Dan ShorerBecome the person your were meant to be

Winning the Creativity war

Table of ContentsIntroduction.................................................................................................................4The life you were supposed to live.....................................................................................................................5

Book One.....................................................................................................................7

Defining the Enemy......................................................................................................7When can you expect Resistance.........................................................................................................................8Characteristics of Resistance.................................................................................................................................9Resistance is Invisible............................................................................................................................................10Resistance is within................................................................................................................................................11Resistance is Insidious...........................................................................................................................................12Resistance is Impersonal......................................................................................................................................13Resistance is choosy...............................................................................................................................................14Resistance doesn’t take prisoners....................................................................................................................15Resistance is Fueled by Fear...............................................................................................................................16Resistance only blocks you when you aim high.........................................................................................17The closer you are to the finish line, the more powerful is Resistance............................................18Resistance and the drama queen......................................................................................................................19Resistance and Unhappiness..............................................................................................................................20Resistance and Rationalization..........................................................................................................................21

Resistance can be beaten..................................................................................................................................... 22

Part Two.....................................................................................................................23

It’s time to win!..........................................................................................................23Winning the war of creativity, reclaiming your mind..............................................................................25The Warzone..............................................................................................................................................................26The champion and the “also ran”......................................................................................................................27Lovers or winners?..................................................................................................................................................28Only when the muse strikes................................................................................................................................29A new day, a new battle.........................................................................................................................................30Fake it till you make it............................................................................................................................................31Love your misery, but don’t share it................................................................................................................32Love the game, love the benefits.......................................................................................................................33Be patient.....................................................................................................................................................................34Art and craft............................................................................................................................................................... 35The champion acts in the face of fear..............................................................................................................36No excuses...................................................................................................................................................................37A champion plays it as it lays..............................................................................................................................38The terrorist within................................................................................................................................................ 39Mastering technique...............................................................................................................................................40The champion is never above learning..........................................................................................................41You are not your creative persona, you employ it.....................................................................................42Failure is not personal, and neither is success............................................................................................43Art is born of humiliation W.H. Auden...........................................................................................................44A Champion reinvents himself...........................................................................................................................45Incorporate yourself...............................................................................................................................................46

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No Mystery..................................................................................................................................................................47

Book 3........................................................................................................................48

The art of the start.....................................................................................................48Starting is magic....................................................................................................................................................... 50Ego and Self................................................................................................................................................................ 51Creativity and territory.........................................................................................................................................52The supreme virtue.................................................................................................................................................53Portrait of the artist as a territorial creative...............................................................................................54Of promises.................................................................................................................................................................55

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IntroductionSo you tried writing, and decided that Pushkin did it better. So why bother, Right?So you sat looking at that blank canvas for hours, dropped some color on it, stepped back and - heck, Picasso at 8 could and did better. So why bother, right?You don't write like Pound, or Shelley, or Nâzım Hikmet, or Saul Bellow. Neither did any one of those, write like anyone else. They tried hard not to.Creativity is your answer to the inner quest that wishes to be distinguished, not distinct.Never try to find yourself in the works of others, shape your creativity through your own words, your own paintings, your own vision.Don't listen to academics, policy-makers or art- educators who feel the need to deploy a range of claims about creativity yet all they are doing is being creative about creativity, trying to convince you that they know better, that you should shy away and shut up.Well, don’t shut up!Don’t abide by any one’s opinion about the Elysian Fields where only the gifted and talented are allowed to roam. Do you know that some twenty publishers refused John Carver’s short stories?Do you know that Beethoven was booed and whistled at the premiere of the Fifth?Just allow yourself to be yourself, distil your senses until they shine more than any sun, allow your vision to reflect your inner reality into lines, colors, rhymes, rhythms, or just hums…Don't hold back. Let loose your creativity – You have it. We all do.I remember my son's first complete sentence (he was 30 months old): “Look, Dad, the sun is going to sleep and covers itself with clouds.” Many years of schooling, uprooted that wonderful creator.A son of a friend, when asked why he jumps over water puddles, answered: “because they eat up the tallest buildings'”Never mind what you said as a toddler, blank out the years of demagogic education that always knew better than you what was important; allow that miraculous mirror - your dynamic mind -- to reflect what it sees hidden.Don't wait until life gets out of the way. Just do it! Let go, share your creative self through your poetry, your art, your photography or in any other form.

