Refocused Living

A major issue for lots of creative people is the process of creating enough work to make an impact in their careers. More specifically, creative people seem to have a problem with sharing their own work out in public. This can be attributed to a lot of things – for example:, perfectionism, the feeling of inadequacy (e.g., “this work will never be good enough to show others”), or thoughts of being able to immediately create another work that’s even better than the the work just made.

But you know what? All of those crippling excuses for not sharing your creative works don’t matter. As soon as you come up with something creative, you need to put it out there ASAP. If you look throughout history, every single success story in any artistic field has tales of flops and tales of successes. But what defines those successful people from others is the fact that they kept trying again and again and again. If one thing they tried wasn’t successful, they immediately moved on to something else. Let’s look at a few examples.

Mozart was an incredibly prolific composer . He only composed a little over 30 years, but he wrote over 600 sets of pieces by the time he died at age 36. Starting when he was about 5 years old and ending literally on his deathbed, he never stopped the process of creating new artistic works.

The odd thing in Mozart’s story is that he only composed works purely for higher. He couldn’t sit around and wait for divine inspiration to strike at the perfect moment. No new compositions meant no money on the table; no money on the table meant he couldn’t support himself or his family. But even without sitting around waiting for a spark of creativity, he still managed to continuously compose and expand his accomplishments, creating beautiful masterpieces along the way.

If you go through Mozart’s catalog of works, you’ll see that most of his stuff isn’t even performed today. The first 200 to 300 works are pretty average, with some exceptions of course, but it didn’t stop him from composing the next piece. Even if one of his works failed miserably, it was still a brand new work to share with others. People kept hiring Mozart because they appreciated his compositions and admired his skills. Mozart never, ever took a break or quit; he worked nonstop on becoming an even better composer until the end of his life.

The best artists, the best writers, the best actors, the best directors, the best artistic people in the world are obsessed with continuously creating and throwing their new works into the hands of the public. If a new song or a new movie is a flop, so what? There’s always next time. They learn the lesson from the failure and move on.

Lady GaGa has been touring on almost a constant basis since early 2008, and now she’s selling out stadiums. Liberace started performing in restaurants when he was about 22 years old and didn’t stop until he was forced to due to extreme sickness, in his mid 60s; by that time, he was selling out Radio City year after year. Madonna constantly revives her career by sharply turning down different roads every single year, never halting to take a break. When she finishes recording a brand new record, there’s promotions and a tour to be done. When the tour is wrapped up, she undertakes another creative project almost immediately.

Great actors never stop honing their craft. A new role is always available for them to take on. Directors continuously direct.

The bottom line is that any famous person in any field, any success story, will have a long list of works behind their names. They might not be perfect works. They might not be works that people will look at in 20 years and think they were anything special. But to these people, it doesn’t matter – it’s a process of growing, of reinvention. It’s a story of becoming successful not right out of the box, but because they truly believed in their creative talent and did everything in their power to get that talent in the hands of other people.

Not every sonnet that Shakespeare wrote was a literary masterpiece. Not every piano piece Chopin composed will enter someone’s piano repertoire. Not every piece of art that Picasso painted was considered among his best.

Getting your work out there isn’t sitting on a completed work and thinking of ways that you could possibly perfect it. It’s doing the absolute, very best job you can at the time and then getting that work out into the hands of people who would appreciate what you do.

Will the average person notice the slight awkwardness of a brush stroke in a painting? The odd musical phrasing in a classical piece? A flubbed line in a play? Nope. Not at all. The average person is going to be focused on the piece of art being presented – the item you created. Not all of the imperfections that you personally see when you view your art.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of constantly sharing your works with the world is that you’ll be able to get first hand, live experience that shows you what works and what doesn’t work. Without this kind of awesome feedback, you’d never be able to know how to hone your craft into something greater. It’s one thing to be able to write a novel that you think deserves to be on a best seller list; it’s another thing to give it to somebody so they can assess what you’ve written and ofter a critique. Getting into a cycle of creating a work, sharing a work, then creating another even stronger work is something that will help you your entire life.

