation in the customer’s mind, capturing their imagination for what’s come.
Icontact is a perfect digital example. The moment you subscribe to any publication on their platform, you’re prompted with questions: What are you going to get? How can you ensure our email gets to you? Is my information secure? Then, each of the answers is custom written by the publishers themselves. And all of this happens before you receive your first issue.
Weiner Circle is the perfect analog example. Customers rarely show up to wait in line without first hearing crazy stories from friends, viewing fun pictures online or learning instructions on how, specifically to order. A word to the wise, a chocolate shake isn’t what you think.
Whatever business you’re in, ambiguity is the enemy of profitability.
But learn to telegraph reliability, eliminate guesswork and deliver a series of predictable promises, and you’ll save a bundle.
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