A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before anyone else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.

William James, The Will to Believe

William James, a philosopher from the American pragmatist tradition, wrote “The Will to Believe” in 1896 in response to another philosopher’s claim that we should suspend belief until we have enough evidence to justify the belief. James argued that on the important things in life, suspending belief prevents the world from becoming the way we want it to be.

In my younger days, I was very harsh on James’ thesis. As I’ve matured a bit, I see that there’s a lot of truth to it. For instance, have you ever noticed that when you acted as if people were trustworthy and helpful, they became trustworthy and helpful? Were you to have acted in ways that signaled you didn’t trust them, they would’ve change their behaviors accordingly. Your beliefs and actions had a large role in making the state of affairs match them.

My clients are often scared to talk to me about their ideas because they’re scared they’re not good and aren’t worth pursuing. As a result of their beliefs and actions, their ideas never see the light of day where we can improve upon them or just see how good they were in the first place. They come in wanting some sort of proof that their ideas are worthwhile before they talk about them without realizing that it’s the withholding of the idea that kills it.

Because people are afraid of failing and believe and act as if they will fail, they end up scripting reality to match their beliefs. Hence the important point of learning to become comfortable with failures and mistakes is that you’re less likely, in the end, to make the biggest mistake: to remain steady, dependable, and run-of-the mill. Being remarkable is risky and brings its share of mistakes, but the bigger risk is to sit on the sidelines waiting for the world to give you your chance.

I’m not at all saying that there’s some spooky or weird force out in the world that makes the world match your intentions and actions. What I’m saying is that in the social but isolated world we live in, our intentions, energy, and actions change the social environment around us. People want to be a part of something, they want to be excited, but they’re waiting for somebody else to be the catalyst for change. Their time, they think, will come when the world is ready for them. So they wait.

The world is ready for you today. We want to see the best parts of you, and we want you to share the value you bring to the world. Sure, we’re scared to tell you that, or we’re busy, or lost in our own worlds, but when you show up, we’re ready for you. It’s the way we are.

But if you’re waiting for proof of this before you act, you’ll never get it. Proof comes afterwards.

So, what would you do differently if you believed that the world would stand up with you?

I take it that a few people thought the point of my last post was to suggest that people should quit their jobs. Perhaps it’s the point in which I come out and recommend that everyone who doesn’t work for themselves is living a low quality life. Because that’s exactly the type of thing that I would say.

As a case in point, I’ll share a comment I got on that post from lavendula13 at Reddit:

Stupid, self-serving, egocentric cock rot. Most of us don’t have a choice, asshat.

I love this comment for several reasons. One, I absolutely love the term “asshat.” Two, I love the self-assuredness of his lack of a choice in the matter. Third, I love that he took the time to see how this train of thought would play out. This is an absolutely wonderful comment that’s a testament to the quality of commenters on the Internet.

Sure, there are some elements to the questions that may make you question the suitability of your current job. If it helps you get out of a bad situation, great. But I have a larger goal: I want to change the way you think about your work and your play. I want to give you a new paradigm that I hope will clear some things up and empower you to do more of those awesome things that you do. Continue reading →

Are you in the right line of work? Should you be doing something else? Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do you get to do your work, or do you have to do your work?
2. If you were guaranteed your current standard of living no matter what you did, would you still do what you’re doing?
3. True or false: When you think about what you do, are you dreaming or dreading?
4. Who decides when you work: you or your organization?
5. Do you get through your day or are days a chance to advance your goals and projects?
6. True or false: If you stopped liking what you’re doing, you would quit.
7. Does your productivity keep you working or does it help you maintain productive motion?
8. Do you like to talk about what you do, or would you rather people not ask about it?
9. True or false: What you’re doing today helps build skills and achievements that help will help you do what you want to do 6 months to a year from now?
10. Does doing what you do drain your energy or renew you?
11. Do you make your To Do list or does somebody else?
12. True or false: You would be proud if someone you loved did what you’re doing.
13. You get up early or stay late because…1) you want to work on the project or 2) you want to get the project done.
14. When you say what you do, do you say “I am a (_____) or I (_____). Example: I am a painter vs. I paint.
15. Would you do what you’re doing if you weren’t getting paid for it?

I recognize that some of the questions seem the same, but sometimes asking the question differently yields different answers. Please share some of your answers or thoughts if you’re up for it.

Spoiler Alert!: If you find yourself seriously stuck in the middle on some of these questions, stay tuned! I’ll be talking about a perspective next week that may help you understand your fence-sitting and show why you’re right to be sitting there.

I’m not feeling well today and was originally going to take the day off from posting, but then I realized it was Blog Action Day and the topic is Poverty. Given that this is one of my pet issues, I refuse to pass this opportunity by. I apologize that the post is going to be rehashed material from some of the courses I’ve taught.

