A Cure for the Can’ts

Last week my 8-year-old granddaughter Zoe dropped something off at my place. As she was heading back down the stairs, she said, “I’m so excited. I’ve got a surprise to tell you about. Here’s a clue: ny.”

NY? Not yet? I was not solving the mystery.

A couple of hours later, I was at Zoe’s house and she couldn’t wait to tell me the news. Her family had decided to visit New York in October. This is their most ambitious vacation so far and Zoe was already bursting with excitement.

“There are museums and parks and I get to see The Lion King,” she exclaimed.

“I need to earn money,” she said—and she was wasting no time. “Do you have any paying chores for me?”

I expect  I’ll be hearing that question frequently in the next several months. When she came for a visit on Saturday, The Trip was on her mind. She had calculated that she wanted to raise $180. She and her father had figured out that her monthly goal for fund-raising was $20.

We brainstormed some options and I volunteered a small amount as seed money. She was off and running.

When Zoe was working her way through the Harry Potter series, every encounter with her began with an announcement of the page number she had reached. I suspect that I’ll be having regular updates on her money-raising project in the months to come.

More importantly, I’m happy that Zoe has become a practicing goalsetter at such an early age. It’s a tool that far too many adults don’t possess.

How many lovely goals and plans are abandoned because of the all-too-common approach used by the frustrated? It goes something like this: inspiration strikes, a  wonderful idea appears, then resistance kicks in with the dreambashing thought, “I don’t have the money for that,” and the idea is dead.

Do that often enough and inspiration goes elsewhere.

On the other hand, those who live with a steady stream of exciting ideas they’re bringing to life go about it in a very different way.

First, they decide what they want to do. Then, they figure out how to finance it. Perhaps it involves creating a new project to generate cash flow to fund the dream. It nearly always turns on creative thinking and uncovering hidden options.

It probably calls for some sort of tradeoff. In Zoe’s case, she may have fewer play dates with her friends while she’s helping her grandmother out. She’ll also resist the temptations of Toys R Us and use the library more and the bookstore less.

Of course, this won’t feel like deprivation to Zoe. She’s serving her apprenticeship in the fine art of building a dream.

“The mightiest works have been accomplished,” said Walter Bowie, “by those who have kept their ability to dream great dreams.” I’m going to do my part to make sure that Zoe stays in that group.

Best of all, there’s plenty of room for all of us if we are bold enough to ignore the can’ts and hows.

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Want to spread some entrepreneurial spirit and acquire more dreambuilding tools? Then join me for my upcoming Joyfully Jobless Weekends. I’ll be in Houston on February 15 & 16 and Phoenix on February 22 &23. Y’all come.

 

Steven Pressfield Talks About Resistance, Inspiration & Fear

At the end of every year, I pick my favorite books from the ones I’ve read in the previous twelve months. When I came upon Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art a few years ago, I declared it one of my favorite books of the decade. It still is.

Whether you’ve discovered the book for yourself already or not, I am delighted to share Steven Pressfield’s answers to my questions. Here they are.

 

 My  enthusiasm for The War of Art comes from having a whole new understanding of the nature and role of resistance. How did you begin to recognize resistance and deal with it in your own life?

 I first tried to write a novel when I was 24, quit my job, etc.  (I told this story in The War of Art, but I’ll tell it again here.)  I got 99% of the way  through and I totally fell apart.  Couldn’t finish it.  Bottom line: divorce, heartbreak, causing terrible pain to people I love, years of wandering, working weird jobs, etc.  It was very clear to me that SOMETHING was screwing me up; I just didn’t have a name for it.

Finally, finally, finally I realized that all my troubles stemmed from that one failure of courage (and a million other such failures thereafter.)  I had to go back and do it over.  Not that same book but another one.   Along the way, I came to call that negative force in my mind “Resistance.”  That’s what it felt like to me.

It seems to me that nurturing inspiration is a powerful way of dealing with resistance. How do you feed inspiration and what inspires you personally?

 I’ve never thought about it that way, Barbara.  That’s pretty cool.  You may be onto something there!  The positive force that actually produces Resistance as “an equal and opposite reaction” is an Idea—for a book, a movie, a business, whatever.  That’s the baby  that wants to be born.  So the more you can feed that embryo, the stronger will be the mother-love and the urge to be born.

I realize, thinking about it (thanks to your question) that I really do cultivate my ideas, when I’m lucky enough to get them.  I raise them in secret, inside myself, like little hothouse tomatoes.

One thing: I don’t talk about them.  I don’t dilute their force by blabbing to everybody.  The pregnant mom metaphor is pretty good.  You gotta protect that “baby bump”  and give it time to grow.  Once it’s really growing, it produces an irresistible power to be born.  Even Resistance is no match for it then.

How can a new writer or entrepreneur or musician put fear of rejection into perspective?

Great question, Barbara.  I’m not so sure it’s all about fear of rejection.  Fear of success may be the bigger issue.  The bottom line for me (and I suspect for many other writers, artists and entrepreneurs) is that the pain of NOT taking that chance is greater than the pain of taking it.  It’s like you have a choice of two forms of difficulty—the difficulty of facing your fears and doing the work you were born to do …  and the difficulty of losing your mind, your wife and family, etc.  I know that sounds pretty hard-core but I think it’s true.

People seem to flock to how-to formulas. Do you think it’s possible to live a creative life if we don’t leave room for mystery?

How-to formulas help, but they can also be a particularly insidious form of Resistance.  We spend all our time studying “how,” and forget to actually “do.”

There’s a great quote from Plato, which I can’t remember even close to verbatim.  He puts it in the mouth of Socrates, who says something like, “The skilled poet is no match for the divinely inspired fool.”  In other words, it does all come down to the mystery, which is really not so mysterious at all—it’s just hearing the voice in your head or seeing the vision in your heart and believing it in enough that you find the courage to actually manifest that voice or that vision in the real world.

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