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The life you were supposed to live.

I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.' Muhammad Ali

We all have two lives: the one we live and the one we were supposed to live. Between the two stand our arch-foe Resistance.

Remember that treadmill you bought only to see it turn into a cloth hanger? Resistance.Remember the diet you started and quit? Resistance.Remember your New Year resolutions, and here it is September? Resistance.Remember you promised to crusade for the planet? Resistance.

Were you ever visited late at night by that person you were meant to be? The person who is carrying out the work you were meant to accomplish, realizing the potential that was yours to fulfill?

Are you a writer who doesn’t write?Are you an entrepreneur who doesn’t start his dream-venture?Do you have a virtual box with all your dream stacked up and collecting dust?

Then Resistance has visited you too.

The good news is, you are not alone. Resistance is paying constant visits to millions of people. The bad news is, Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet.Resistance is a plague. It brings more unhappiness than poverty, unrequited love, disease, or even erectile dysfunction.

You have been endowed by your unique Genius (In ancient Rome, the genius was the guiding spirit or tutelary deity of a person). Our genius is that inner compass that guides you to your calling. A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; An entrepreneur launch his start-up with his genius. Your genius is where your soul sits. It’s the sun that rises every morning of your life.

Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is Resistance.

Close your eyes and listen to your soul calling you to reach out and realize your potential. Resistance puts up all its potent arsenal to hush that call up.In Akira Kurasawa’s movie Ikiru, Mr. Watanabe suddenly finds that he has terminal cancer. He vows to make his final days meaningful. His attempts to communicate his anguish to his son and daughter-in-law lead only to heartbreak. Finally, inspired by an unselfish co-worker, he turns his efforts to bringing happiness to others by building a playground in a dreary slum neighborhood. When the park is finally completed, he is able to face death with peaceful acceptance. If it were a western movie, the cancer would have gone into remission.

Do we have to stare death in the face to make us stand up and confront Resistance?

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If Resistance were to be eliminated by some magic wand, shrinks would be out of business, prisons would stand empty, the alcohol and tobacco industries would collapse, drug dealers will go back to grow oranges, domestic abuse would become extinct, as would addiction, obesity, migraines, and dandruff.

I am sure that right at this point, there is a small voice piping up within you, telling you as it has ten thousand times before, to fulfill your calling, the one that was assigned to you and to no one else. Yet, unless I am completely mistaken, you’re no closer to taking action on it than you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. Show Resistance the smallest weakness and it’ll burry you.

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Book One

Defining the Enemy“Your enemy can be your best teacher” Dalai Lama.

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When can you expect Resistance

Here is a short chaotic list that tells you when you are likely to get an unannounced visit by Resistance:

1. You are pursuing a calling in writing, painting, music, film, dance, or any creative art, no matter how marginal.

2. You are about to launch an entrepreneurial venture, for profit or otherwise.3. You are about to start a diet.4. You undertake a program designed to overcome an addiction.5. You think about furthering your education.6. You have decided to change a pattern of thought within yourself.7. You have decided to participate in a charity you strongly believe in.8. You decide to get married.9. You decide to get divorced.10. You decide to take a resolute stand in the face of adversity.

Any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health or integrity, will have Resistance all over you. If it’s important to your inner self to do it, it’s as important for Resistance to stop you.

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Characteristics of Resistance“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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Resistance is InvisibleYou can’t see, touch, hear or smell Resistance. You can only feel it. It’s an energy that radiates from a work-in-potential. It aims to distract us, and prevent us form doing our work.

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Resistance is withinResistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance resides in and arises from within. Resistance is the enemy within.

