You Can't Contribute If You Never Leave Your Room
First published on August 29, 2019
I love the work of Steven Pressfield. But if there is in one idea from Pressfield's incredible non-fiction work that is the most important to remember it is probably this: Inspiration is always around us. But it is when we start that we let inspiration in.
So, sometimes, sit. And start.
When we start, something changes. We become someone who can start.
We create something. From nothing. And, like pushing a car, once the car is moving, keeping it moving is WAY easier. Changing the momentum of something is where the force is really needed (that's basic physics). Keeping it moving, that's different.
Starting, no matter how small, can be the most important thing. Then, you have to keep going.
One of the things I was talking to my colleagues at 64 Million Artists about this week is: do you create for the audience, or do you create for yourself?
There are MANY people out there creating only for the audience, consciously or not. The audience on Instagram (will I get likes?); the audience on YouTube (will I get views?); the audience on LinkedIn (will I get clicks?).
The thing is, if you are creating for the audience and only for the audience, for the likes or the views or the clicks, then if you don't get those thing you have failed. Your effort was wasted. Maybe not quite completely, if you have a good frame of learning, but if your measure of success is clicks, then if you don't get clicks, what are you left with?
If you are creating just for the sake of creating, that's different. Where true creativity has happened, there is always at least one person who is changed: the creator. You can't not be changed by that. My friend Jo, who founded 64 Million Artists, talks about why empowering people to be creative is so important, how it changes us, in her TEDx Talk.
It's a wonderful thing to change yourself. My work depends on people coming to me and deciding they want to invest their time and their money in changing themselves. And I know that if I help a person change themselves, then that will change their friends, their colleagues, their partner, their children, too. That's the beauty of the world: we are all connected far more than we think.
But the world we live in is an uncertain world. There is division, there is polarisation; things that felt fixed feel fixed no more; things we thought would last forever don't look so permanent any more. There is - for me at least - an unsettling feeling. Despite my rational optimism (the world is SO much better than it used to be in so many ways, why wouldn't that continue?), there's something in the air. We are living through a time right now, perhaps particularly in the UK and the USA. Even more than usual, we are living through history.
If this concerns you, then my challenge to you is this: changing yourself is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Given the times we live in, the complexity of the world and the opportunity of the Internet age, it is vital that each of us that is capable of it changes others. Change people by the way you are - by being the most kind, tolerant, thoughtful, skilful, wise, courageous person you can. And, change them through what you create.
And don't let Resistance stop you sharing. You are probably a bad judge of how useful the things you have created are for other people. Don't create only for others. But, make a contribution.
You can't contribute if you never leave your room.
And your work can't contribute if you never share it.