Will this work???

So what do we really know about our gifts?  Can we really prove that we have them?   If so, how?  What’s the evidence?  Is their existence obvious primarily by how they impress others?

These are natural questions.  But they only scratch the surface of the real, underlying question: do I have what it takes to “win” people over?  Am I good “enough” to get the respect and ideally (especially the ones with resources), their support?

Will this work?

It’s very easy to fall prey to this version of scarcity mentality.  It goes something like this: Only a relative few people hold the resources I need and there is no way to get at them unelss I play their games.

It’s subtle, but do you see what’s happening?  The attention is all on the supposed resources we need, NOT on what we are creating.

People in this kind of scarcity forget the resources are for creating!  And in thinking so much about resources they fail to ask whether they really even need them in the first place.  Do resources come first?  Or do they naturally follow those willing to create with whatever they arlready have?  *YouTube celebs and success stories remind us creators can win by focusing on what they do best, even on the cheap.

The point is to create; and to share what you create with others.  Eventually, there are costs to doing that (obviously), but keeping that goal at the center is key.  It puts the artist in charge.  Thinking about the money will put someone else in charge.     

It does NOT mean we decrease the size of our goals, in fact the opposite.  Keep goals big, bigger than currently makes sense.  Get to that edge where the path ends.  Look out over that beautiful chasmic place.  Breathe it in.  See it.  All of it.

Plans don’t need to be elaborate.  They need only give us our next step.  What is more important than plans are goals, outcomes, vision statements that describe the incredible view we are seeing.

Setting goals allows us to wrestle with our deep-seated fears. “Who are you to be thinking like this?”  “Do you really think you can do this?

These unsettling objections help us deal with another underlying question, the one of origin.

Did your desire to create come as a result of some intense planning session (that you could take credit for) OR out of the candid freedom of your heart to simply create what it wants (which you only discovered was already in there)?

If we can establish the desire was already there, we have the perfect excuse to excavate it.  If we did not put it there, then it was wired in at birth, or even before.  The gifts are distinctly mine.  Inherently part of me.

That also means, by the way, I am not at liberty to take them out.  These dreams must be dealt with.

Besides that, life is too short.  We are here for so little.  We really don’t have time for all this going back and forth.  Eventually we either go for it or we don’t.

Some waste so much precious time contemplating what they already know.  Not children though.  They get lost in their own curiosity.  They don’t get stuck considering endless options.  They are mindlessly free to execute, to do what they love.

Now, unfortunately, life happens; and at some point we run into ourselves.  Our existence forces itselft upon us.  We have to wrestle with such questions as they arise.

Still, loose not the example of the enthralled child.  Be curious.  Find wonder.  Do the thing that lights you up.  Shine bright like a diamond :-).  Mind no one else.  This could be your last time to create.  Get to it!