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Resistance is InsidiousResistance will tell you anything to keep you away from your work. It will reason with you like a lawyer or will put a ticking bomb in front of your face. Resistance has no conscience. Like a trained politician, it will pledge anything to get your trust, then double-cross you. Resistance is always lying.

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Resistance is ImpersonalResistance is not out to get you personally. It couldn’t care less about who you are. Resistance is a force of nature. You don’t expect the rain to fall on you exclusively, the night to fall on you and nobody else but you. Resistance acts objectively.

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Resistance is choosy. Resistance can be used as a compass. You can navigate by Resistance. The more important a call or action is to you, to the core of your being, the more Resistance you’ll feel toward pursuing it.

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Resistance doesn’t take prisoners.Resistance isn’t out to maim, wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill. It targets your genius, your soul or whatever you want to call that unique denominator that was given to you and to no one else; that special gift that makes you whole, and different, and creative, and YOU!

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Resistance is Fueled by FearResistance is a drone; it has no strength of its own. You feed it with the power of your fear. Master that fear and you conquer Resistance.

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Resistance only blocks you when you aim highIf you’re serving a higher purpose (let’s say, working for peace in the middle east, or for saving animals in danger of extinction, or for the Mother Teresa Foundation), and you are thinking of bolting to launch a career in telemarketing, Resistance will give you a free pass. Maybe even throw in a lottery win to pay for your trip. But if you think of giving up telemarketing and pursue a calling in the art, or launch an innovative enterprise that will eliminate illiteracy – Resistance is there to stop you.

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The closer you are to the finish line, the more powerful is Resistance John Steinbeck hated to get close to finishing a book. He wrote: “To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.” It was Resistance that whispered those words in his ears. But Steinbeck was a professional. A professional knows that every step in the project, takes energy and resilience. A professional never spends all her resilience. She always keeps some for later. It’s resilience that conquers Resistance. Keep it in mind.

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Resistance and the drama queenCreating a soap opera in our lives is a sure sign that Resistance is in residence. Why travel the world to conquer the Everest if you can get as much attention by bringing home a boyfriend with a prison record? Trouble call for compassion, and compassion is always alert to Resistance’s knocking on the door. Dad get s drunk, Mom joins an Ashram, Rebecca comes to synagogue with a tattoo depicting Jesus and Muhammad kissing passionately, and little John send an SMS from parts unknown announcing he has joined the Foreign Legion. And it works – Nobody get a damn thing done. Ill health is trouble. Alcoholism and drug abuse is trouble. Compulsive screwing up is trouble. Benign foibles like jealousy, chronic lateness, blasting techno music from your car speaker at 2:00 am is trouble. Anything that draws attention through pain-free or artificial means is trouble. Resistance is rejoicing. Her job is done.

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Resistance and UnhappinessResistance is here. How do we know it? Fears, unhappiness. A low-grade misery veils over everything. We feel restless, bored, unwanted. We can’t get no satisfaction. We feel unspecified guilt. We want to go back to bed; we want to get up and party. We feel unloved and unlovable. We hate our lives. We hate ourselves. At this point Resistance throws the inauguration party. At this point vices kick in. Dope, adultery, web surfing, a shopping spree. Nothing works.Resistance is now about to become clinical. Depression sets in. Aggression. Dysfunction. And what makes it so tricky is that we live in a consumer culture that’s acutely aware of this unhappiness and has massed al its profit-seeking artillery to exploit it. You must enact your own internal revolution. Erupt into a disruptive insurrection. Grab onto your skills, lower your head and free yourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture Resistance begets unhappiness, that begets quest and thirst, that beget slavery to consumerism. Don’t forget that You Are Creative and that there is a club that will help you overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, and all the other mesmerizing distractions that have been hypnotizing us from the cradle. Join the club and unplug yourself from the grid of recognizing that you’ll never cure your restlessness by contributing your disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshitl.com, but only by doing your work.

