Do you want this more than the heartbreak you’re gonna have to go through to get it?
Balancing out heartbreak with desire is the high wire act every artist (or any other type of dreamer) must walk.
And this is why is so scary to want something big…and to say it out loud. The odds, reality, norms, and some or all of your family aren’t in your favor. It’s heartbreaking. But do you want it anyway?
Here’s how you know you’re on to something scary and important…
The things that never distract you start distracting you.
You’ve got to sit down and finish writing and you find yourself enthusiastically organizing the shoes by the back door.
You’ve got to send the big invoice but you end up scrolling the social media pages of the pals from your third grade baseball team.
You’ve got to make the big phone call and realize your dishwasher doesn’t do a good enough job with the silverware and it needs to be rewashed and shined by hand.
When we’re onto something good it’s usually a little scary. When it’s scary there is part of us that wants to do anything but the scary thing. So we fill the time anything else.
The shoes and the baseball pals and the silverware will all get taken care of later.
Get back to work.
We tend to think too much or too little of our efforts…
‘I’m going to be as big as the Beatles’
Can quickly turn into…
‘I suck at music’
Most likely neither are true.
At certain critical moments in life it helps to have a few trusted people in your life to ask what they think. Is this any good? Should I keep giving time and energy to this? Is my outlook reasonable? What do you see that I’m not seeing?
It’s hard to ask those questions but it’s perhaps even harder to have already cultivated those trusted relationships that you can lean on when you need to ask the questions.
I’ve been hearing that since I was a kid.
When the newest fastest most powerful computer comes out it’s more than enough to handle everything.
Then people make cool things that use up all the latest power and speed…and then demand just a little bit more.
If you want to do the exact same things forever that you’re doing today, you probably have the last computer you’ll ever need.
If you want to make new things in a new way, you’ll be buying new computers forever.
»» The metaphor holds up for many different sets of tools we use and develop.
If you want to be a great writer you have to start off as a bad writer.
After figuring out the basics, and going from zero writing to some writing, you grow to be a mediocre writer.
Then you sit down to write and you realize you’re mediocre and you’re going to have to put in a lot of effort if you want to be great.
It’s an incredibly heavy lift of commitment, learning, refining and risking if you actually want to get great. And there are no guarantees. And you’ll doubt yourself a lot along the way…probably every day. And the money may or may not come.
But being great at a craft, and pursing greatness in a craft, is one of life’s greatest gifts.
There’s an old Ben Folds lyric that goes, ‘everywhere I go, damn, there I am’.
That’s the thing about getting everything you hoped for. You go with you.
Achieving the success you always wanted and becoming the person you always wanted to be don’t often go hand in hand.
Both are worth pursuing but as long as you get the second one, the first one will work itself out.