In preparation for my recent class on Boredom to Brilliance I made a discovery. The discovery is that no matter what it is you create, create. You can’t catch up later. You can only start where you are and move forward. You can’t recover the past now. It is gone.
I was thinking about the importance of being prolific in your creativity. What does that actually mean?
It means to create without the expectation of ‘success’. Sometimes people write that hit tune right out of the gate but most of the time it takes a lot of clumsy attempts to get something that is ‘successful’ in the eyes of the world. After all, did da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa first? Did Beethoven’s 1st Piano Sonata make him the icon he is today?
I had brought a Kentucky Red Clay sculpture, a bust of an arbitrary man who ended up looking like my father’s cousin, to class and told them about my father making it back in the 60s. What I didn’t mention was that it was the only thing he ever sculpted. It is the only thing I’ve ever seen sculpted by native Kentucky Red Clay. It is completely unique. That got me to thinking. What if he had kept on sculpting like that? No telling what he may have come up with? At the time, we all laughed at it, he laughed at it, after all, he just did it “for fun”.
But, imagine if Beethoven had stopped at Piano Sonata #1? What if da Vinci had decided to stop working on art because he just did it because he was interested in it? What if Mozart had never written “The Magic Flute”? There are thousands of such examples.
For myself, I was a singer. The only way I made money was to go out and perform live in opera companies. It is a great life no doubt and I was fortunate to do it. But, it was a ‘one time’ thing. One performance, one payment. No residual at all.
When my wife and I put together song recitals it was my goal to do them on tour, to make a CD of them, and just do as many repeats as possible. We did two of these gargantuan recitals and we did each of them exactly twice. Thats it. Didn’t record it. Didn’t try to publish a CD. Nothing.
You can’t just do something once or twice and expect the world to fall at your feet bringing you gold and silver. It doesn’t work that way.
I wrote the book Boredom to Brilliance. It is the same with it. My publisher designed the book to be used in presentations and to build a brand with it. But no, I got all caught up with all of the demons in my mind telling me I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I couldn’t ask someone to pay for it, nor go out of their way to take the class. When people showed up for it, I figured they were doing it ‘just to be nice’. Which was how I always felt about my singing career as well. It never occurred to me that people might actually “like” and “care” about what I was saying. No! I had to go and make that decision for them! Nice! Brilliant! NOT! Geez!
Now 14 years have passed and I am just having my first class in the USA on Boredom to Brilliance. “What if” I had been doing them all along? What if I had written my other books during this time? What if I had applied myself to conducting or becoming a recording guru?
The past 14 years have been wasted because I didn’t feel good about my work, about myself, and about my abilities. What if Michelangelo, Beethoven, Muhammad Ali…quit?
I could have written 10 books over the past 14 years. None of them would have probably become best sellers but there was never a best seller that existed that was unwritten. You can’t win the race you don’t enter.
And so what if everything you say isn’t worth it? Who cares? There is plenty of stuff out there that is ‘junk’. But, it takes a lot of junk to create one piece of art that is worthy of notice. It will never get noticed if you don’t enter into the race.
Well, I’m turning over a new leaf now. I’m going to get by into production mode, creativity mode, and get out in front of people mode. I am tired of being a spectator. There is only so much ‘filler’ I can stand in my life.
It is a powerful message to be sure. Don’t stop creating.