No matter what you perceive as your limitation or your advantage, the most influential resource to a prosperous creative career is recognizing the innate power you hold. Everyone has the power to do incredible things. It’s not a quality that is reserved for the influential or the well-known. It’s one that everyone shares and the only difference is in how you claim it and how you use it.
You can use your implicit power to destroy your ability to do work by fostering self-doubt, hesitation and resistance. It is a forceful act to constantly cut yourself down or hold yourself back. You might not be moving, but it’s because you are making a concerted effort to stay small and stuck. You can use that same power to embolden your work with resilience, grit and determination. Your power to surmount challenges and break past your comfort zone takes the same amount of force as resisting that forward momentum. Both options require an output of energy. The most important choice you’ll make is whether to use your power to hold you back or to push you forward.
There will always be two scenarios in any given situation, how you choose will determine everything. Here are a few situations that will surely come up in your creative process and your options for how to proceed:
1. You will have obstacles. You can either write them off as reasons that it’s too hard and too unfair to push forward, or you can see them as challenges to make your work more complex and thoughtful because of your desire to overcome those challenges.
2. You will fail. You can quit and give up on your dreams, or you can use your failure to understand what went wrong and try again. You can “fail better” as Samuel Beckett once said.
3. You will be uncertain. You can either let that uncertainty paralyze you, or you can use the uncertainty as an experiment. You can allow yourself to search for the answer, innovate and try new things even if you’re uncertain if it will work.
4. You will grapple with self-doubt. You will either believe your self-doubt and pretend that you aren’t really an artist, or you will look for opportunities to connect with other artists who might feel the same thing. Instead of keeping yourself isolated, you will reach out, help to build others up, and in doing so, build your own confidence.
5. You will change. You will either choose to be disappointed in change, resist it or remain wistful of the past, or you will see change for what it is: an evolution. Acknowledging that change is part of your artistic growth, you will be able to move through the changing seasons without the anxiety that could accompany it.
Like the Spiderman comics tell us, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The issue isn’t that you don’t have power, it’s only that you don’t acknowledge it. Your power to create, to bring an idea to life and share your perspective of the world is the same power that your creative heroes had when they started out. No matter what, you will face obstacles, uncertainty and sometimes even failure. The more you can catalogue those moments as part of your creative process and allow yourself to learn and grow, the more your power works for your creative career instead of against it. Choose wisely and choose often. Claim your power to create and get to work.
In: DISTINCT
