1 “Realistic” Belief That Keeps Creative Men In Chains

Every day you are beaten:

Beaten by the leaky sink you keep avoiding.

Beaten by the applesauce on the wall you keep not scrubbing off.

Beaten by the dent in the drywall you keep putting off fixing.

You long to conquer mountains, yet every day you are beaten by molehills.

All these little problems… they should be so easily solved. Yet they go on defeating you, day after day, until at last you conclude that you are not a capable man:

If you are this easily defeated, “surely” you do not have what it takes to win the bigger fights: to become your fittest self, to create a business empire, to create works of art that will outlast you.

Hell, you can’t even fix a leaky sink: might as well fuck off and go watch TV.

But you’ve misdiagnosed the problem entirely.

…

One summer day when I went into the workshop, I saw that the plastic gas cans by the tractor were bulging like balloons.

I had left the vents closed, and the heat of the day had brought them near to the point of bursting.

You may feel your life is at risk of imploding from outside pressures and problems.

In fact, the true risk is not of implosion but EXPLOSION. Your pent genius is rotting and fermenting inside you with nowhere to go, your un-channelled powers and abilities threatening to burst the case.

You are a pair of creational blue balls, swollen with unspent seeds and unshouldered mantles.

Your reactive, retreating project of “problem minimization” is broken:

It is not LESS problems you need, but BETTER ones.

You’re not “overwhelmed”: you are profoundly UNDERWHELMED.

You are restless because you’ve taken yourself out of play on false pretense… cut yourself off from the very problems that will save you.

This growing discontent is a warning: a message to stop dissipating your powers in low-level problem solving, to lift your aim and seek better, higher-order problems: ones more lucrative, more alluring… ones better suited to your highest gifts.

You are the student when you should be the teacher.

You are the employee when you should be the owner.

You are the court jester when you should be the king.

I know what you’re thinking: you can’t imagine how you would find the courage, the heart, the strength to take a single step, never mind the entire journey.

But you forget the magic of man:

You forget our great paradox: we know true rest ONLY when we are doing the highest work we are capable of.

Anything less, and your restless, un-fed genius will chew itself to pieces.

You and your power have been playing a long, workless game of “you first’:

Over and over, you’ve asked your power to manifest in a vacuum… asked it to defy the laws of nature and show up BEFORE and not after you’ve taken the first, triggering step.

So quit this dead game of “problem elimination”:

Pick the project that makes your hands shake… the one you’ve been “saving yourself for”… the one of which you’ve thought “if only I had the drive to take this one on.”

And then, simply begin.

Surrender, finally to the unreasonable pursuit.

You’ll never be ready: you’ll never have what you need to begin.

That is the point:

It is the ACTION that ushers the requisite.

It is the JOURNEY that creates the path.