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Resistance and RationalizationRationalization is a high-ranking general in Resistance’s army. Its job is to keep you from feeling the shame you would feel if you truly faced what a coward you are for not doing your work. General Rationalization has a Lieutenant General. His own sidekick. It’s the part of our psyche that actually believes what rationalization tells us.

It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s quite another to believe it.

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Resistance can be beaten

If Resistance couldn’t be beaten, there would be no Fifth Symphony, no Hamlet, no Duomo in Milan, no David in Florence. Defeating Resistance is painful, long and exhausting. It’s like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible, and yet – women have been pulling it off successfully for over fifty million years.

So now we come to the war itself. The war of creativity and the tactics you need to win it.

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Book Two

It’s time to win!

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A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning.

Billie Jean KingAmerican former World No. 1 professional tennis player.

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Winning the war of creativity, reclaiming your mind.

Sometimes it seems like your mind just runs wild with abandon. And to make matters worse, it seems like everyone and everything around you is constantly fighting for your attention.So, how do you win the battle for your mindset, without losing the war of creativity?

Did you know there is a battle being waged for your mind? It’s an inner creative war — a war of nerves and neurons — and you’re the leader of the insurgent force trying to create your life’s work.

If you want to win, you’ll need to understand: the battlefield on which you fight the enemy forces arrayed against you trying to destroy your creative vision how to fight an unconventional war against these forces so you can start,

finish and ship your great project.

In other words, you must learn to fight like a Brain Map Insurgent.

A warning: This war is a lifetime of creative battles. There are no shortcuts, tricks, or magical genies. Only you can do the hard, creative work, day in and day out, to create your life’s work.

You may (and probably will) experience obstacles, setbacks, and failure.

Still here?

Good. Let’s get started.

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The WarzoneYour brain is composed of billions of neurons.These neurons form complex networks where they send signals back and forth to communicate important information. They’re responsible for how the brain functions, how we experience touch, taste, and other senses, and — most importantly — how we experience pain and pleasure.

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The champion and the “also ran”Aspiring achievers defeated by Resistance and its army of bad habits share one trait. They believe in the epitaph coined by the Baron de Coubertin, who posited the important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. Noble, but wrong. The important thing in life is triumph, struggle is one of the ways to get there. The good Baron also thought that the Greek participants in the ancient Olympic games were amateurs. Wrong again. They were professionals! De Coubertin’s romantic view "L'important c'est de participer" (participation is all that counts), is at odds with the ideals of the Greeks. The Apostle Paul, writing in the first century to Christians in the city of Corinth where the Isthmian Games were held, reflects this in his writings when he says, "Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize", (1 Corinthians 9:24).The challenge in becoming the best you can be is much greater than winning at the Olympics – In life you compete against yourself and against the army of bad habits! So if you are not prepared to win, get out of the race!Still there?Great!

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Lovers or winners?The word amateur stems from the Latin root “amare” meaning “to love”. The conventional interpretation is that the amateur pursues his calling out of love, while the professional does it for money. Right?Wrong!The whole concept of amateurs, and dilettantes reflect a snobbish elitist notion – he who dedicated his free time – as abundant as it might be – to the finer things in life like art, sports etc. The real vocation of the amateurs lies elsewhere. Here is where you have to make a call: Do you have more important things in life than fulfillment of your inner self? If yess, dedicate your time and energy to that other more important issue. Just remember that Resistance and the army of bad habits are always trying to trick you into wrong choices. One simple question to ask yourself: is my job a vocation? If the answer is no, define your real vocation and strive to become a champion in that vocation. Use your “job”, use your resources, your talent, and fun and games to break the wall of indulgence that Resistance has built around you.

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Only when the muse strikes

A journalist once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

That’s a professional. That’s a champion.

Maugham set his muse to a tight and precise schedule. He understood that in performing the mundane physical act of sitting down to work, he sets in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that calls inspiration to its post of duty, and the Muse, the Genius, or the writing hand of the champion, whatever you prefer calling it, synchronize their watch with his.

Operation “You Are Creative” is back on track.