Think of it like a real world tennis lesson. When you first start playing tennis, you’re probably going to be absolute terrible. But with a teacher, and some practice off court, you can surely expect your skills to gradually improve over time… to the point where you might be pretty competent at hitting those balls. With the right mix of dedicated practice and a teacher to guide your moves to make sure you aren’t making any beginner’s mistakes or picking up on the wrong technique, it’s easy to see how your skill level would begin to improve and eventually soar.

Sharing creative works works the same exact way. Instead of learning tennis, it’d be creating valuable works for the world. Instead of hiring a private coach, you’d get real time feedback from your friends, family, even strangers who stumble upon what you do. Instead of practice, you’d be refining your process and coming up with an even better item to share with others. This process never changes, no matter if you’re learning a new sport, picking up a musical instrument, or writing a book of poems. Remember when you first learned how to drive a car? The method was exactly the same. You try, you got feedback, you tried again.

Creating and deliver value is at the heart of any creative career, ranging from fashion to music to acting to art. But it’s not enough to create a few things in hopes that one of them catches on with the public. You need to be the person who strives to always create something better, something brand new, every single day of your life. Be the person who takes every single completed work and shares it with the world.

Most people go through life living a truly boring existence. While it’s kind of weird for a personal development blog – out of all places – to say this, it’s the truth. Generally, people lead dull lives, they work at dull jobs, they invest their time in dull activities, and then they die in a dull way. (Okay, so maybe the last thing mentioned isn’t something they can control. But you get what I mean.)

Why on earth would anybody willingly want to live so…dully? It’d be easy for me to throw up my hands and say “Who knows?” – but in reality, there are a lot of reasons people want to live their lives as an unspectacular chain of events.

The funny thing is that all of these dull people constantly try to convince everybody else to be dull just like them. All of the time. For some reason, people adore attempting to talk others into living life just as they are. Since most of the people doing these attempts at converting are naturally dull, it takes on an odd twist: Living life to your absolute fullest is encouraged when you’re little, then discouraged once you hit adulthood. Dull-ness needs to rule once you can think for yourself!

But… who wouldn’t want to be the exception to the rule? Who doesn’t want a fabulous life that’s different from everybody else, from the time you’re little to when you’re older than dirt?

You can’t do that! That’s the exception!

When you’re a little kid, you’re often encouraged by nearly everybody around you to think big and dream even bigger. Whatever you want to achieve in life, you can certainly do it. You just have to believe you can, set a goal that you’re going to obtain what you want, and get working. Not even the sky is  your limit unless you limit yourself.

But along the way, as you grew older, something strange began to happen. Those people who told you that success was within reach and something you could grasp started to tell you the complete opposite.

Suddenly those same people are putting your dreams down. For example, does the following sound familiar, in any way, shape, or form?

“Oh, sorry. Did I just hear you say you want to be a pop singer? That’s not possible. You can’t do that; you can’t be the next Madonna. She’s the exception to the rule, she just got lucky. You gotta pick something more down to earth. Stop longing to be a famous pop singer. Why aren’t you thinking about going to college like your friends? What are you going to do for a living? Seriously, you cannot make a decent living singing. How are you going support yourself?”

There are literally hundreds of variations on this same theme. You can’t be the next (famous person!) because (they got lucky! they’re the exception!) Better go try your hand at something else, right? Right…?

Instead of dreaming these amazing dreams for yourself and being filled with the passion that you can achieve anything, you’re slowly taught to conform. After all, everybody wants to live like everybody else. That’s just a given. Who wants to show off, be amazing, and rock at life if you can live like the Joneses next door? Duh.

Where does this “You can’t do that!” stuff come from?

If you’ve ever had to deal with the assault-like verbal grenades like the one I just mentioned above, you know what it feels like for people to totally demean your aspirations. It’s no fun at all.

Why would people who care about your future dish out advice like that? In my experience, the cause is linked to two main reasons:

• A lack of courage. If somebody is trying to give you advice but it sounds directly opposite of what you want to hear, consider that he/she might be speaking from a mindset of fear. People who want to see you succeed and want you to be happy might be drawing from their own feelings of being fearful of success when they offer you up terrible advice. Take what they say with a grain of salt. They might not necessarily mean to put a damper on your dreams, but they have their own limiting beliefs that are darkly shading the advice they give you.
• Fear of your success. What would your success mean to these people if you went out, achieved what you set your mind to, and shattered their expectations to pieces? Would they truly be happy for you? Would they sulk and have resentment when they see what kind of person you’ve become? Your success might force them to reevaluate the boring life they’re living; your success would be a threat to their stability.