That said, here’s a way to understand world poverty: 50,000 people die of poverty-related causes every day, including 34,000 children under the age of five. Since numbers don’t really do justice, here’s a picture: imagine that roughly every two minutes, a school bus full of children crashes, instantly killing every one of the children on board. Or another: roughly every second three seconds, 1 child dies from poverty-related causes. Lastly: roughly 17 times the amount of people lost during 9/11 die every day to poverty-related causes.

Take a second to think about that. Continue reading →

Here’s the deal: You’re smart. You’re creative. You know what you’re doing.

But you’re scared as hell of failing and making mistakes. Maybe it’s because you’ve been so damned good at whatever you’ve done for your whole life. Maybe it’s because you quit a good thing to pick up something risky. Maybe it’s because you’re scared of what happens when you don’t fail.

I get that. I do. I could write all day about how you need to embrace failure and mistakes before you can really unleash your creative potential, but who am I to tell you this? So I’ve enlisted the help of a few thousand years worth of creatives to help me out:

If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.
-Thomas A. Edison (1847 - 1931), Encyclopaedia Britannica

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit…I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
-Ernest Hemingway

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
-Joseph Chilton Pearce

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.
-W. E. Gladstone

To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.
-Plutarch (46 AD - 120 AD)

The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
-E. J. Phelps

Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.
-Dale E. Turner

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
-Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
- Steve Jobs (1955 - )

If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.
-Frank Wilczek (1951 - )

If I had my life to live over… I’d dare to make more mistakes next time.
-Nadine Stair

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
-James Joyce (1882 - 1941)

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
-Scott Adams (1957 - ), ‘The Dilbert Principle’

To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all.
-Peter McWilliams, Life 101

If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
-Tallulah Bankhead (1903 - 1968)

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
-George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

You cannot measure a man by his failures. You must know what use he makes of them. What did they mean to him. What did he get out of them.
-Orison Swett Marden (1850 - 1924)

If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.
-Mary Pickford (1893 - 1979)

Don’t be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
-John Keats (1795 - 1821)

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
-Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919)

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t as all. You can be discouraged by failure - or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that’s where you will find success.
-Thomas J. Watson

The bottomline: I’d tell you to get over your fear of failure and mistakes, but it’s natural to feel that way. I’m asking you to understand that failure and mistakes are part and parcel of greatness. You can either let fear of failure and mistakes cripple you and keep you stuck, or you can join the rest of the successes throughout history and rack up a good tab of failures and mistakes while you’re at it. Your call.

(Note: I have a large project that I’m completing this week, and one of three things will happen: 1) I’ll post a lot because I’m really productive, 2) I’ll post more snippets of ideas because I want to get them out and fill them in later, or 3) I’ll only have another post or two between now and next Wednesday. Either way it goes, I appreciate you bearing with me!)

One thing we often forget when we make new commitments is that time is only one of the various factors to consider. Because we’ve been taught to think about time quantitatively rather than qualitatively, we mistakenly assume that we can handle more because a proposed commitment will “only take a few hours a week.”

The reality is much different when you’re thinking about creative work because it’s not just about the amount of hours it’ll take to get the project done. It’s about the type of work it’ll take to get the work done.

Creative work doesn’t happen in steady slices - it comes in very intense bursts followed by slices of time in which you can’t do that type of work. Let’s make this more tangible: I know that on a given day, I may have three or four creative blocks of about 90 to 120 minutes. These chunks of time are when I actually do the things that bring money in.

I’ll pause here and talk about metaprojects and their relation to time and creativity. Continue reading →

Amy at Quiet Rebel Writer just posted the our interview from last week. The interview covers “writing, creativity, rule-breaking, and multi-year plans.”

I’m really honored to be interviewed by such a great writer and I’d really appreciate it if you would run over and check it out. Warning: it’s far too easy to get stuck for hours over there even though she moved Word Porn off site.

Don’t know who the QRW is? To put is bluntly, she’s one of the rising stars in the writing niche in the blogosphere. Seriously - after only being on the scene for a few months, her blog ended up in a competition against the likes of Copyblogger and Men With Pens. Just being included in such a list after only a few months should say enough about her caliber as a writer and blogger.

On a personal note, a lot of the reason this blog is here is due to Amy’s support and encouragement. She’s been cool enough to help me both on and off the page, and she was the one who helped me brainstorm the new domain. If you love it, you have her to thank; if you don’t, it’s all my fault.

Are you increasing signal or adding noise in your communication with other people?

Most of the time you hear people complaining about the noise they get from other people, whether it’s junk mail, spam, inane phone calls, water cooler emails, or that chain mail that’s been forwarded forty-seven times. Very rarely do we admit that we are sources of noise, as well.

This recently struck home when a friend of mine starting using AwayFind. AwayFind is an excellent service that auto-responds to email messages while giving people a link that they can use to get to you if you really needed to. I’m sure Jared will come over and explain it better, but it’s really a good service that I really don’t need given my manageable email traffic levels - yet this post is not really about AwayFind.