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A new day, a new battle

Yesterday was a good day. You set down with all the right intentions. You spent the scheduled time on your book, your enterprise, your relationship. You acted like the champion you really are.

And yet, you wake up with a gnawing sensation of failure. Fear is back to play havoc with your intestines. You are busy fighting fear, and Resistance, yet you don’t fight so hard because you feel certain that the good guys will make sure that your work is done.

You start the game of “I’ll just get this out of the way”. You look at bills, check the bank’s statement, you make sure the kids leave for school.You walk the dog.You water the plants.The clock is ticking, but your “priority list” (a minor general in the arm of bad habits) is pressing.Here is my take on the law of Prioritizing:

a) You must know the difference between what is urgent and what is importantb) You must do what’ s important first.

Your work, allowing your creativity to guide you – that’s important.So, it’s nine o’clock – the muse strikes!

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Fake it till you make itGarry Kasparov and his long-time rival Anatoly Karpov—two of the greatest chess players of all-time—took their respective seats around the chessboard. The 1990 World Chess Championship was about to begin.The two men would play 24 games to decide the champion with the highest scoring player being declared the World Chess Champion. In total, the match would stretch for three months with the first 12 games taking place in New York and the final 12 games being played in Lyons, France.Kasparov started off well, but soon began to make mistakes. He lost the seventh game and let multiple victories slip away during the first half of the tournament. After the first 12 games, the two men left New York with the match tied at 6-6. The New York Times reported that “Mr. Kasparov had lost confidence and grown nervous in New York.” If Kasparov was going to retain his title as the best in the world, it was going to take everything he had.A friend asked Garry how he’s going to play to overcome his loss of confidence. He answered: I’ll play the moves I would have played if I felt confident. Kasparov lost only two of the final 12 games. By letting his action boost up his confidence Kasparov used his fear to overcome his fear.A professional. A champion.

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Love your misery, but don’t share it.

When you commit yourself to your life’s job, you have volunteered for hell, whether you know it or not. You’ll be dining on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.Interspersed by bouts of maniacal hallucination. And the closer you get, the harder it’s going to get. Knowing it will not alleviate your suffering.Knowing it will serve to guarantee you are on the right track.Don’t use your misery to get sympathy, as this is exactly what Resistance is waiting for. Sympathy seeking is for the amateur. It’s part of the game. No medals, just participation.

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Love the game, love the benefits.The champion realizes that too much love can be a bad thing. Too much love can choke her creative drive. The professional uses detachment, cold blooded demeanor to keep him from loving the game so much that he freezes in action. Playing for the benefit, for money and material gain, or adopting the attitude of one who plays for money, lowers that fever. Don’t forget, fear and love are the best indication that you are on the right track. They are also the door that calls loudest for Resistance to come. The more you love your enterprise/calling/art/relationships, the more important its accomplishment is to the evolution of your soul, the more you will fear it and the wider the back door opens and the harder Resistance will fight you. The payoff of playing the game is not the money, which you might never see anyway. The payoff is that playing the game for material gain produces the proper attitude. It inculcates the lunch-pail mentality, the hard-core, hard head, hard-hat state of mind that shows up for work, come rain or snow, day in and day out. Day, after day, after day. You are a mercenary. You don’t fight for the glory of it. You fight for the booty. Glory, pride and preciousness are the avant-garde of the army of bad habits.

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Be patientResistance outwits the amateur or the dilettante (from the Italian “dilettare – to delight) using the oldest trick in its bag: it uses her own enthusiasm against her. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. It knows we can’t sustain the level of intensity. It just has to sit back and watch us hit the wall. Watch us crash.The champion understands delayed gratification. She is the ant, not the grasshopper. The amateur believes in the mythical stories of wondrous achievements. The quick and easy hits. You’ve seen the infomercial before. Men and women prancing around, showing off their rock-hard abs that they supposedly achieved by working out just six minutes a day! Why would you spend hours each week on a treadmill when you could look this good with a super-quick fix? The amateur buys the treadmill. The amateur is seduced into believing she can pull off the big score without pain and without persistence. The champion keeps herself from flaming out. She knows that writing a novel, remodeling a kitchen, or even putting together an Ikea couch always takes twice as long as she thought. She steels herself at the start of a project. She avoids the false enthusiasm that whispers in her ear: just do it, it won’t take long. She knows the words are the poisonous promises of Resistance out to trick her. She prepares herself for the long and winding road.

