Challenge Number #19: Reality Check

Put on your PJs, lose the make up and grab the Ben & Jerry's people,  things are about to get real.

I'm not going to lie, most of my creative career has felt a lot like running around really fast in the dark praying that I'm not going to run into a brick wall and knock myself unconscious.   I don't really have a solid sense of direction or even purpose all the time, often opting for the Indiana Jones "make it up as I go" method of living.  This has served me well over the years.  It may not be the most efficient way of living, but it was sort of, kind of, working out.

Till it wasn't.

Here's the problem, while running around at Mach 10 in as many directions as possible, making life up as I go, sounds like a great plot to a spy novel, it was a really inefficient, unproductive, exhausting way of living.  I just couldn't see it.

As our world get's more and more advanced and we discover more and more technologies for helping us do simple tasks more quickly and efficiently we slowly begin to fill up our lives, one moment at a time.  We work our jobs, we commit to extra curricular activities, we eat out instead of having to take the time to come home and cook a meal, let alone take the time to shop for the groceries to make it.  And then in our down time between events we scour our media pages, scrolling through pages and pages of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook updates.  Filling every once of spare time finding out what our friends, or most likely people-I-only-met-once-but-am-somehow-facebook-friends-with are doing, thinking, saying, eating or just posting for the hell of it.  We've become the poor little frog, slowly, over time, being busied to death without even realizing it's happening.

One Small Step For Art Kind...

Here's the thing, I can talk in cliches until I'm blue in the face, but setting out to reach our goals is terrifying and completely overwhelming no matter how you slice it.  It's hard enough to let ourselves dream of that distant far off mountain we'd like to reach, but once you sit down to the brass tacks of actually making a map and figuring out how you are going to get from point A to point B, things start going a bit lopsided.

The problem comes in when we start to realize just how much work and effort it's actually going to take to get to that damn mountain.

It's easy to dream and say someday, but when we are faced with a physical map and a plan of action we start making excuses for why not, why it's too hard, why we'll never make it, why we can't.  It can almost be comical how ridiculous we can get with this mindset.  Larry Smith does an amazing job of pointing this out in his TED talk "Why you will fail to have a great career".

"You're afraid to pursue your passion. You're afraid to look ridiculous. You're afraid to try. You're afraid you may fail." - Larry Smith

It's so easy once we create our roadmaps to become suddenly paralyzed by them instead of encouraged by them.  The journey seems so overwhelming we are simply unable to begin it.  But a mountain is never conquered in one giant leap, it is  scaled slowly, one step at a time.  Even if the step you can take today is small, you are still one step closer to your dream than if you let your fear of failure paralyze you from even beginning the journey.