Late last night while you were laying in bed — after you finished scrolling through your Instagram or Facebook or Twitter (is that still a thing?), after you turned off Colbert or Kimmel or Netflix, after you set down the kindle— did you have a vision of yourself as someone else? A lucid reverie of the person you might become? The work for which you might be lauded? The day you might be leading as a distinctly realized person that looks like you, dresses (better than) you, and is doing what you were meant to do? Me too.
And then there’s the day job. It has some convoluted way of getting you on the path to a title you think you want. So you can’t leave. You like the pay too much! You like the validation from your peers, who place high social value on affluence and name recognition. You’ve surrendered to the curse of competency, and anyway, you’ve already put in so much work and time to get to where you are. You can’t deny the gratification of your name associated with that impressive rank, inked on cards you hand out at industry events. Me neither.
If we get bored or unhappy or unfulfilled, we remind ourselves of the myriad reasons we can’t leave. If we just get through today, the dreams will come back for another go-around tomorrow. Increasingly in my work, I felt that the factory line I had willingly submitted to bled me dry of my potential. Sure, I learned a great deal and fashioned a package of skills that benefit me to this day. But the relentless idolatry of productivity and efficiency on the way to an output that didn’t feel meaningful drained me of my creative capacities and zapped my esprit de vie. So I trusted in something — “my gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” I took the experience and skills I had up to that point, and 5 months ago I ran with them, hoping this approach, which never failed Steve Jobs, would help me connect the dots of my future.
So how to be a creative who does create? Action begets doing, and that’s nothing new — uniform motion à la Newton’s first law of motion was defined in the 17th century. But action is HARD. Steven Pressfield’s “War of Art” renames the enemy of action as Resistance, which you might recognize as a euphemism for procrastination, that deadly cocktail of inertia, distraction and fear. This cocktail is terribly efficient at sending us into a stupor of not doing, but the work we don’t start is the work that weighs most heavily on our psyche. And it’s not just the psyche, because as it turns out, our minds and our bodies are connected (duh!) as this great animation points out. It’s a painful paradox to recognize that procrastination today makes us even more likely to remain inert, distracted and fearful in the future.
Since exiting the corporate world of stable pay, highfalutin titles and validation, I’ve felt more in control of my career and simultaneously more stressed out of my mind. But it’s ok, because at least my pay isn’t a product of a system built to pay people just enough because they would never do the job otherwise. And at least the curse of competency has been lifted so that I now focus on pursuits that I’m not only good at, but that are meaningful and inspiring. And at least I recognize a sunk cost fallacy for what it is, and reject the irrelevant sentiment that just because I’ve been somewhere for a few years and invested my time in the work, I have to continue on with that investment in the future.
What is it about pursuing your dreams that makes people suddenly call you “strong”, “brave”, “courageous”, “daring”, a “badass”? None of these labels apply to me. I didn’t pilot a plane through engine failure, or punch my way out of a coffin. The conditioning we have undergone, to tell ourselves that this life devoid of dreams is okay, well it’s veritably vexing. It’s not “brave” to pursue a dream, it’s natural. In fact, it seems to me wholly unnatural to not go after your dream.
