It gets painful to admit you made a mistake.
It is quite difficult to have someone put a red X on your test paper, and it hurts that much more to put it on your own. Even if you didn't you know you were wrong, and there is something about that that can eat at you — unless you’re a sociopath, in which case, all is well.
If you aren’t then you just feel better just marking that X down. It hurts, but you learn from it and you get better going forward. When you pick up that test, it now becomes a studying tool for your next adventure. It sticks out to help you move forward.
The reason I start with that is because in the last 3 months I realized I had been going about creativity and my passion all wrong — and I was the one to blame… It was time to give myself a Big X.
I was a stalwart defender of taking things as they come — fighting the good fight as the fight came to me. Other things, like organization and planning didn't matter as much as getting the work done.
To me, the ones that focused on that were all just paper pushers getting in the way of all the creatives — the programmers, the designers, the writers, the people who let inspiration be their guide.
I had lot of people try to push me in the opposite direction, people who understood my intelligence, but wanted me to add some organization so I could see things better.
People would try to help all the time. I remember being given a planner in my 7th grade year — in September I would try, take notes and mark down my classes — by June it was empty. I didn't see the results, and I couldn't be bothered.
That mind-state started carried me through my career, but ended with me attending the 99U Conference in NYC. I got several takeaways from that conference, but the biggest one of all, was to take a real effort at looking at my process and begin to determine how to improve. The glaring hole in this process was planning — seeing things through.
The big reason this domino fell was because I was seeing other creatives guide me. These were the beaurocrats I envisioned, but people who were making real change in the world — making a difference to the people that matter by people that matter.
It was right then and there I recognized the power of the conference, or gatherings, and began by making the X on my test paper. The great thing about life is that the questions in the test of life go as far as you want with as many retests. One X doesn’t mean much in 100 questions, but it means even less than in a 1000.
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