How we kill creativity

Get over yourself.

Seriously.

Just let go.

You don’t know it, but that self is stopping you dead in your tracks. That self is the past. It can tell you what to do, but it can’t tell you where you need to go. In fact, when it counts the most, it’ll do the opposite, and it’s killing you.

It’s a little like this: You’re driving. You have your GPS all set and the coordinates locked in. But you have a change of heart, and you decide to take a detour. Your poor GPS doesn’t have a clue. It just keeps saying you’re off course. And the more it does, the more tense you feel. The more messages you hear, the more you worry, the more you doubt. Maybe you even start to think you are going the wrong way. And there lies the problem.

We all have our inner-GPS. And it’s great most of the time. It’s the instinct we acquire from a lifetime of experience. It keeps us safe, and it keeps us on track. But it’s built by the past, and it will never know when there’s a new you. A you who’s ready to push in different directions to find different things. In short, it doesn’t know about the detours. Yet the detours define us. When you go off the beaten path, it will just keep telling you to get back on track, and for awhile, the more you veer, the more it nags. If you listen to it, know that you’ll be navigating by a you of yesterday, and sometimes, a you from a very distant yesterday.

See, the GPS is loaded with all sorts of destinations. Notions of who we are and what we’re supposed to do. Maybe we never got over the idea that a certain career was right for us. Maybe we thought there was a best way to talk to people. And in the heat of the moment with the shot on the line, it’s sure not going to know that some new and different pose in this new and different light is the one you really want to go for.

Of course, your GPS isn’t to blame. It was designed for different times. Times when eating the wrong berry could kill you, or taking the wrong path would leave you short an appendage. It’s conservative for good reason.

But this is a bubble-wrapped world. We’re insulated from everything, and we can bounce back from a whole lot more than we think. You post the wrong post. So what? You get a mediocre review. So what? What’s really going to happen? Not to say that it won’t hurt, but at the time these things happen, it feels like you’ve just RUINED. YOUR. LIFE.

In other words, we fear pain more than we feel the potential.

Don’t listen to the fear. The fact is you change every day. You have new needs, you have new desires, and you just plain grow. But your mind and body take some time to catch up. Your GPS holds on to the old directives, and it takes the full force of all the will you’ve got to send the message that this new place you’re heading is exactly where you want to go.

Don’t stop.

We start all things free. Full of ideas. Full of purpose. To be sure, tangled and blurred and ever just so hidden, but it’s there. We lose this along the way as we find success. Once we make things work and the patterns become apparent, our bodies hard-code the recipe into a user manual for living, when, in reality, there can never be a user manual for living.

As this happens, we go from a state of freedom to a state of constriction, which is utterly backwards. After all, shouldn’t learning free us?

And it can, if you stay open and aware.

Success can be so much worse than failure. Failure hurts, but it pushes us to keep exploring. Success, on the other hand, limits us. It tells us to keep doing the same.

It’s all that damn stuff. Literal. Metaphorical. You know – baggage. Once you have something, you fear the loss, which is why nothing is more perilous than early success.

See, once you are something – once you earn something, deserve it, have it and need it, letting go is hell. We’re all a bunch of pack rats, when it comes down to it, but it’s not just about keeping this or that, which is hard enough. What we really cling to is ego, and losing that is most painful thing of all.

So we stay the course and re-tread familiar ground. We let creativity die.

Don’t.

You live by the fear or you live by the potential. When you know whatever you do this second is all you are, you know you can be anything. When you know today is what matters there’s no ego to feed. But more than anything, when you turn off the GPS, you get over yourself in the most glorious way possible. You live free of definition and free of restraint.

And that’s the detour you want to take.