As you can tell, its not necessarily that these people don’t want you to succeed, but they’re afraid of realizing what your success would mean to them. (Also remember that things such as limiting beliefs can also skew judgement when these people give you advice.)

Come on! Be like everybody else! (Or not?)

It’s sometimes extremely difficult to break away from what everybody else is saying and go down your own brilliant path, especially when the status quo is pressuring you to stay exactly the same. But unfortunately for you, if you begin believing that your dreams aren’t worth clinging onto and turning into your own reality, your life starts to become a pale copy of everybody else’s.

What is it to be like everybody else, anyways? Does it mean you eat a lot of foods that shouldn’t ever be put into your body? Does it mean you slowly chip away your time at a 9 to 5 job, wishing you had the freedom to do anything else with your time? Does it mean you spend years of your life paying (possibly tens of) thousands of dollars to go to college to graduate and find yourself in one of these terrifying jobs?

Let’s be honest – who really wants to live like everybody else? Deep down inside, everybody’s thinking they could be the exception to the rule. Everybody wants to be a somebody who’s fabulous.

Who doesn’t want to be the person who can make their entire living online? Who doesn’t want to be the person who has the healthiest diet for themselves? Who doesn’t want to be the person who’s an extremely talented songwriter and brilliant singer? We call these people the exceptions to the norm. These people are the the people who others look up to, but everybody discourages their friends from becoming. These people are the ones who followed their dreams and made something of themselves.

What do you do when people attempt to curtail your dreams and bring you back “down to earth?” I hope you ignore these people. I hope you ignore all of them. Seriously. Are you honestly going to start believing these people, that you’re dreaming too much or that your head is in the clouds? Why would you deny yourself your very own dreams? Why would you even want to pretend that your aspirations don’t exist?

Letting somebody else tell you that you can’t do something is effectively giving away your power to create your own life. It’s like you’re conceding defeat.

These people may give you reasons that your dreams won’t work. And for a while, you may believe these reasons and you may even make up more reasons that your dreams will never work out in your favor. But behind all of the excuses you imagine up, do you really know the script that’s running through your mind?

“Oh, you’re right, (other human being). I could never do something like that. What was I even thinking? Thank you for helping me realize that! I won’t bother trying any longer.”

Think about that whiney, loser-like script for a moment. Doesn’t it sound utterly ridiculous to you? Somebody says you can’t do something, and you tell them right back “Oh. You’re right! I can’t!” What ever happened to your power to create the life you’ve always dreamed of? Did you suddenly forget that only you have that power and it can’t be given away to anybody else?

Don’t ever for a second doubt in yourself or in your dreams, no matter how big your dreams are or far off in the future you may be dreaming. If you don’t pursue your very own dreams, your life will wind up like everybody else’s. Dull. And pretty soon, you will try to convince everybody else to put away their power and to settle for a dull, dull life, just like yourself.

Be the Exception

The beauty and richness of human life isn’t found through mimicry of other people. It’s from transcending that little snag and becoming somebody who’s totally unique, so unique that their values, beliefs, and accomplishments can’t be classified as normal. It’s then that you become the exception.

Being the exception doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make astute, amazing scientific discoveries or change the pop music landscape for generations to come. It simply means you have to live true to yourself, without succumbing to other’s expectations of what you should become. It means going after your dreams in the face of everybody else, whether those dreams are super small or immensely huge.

It’s tough. Going after your desires is tough to do in a world that’s knocking on your door and reminding you 24/7 to be normal, reminding you that if you don’t act normal something is wrong with you. But you know what? The reward for being the exception is far greater than the reward for being identical to everyone else.

Nobody remembers the average people. Everybody remembers the exceptions. The average people don’t bother trying to touch other people’s lives with their skills, knowledge, and presence. The exceptional people reach out to other people and strive to make a difference in somebody else’s life, every single day.

Which of the two paths will you be choosing today? Will you become the exception?