Ego Based Creation is Not Your Art

EGO BASED CREATION IS NOT YOUR ART

“What if you created a space for yourself where there are no mistakes, no failures, only lessons, and each lesson takes you closer to that place you don’t know you’re going but will recognize when you get there?”- Justine Musk

There’s a creative space we enter in which we get completely absorbed in what we’re doing. The world around us disappears. The voices in the background fade, and we become almost laser focused. It’s your zone of genius. This is also a place of great peace and it’s where our best work comes from.

It’s where the no-bullshit version of you who are lies:

- the one that’s not afraid to take risks
- the one that’s not afraid to tell the truth
- the one that isn’t concerned with validation
-the one that creates for the joy of creating, nothing more

In this space there’s a creative rhythm, that’s almost music (thanks Torre DeRochefor that gem). Being in this space is almost orgasmic because it’s the destination we’ve been trying to reach all along. It’s the perfect wave, the lover you long for, and the song that makes your heart skip beats.

Traffic, best selling books, speaking gigs and all the accolades that your ego gets its rocks off on are just byproducts of creating from a places where your ego loses its power. It’s counterintuitive. Danielle LaPorte once told me that “your are art can never be about the money.” It’s finally starting to make sense to me.

The ego needs to be fed to remain healthy, but if you overfeed it, it pukes all over every part of your life. ANd it’s not the real YOU. When you create something for attention, money or any form of external validation that’s your ego at work. But when you enter the space we’re speaking it feels threatened and will do everything in its power to bring you back to playing the game on its level.

My ego has led to my most spectacular downfalls, and the pursuit of things in life that mattered to it more than they mattered to me. You might find that yours has led you astray in the same way.

The No bullshit version of who you are can work with a compass. Your ego needs a map because he doesn’t quite understand the wise words of Paul Jarvis “Nobody is successful because they took somebody else’s roadmap and copied it.” That should hang in high school gyms across America, and you should get fortune cookies at college graduations with that one message.

Imagine the beauty that would fill our world when people stop wasting their unique gifts on the pursuit of becoming somebody else or the person they thought they should be.

What would happen if we pursued being unmistakable instead of wildly successful by external measures?

What if we stopped suppressing the the parts of ourselves that take use through our most diverse range of emotions? (high and low). Yes you’ll be depressed sometimes.

But sometimes your brightest work will come from the darkest parts of your life. This next book is about some of mine. I realized that when I was writing the stories yesterday:

- Supposedly big occasions like graduations have been more like funerals

- I had to recognize and explore the broken parts of who I am. But if you want to be the no bullshit version of you are that’s necessary.

- The small moments like coffeshop conversations with my oldest friends have been my great treasures

Books, destinations, and callings tend to reveal themselves to you while you pursue them. We often don’t know where stories end, where unpaved roads lead, and who we’ll become along the way. So you just have to start. As Justine says, you’ll recognize the destination when you get there.

Your ego is the bullshit version of who you are and ego based creation is not your art.