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Art and craftA professional views her work as craft though she knows it’s art. She knows that there is a mysterious component she’ll never be able to fully understand nor explain, but she doesn’t dwell on it. In the words of Raymond Chandler: “Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.”The sign of the amateur is over glorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She does her work, and keeps the flame alight.

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The champion acts in the face of fear.The amateur believes she must first overcome her fear; then do her work. The champion knows that fear can never be overcome.Henri Fonda who suffered an intense stage fright, used to puke in the bathroom, clean up and march onstage. He was still petrified, but he used his fear to push himself forward. He knew that once he gets into the action, his fear will be just another element in the armor of his muse.

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No excusesThe dilettante permits the flu to keep him form his daily chore. He believes the serpent’s voice in his head, the one that says that meeting with the friend in need is more important than doing the day’s work. He underestimates Resistance cunning.The professional knows that Resistance is a telemarketer, just waiting for you to say something, anything. The professional doesn’t even pick up the phone. He has work to do.

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A champion plays it as it lays.No excuses, remember? You know that you conduct your business in the real world. Adversity, injustice bod bumps and rotten calls, and even good breaks and lucky bounces all comprise the ground over which the journey must be waged. The champion knows that the stage is level only in heaven.

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The terrorist within.The champion is prepared, each day, to confront his own self-sabotage.She knows that Resistance knows all the tricks, and some that haven’t been invented yet. It will throw stuff at her that she never knew existed.Be prudent, and be prepared to be reckless. Take the blows when you have to and go for the throat when you can. The field is never the same. Remember, your goal is not the victory (fickle lady that comes when she feels like it); your goal is to handle yourself as sturdily and steadily as you can. If you fee you are loosing out – look at the treadmill and get back to work. No shortcuts.

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Mastering techniqueThe champion dedicates herself to mastering technique not because she thinks that it is a substitute for inspiration, but because she wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.

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The champion is never above learning.Arthur Rubenstein took piano lesson every day of his life. When he was asked why, he answered, when I’ll feel I’ve nothing more to learn, I’ll stop playing. He knew that the levels of revelation that can unfold in his vocation, be it playing the piano or running the 100 meters sprint, are inexhaustible.

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You are not your creative persona, you employ it. Madonna doesn’t walk around the house in cone bras and come-fuck-me bustier. She is too busy planning how to employ Madonna for her next gig.

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Failure is not personal, and neither is success. Evolution has programmed us to feel rejection in our guts. In primitive tribes, the threat of expulsion was the key to obedience. Fear of rejection isn’t just psychological; it’s biological. It’s in our DNA.Resistance has studied our DNA so well, it knows all about our fear of rejection and uses it against us. Resistance was fighting a seemingly losing war with Franz Kafka. He was taking everything she threw his way and just kept writing. When his illness deprived him of food and debilitated and weakened him, he gave in, and asked his friend Max Brod to burn everything he wrote. Brod knew it was Resistance talking and did not pay heed to his friend’s wishes. How many unpublished masterpieces are we losing? Not only because editors refused them. Mainly because the fear of rejection kept the work locked in the drawer. External criticism is not the enemy, the battle in inside our head. If we let that external foe join forces with the army of bad habits within us, we’re lost.The Bhagavad-Gita tells us we have a right to only to our labor not to the fruits of our labor. All the athlete can do is leave everything on the field. The Ukrainian/Israeli athlete who just won the silver medal at the world championship in Beijing said: I was happy to see that the jump was a good one. I was glad to see that the result was a new Israeli record, but during the jump, I was like an automaton.” She was too busy doing her job. Success and failure are never personal. Picasso loved his work; yet he knew that his work was not him. He knew that his artistic self contained many works and many paintings, and many styles. All of them his; none of them him. He said: “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” The champion learns from criticism, the amateur is stifled by it. You Are Creative. You are stronger than Resistance. No matter what, you’ll never let Resistance beat you. Never.

