What is stopping you now?
An artist friend posted this quote today and it gave me a wake up call:
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part & a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you & something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary & somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
-Chuck Close (photographer and painter)
It made me think about my hesitation on a couple of big projects – am I waiting to “feel the right way,” to work on them – to be in the right zone, so to say? What if working on them could flip me into the zone? What if the zone were not necessary for my success?
This goes back to what I wrote in November about fear of failure and the road rising to meet your feet:
Can you look forward to failure, just a little bit, as you get your hands really dirty in the stuff of life, rather than staying clean and small and failure-free, but having missed your big messy calling?
But it comes at it at another angle – in addition to perfectionism, another way we avoid is waiting for inspiration. How about we Do It Anyway?
As you set ambitious goals for yourself – envisioning your success as an unavoidable event – include “doing it anyway” in your vision.
If this isn’t making you mildly uncomfortable – as I felt when reading Chuck Close’s quote and seeing myself reflected in it – here’s something Bob Proctor said that got me excited and scared (in the best kind of way):
Set a goal to achieve something that is so big, so exhilarating that it excites you and scares you at the same time. It must be a goal that is so appealing, so much in line with your spiritual core, that you can’t get it out of your mind. If you do not get chills when you set a goal, your not setting big enough goals.
What if you are denying the world your unique gift because of your perfectionism, self-doubt, or staying in your comfort zone?
Can you declare your daring goal, be scared, and do it anyway?
- Contributed by Karali Pitzele
Also highly recommend Seth Godin’s new book “The Icarus Deception” on this topic!
Love this and feel it is very true. Especially as it bears on artists who work from their own unconscious. There is no access to that zone except through the process of digging and discovery. The fear isn’t so much of failure as it is the nature of the encounter with the unconscious itself and the myths we have lived with about it being the house of the repressed. The way to the unconscious is not the way of the ego, and we know the ego, whatever that is, likes to know ahead of time that everything is going to be copacetic