It’s about how being confronted with the reminder that my friend’s time was valuable that changed the way I thought about my correspondence with her. I started reflecting on how many of the messages I sent to her were water-cooler style chatter. The realization struck me: I was adding noise. Continue reading →

We are what we repeatedly do.
-Aristotle

I used to just think about this quote in the positive way, such as “if I continue to write, then I am a writer.” It’s helped me get through many self-defeating ideas about what I can and can’t do, especially in regards to what I’ve been taught how to do and what I’ve learned on my own. In that sense, it’s very empowering.

But here recently I’ve started thinking about the dark side of that principle as it pertains to the activities that I say I do and the activities that I actually do. Let’s take email, for instance. Given the requirements of my full-time job, I spent a large portion of my days doing email correspondence. At the end of the day, I’d recount what I did that day and it was “push email.”

Other days, I licked envelopes and hung posters. You do these things to get a job done when you’re short-staffed and handed a messy project, but at the same time, a lot of what I’ve been doing does not match my job description.

(Sidebar: Part of the problem is that I’m filling a new position that really has at least three distinct components. My spidey-sense went off when I was interviewed and it became clear to me that they really didn’t know what all the job will entail.)

It’s not at all unusual for our job descriptions to be a lot different than what we actually do. That’s not the real point here. The real point is that when I talk with people about productivity, creativity, and goal actualization, there’s a large chasm between what they say they’re doing and what they’re actually doing.

Our Technological Time-Fillers

Let’s return to email. Many creatives are swamped in their Inbox and spend hours of their days checking, shuffling, categorizing, and monkeying around with email. When meetings are sandwiched between email and sandwiches, the net result is that, at the end of the day, the creative hasn’t actually created anything except for email messages.

There’s nothing wrong with email, and by now it’s a critical part of the way we work. But we have to realize at some point that if we’re spending our days shuffling email, we’re not writers, designers, artists, and such - we’re customer service agents.

Twitter is much the same way. I love Twitter, but at some point we all have to realize that if we’re spending our day tweeting, we’re not creatives - we’re Tweeters.

I can hear the resounding disagreement. Some of you are saying “But Twitter and email is how I network, market, build clients, and connect with friends!” I understand - I do the same thing. But we have to be honest with ourselves about this one. Sometimes we’re legitimately there marketing, networking, and connecting with people. A lot of times, we’re just there because we’re avoiding doing something else. (Or to show that we’re part of that elite group who has the type of position that we can hang out all day, but that’s a completely different post.)

The Relationship Between Time and Relationships

One of the things people are most often concerned about is their relationships to others. We want to be good parents, friends, lovers, and spouses and a good portion of what makes us who we are is made up by these very powerful bonds. Yet, when it comes to the time we actually invest in these relationships, it falls short of the other things we do (like work and play).

The answer is simple in theory and hard in practice. Meaningful relationships take time in one shape or the other, whether it’s in weekly emails, phone calls, bar meets, or soccer games. The hard part is making time for these things in our hectic, busy lives.

The main point here is that trying to hold your end of the relationship in thoughts and wishes is pointless - it takes doing. Doing takes time. So rather than worrying and thinking about your relationship with someone, pick up the phone or shoot them an email. Go from there and invest time in the relationship.

The Present of the Present

Our histories only take us so far. Each day is a new day to reassert your being, not by intention and wishing, but by action. We create or reinforce habits that lead either to our thriving or not actualizing our potential each day.

I say this because many of us forget that, while we can only really mark progress through weeks and months, the trenches of our development and identity is in the minutes that make up each day. The hours that are lost on the activities that aren’t instrumental to becoming the person we want to be or gained by consciously redirecting those loose minutes into purposive motion make the difference between us treading water with our goals and us actually pushing the ball forward.

The historical fascination tends to point to men and women who, in a moment, defined themselves through virtue or folly. The reality is much more powerful: the great people, known and unknown, familiar and foreign, became great through momentary choices throughout a lifetime.

But the reality is also much more frightening, for:

What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do.
-Aristotle

Through your actions, what are you becoming in this moment on this day?

“I’m not creative.”
“I wish I could be more creative, but I don’t have it in me.”
“Why are some people creative and others aren’t?”

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard those statements or questions…

The truth is almost everyone has creative potential. What separates good creatives (or dormant creatives that get lucky) is that they’ve learned how to walk through the creative process. The irony is that most of them don’t know that there is a documented process, yet they’ve developed habits and processes that allow them to walk through the process. On some brute level, they understand the process, though they don’t know how the process works.

A large part of the problem is that there is an air of mystery and mysticism around the creative process. Because people assume and reinforce the idea that some have creative potential and others don’t, those that do harness their potential and work through the process become all the more “different.” And because so few of us see that leveraging our creativity is inextricably linked to how we make money, we let our creative process devolve into a daily crap shoot.

So, let’s take a few minutes and demystify the creative process. Continue reading →