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Art is born of humiliation W.H. AudenYou just finished your presentation to a room of bored investors. They nod off. They are silent. No one asks anything. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” You feel humiliated. Hurt. You finally landed a meeting with the famous producer. He is constantly on the phone. Even as you pitch your stuff, he talks into that black thing that sticks out of his ear (Why the name of a tenth century Viking king who united the Danish tribes should be used for an instrument that sticks into your ears is beyond me). His secretary comes in. He signs letters. She asks you if you’d like something to drink. Before you answer, the producer – his head into one of the folders she placed in front of him – mumbles to you: “Do you mind I need some privacy on this one.” You go out and sit in the waiting room. The secretary comes out. She doesn’t see you. Finally the door opens and the producer rushes out, pulling on his jacket. “Oh, I’m so sorry!”He had forgotten all about you. Of course you’re hurt. Humiliation cannot be taken personally. Humiliation, like rejection, is the external reflection of internal Resistance. The bird that flew over your head, dropped something on your slicker? It’s not personal and will come clean with a heavy duty hosing. You yourself, your creative center, cannot be soiled, nor buried, no matter how much guano is piled on top. Your core is hardened, it’s not only shit-proof, it’s bulletproof. If you don’t let it, nothing can touch the creative in you. Unless you let it.Don’t mistake the donut for the hole.

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A Champion reinvents himself.Never allow yourself to be hidebound within one incarnation. No matter how successful. Don’t fall in love with the You that triumphed yesterday. Shuck your outworn body and don a new one, and on with your journey.

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Incorporate yourself.You Are Creative, so go create. To sell your creation, employ the best sales-person or, become one. When you incorporate yourself, you don’t provide yourself, you loan out your services. Just think how cool that metaphor is – You, Inc. That way you can wear two hats, you can hire yourself and fire yourself. Making yourself a corporation (or just thinking of yourself in that way) reinforces the idea of professionalism – it separates the doer from the will-and-consciousness-running-the-show. No matter how much abuse is heaped on the doer, the CEO takes it in stride and keeps trucking. Same with success: you the doer can get a swelled head, yet you the boss remembers how to take yourself down a peg.In most offices, the week starts with Monday morning status meetings. Start having one of those meeting every Monday. Sit down, go over your assignments, type them up and distribute to yourself. If you think of yourself as a corporation , it gives you a healthy distance on yourself. You’re less subjective. Blows are nothing personal. Joe Blow is often too mild-mannered to go out and sell his wares. Joe Blow, Inc., can pimp the hell out of himself. He is not Joe Blow anymore. He’s Joe Blow, Inc.

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No MysteryThere’s no mystery to turning professional. It’s an act of volition. You make up your mind to view yourself as a professional and you just do it. Hike with Nike. Simple as that.

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Book 3

The art of the start

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“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.”

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe

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Starting is magic.Goethe said: “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back — concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.” Don’t stand in the way of your creativity, sit down and make a start.Allow your imagination, your knowledge and your stamina to lead you to the starting blocks. Wait for the starter. And set out to win.When you conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of your fears and the threatening trumpets of the army of your bad habits, something wonderful happens. Have you ever watched the first craze appear as a chick pecks at the inside of its shell? that’s the feeling!Inhibitions fall away, you are about to give birth to the person you were born to be, the one whose destiny was branded in your soul. Your Daemon. Your Genius. Your Muse. Your Inner Creative Self.William Blake wrote: “Eternity is in love with the creations of time.” You are Creative.You are it.

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Ego and SelfYour creativity dwells in your self, resistance lives in your Ego.The fight is between the two.

Your self wishes to create, to evolve. The Ego wants thins just the way they are.

Your Ego believes in material existence.

The Ego believes that when I hurt you, I don’t feel the pain

The Self knows that we are all one, that if I hurt you, I hurt myself. Fanatics live in the past, overcome by their Ego. Ego thrives on fear of the Other, Self nurtures individuality through compassion and acceptance. Ego believes that time and space are real; the Self knows they are but an illusion that operates only in the physical sphere. Self teaches us that we are not locked into any specific dimension; that we move “swift as thought”, that we inhabit multiple planes simultaneously. Ego believes the predominant impulse in life is self-preservation, the Self believes the supreme emotion is love, that we are all in this together. Your Ego will push you to do the job you hate, to glorify in successes and keep a grudge if you fail. Your Self is not interested in the here and now. It plays for the beyond, for your ultimate self-actualization. The Ego is impatient.The Self knows the pleasure of the long haul, of the delayed gratification.The Self is your deepest being. The Ego produces Resistance and attacks the awakening creativity in you.You Are Creative. You shall prevail.The Ego designs an ideal and tells us it’s what we ought to be.The Self guides us to find out who we already are and supports us in our quest to become it.

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Creativity and territory.

In her brilliant book “Chaos, Territory, Art”, Elizabeth Grosz writes that we shouldn’t treat art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate. According to Grosz, art is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires, not just its intention and aesthetic. Art is not a hierarchical scale of fixed values that get more or less refined by studies, market appreciations, and museums’ curators.Our most cultured human accomplishments are the result of the excessive, nonfunctional forces of sexual attraction and seduction. Art is a kind of bodily enhancement or mode of sensation enabling living bodies to experience and transform the universe. Art can be understood as a way for bodies to augment themselves and their capacity for perception and affection-a way to grow and evolve through sensation. Through this framework, which knits together the theories of Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jakob von Uexküll, we are able to grasp art's deep animal lineage. This is the territory of art.Art is not tied to the predictable and known but to new futures not contained in the present. Its animal affiliations ensure that art is intensely political and charged with the creation of new worlds and new forms of living. Art is the way in which life experiments with materiality, or nature, in order to bring about change.Remember, you are creative; you inseminate chaos with the seed of your inspiration and watch with awe and wonderment as the newly born assumes a life of its own. Whatever its nature, like a loving mother, your role is to nurture it.

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The supreme virtueSomeone asked the Spartan king Leonidas to identify the supreme warrior virtue for which all others flowed. He replied: “Contempt for death.”

You are creative, so for “death” read “failure”. Contempt for failure is your cardinal virtue.

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Portrait of the artist as a territorial creativeYou are creative, and you know that there exist other, higher planes of reality, about which we can prove nothing, but from which arise the meaning of our lives, our work and our art, intended is the fulfillment of who we were actually born to be. These spheres are trying to communicate with ours. When Blake said Eternity is in love with the creations of time, he was referring to those planes of pure potential, which are timeless, placeless, space less, but which long to bring their vision into being here, in this time-bound, space contoured world.

The creative you is the servant of that intention. The enemy of the creative you is the small-time Ego which begets Resistance, which is the dragon that guards the gold. That’s why, when you finally come to terms with your inner creativity, you must be a warrior and like all warriors, you must acquire modesty and humility. You might conduct yourself flamboyantly in public. Sometimes you feel you have to. But alone with our work you are chaste and humble. You know you are not the source of the creations you bring into being. You only facilitate. You have a choice – you either set your creativity free and become the womb of your life’s work, or you lock up and succumb to the ordeal of capitalistic slavery.

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Of promises Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter?Were you meant to be a scientist?Were you destined to be an apostle of peace?

It all boils down to action.

Do it or don’t do it.

If you are creative you are not a promise. You are a fulfillment.

It might help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure caner or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only broke a promise, you not only hurt yourself. You hurt us all. You hurt the planet.

You go blatantly against the unique gifts that were granted you with the sole purpose of nudging the human race one Nano-second closer to its betterment.

You are creative, and you know that creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor It’s a gift to the world and every being in it.Don’t cheat us of your contribution.Give us what you’ve got.

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