Do What You’re Capable Of
Start Your Journey Before You See the End
The resistance wants to be reassured. It wants a testable plan. It wants to know that before it endures the pain, it is guaranteed the prize at the end.
“Give me more case studies, more examples, more reassurance. Give me proof!”
The lizard brain has succeeded in making you stuck. The best art is made by artists who don’t know how it’s going to work out in the end. The rest of the world is stuck with the brainwashed culture that the industrialists gave us, the culture of fear and compliance.
But culture is a choice. You don’t have to accept a culture of fear or a culture of failure.
Right now, just down the hall or just up the street, is another artist, someone filled with hope and excitement, someone choosing a different culture, even though he’s in the same town, the same industry, and the same economy you are.
Others have always done that art, always chosen that culture of hope, but you haven’t done it enough (“too risky,” the lizard says), because you’ve been held back by a need for proof, by a reliance on assurance, and by the fear of humiliation.
Art is a project; it is not a place. You will build your dream house and it will burn down. You will start your business and it will succeed, until it doesn’t, and then you’ll move on.
You will stand onstage and speak from the heart, and some people in the audience (perhaps just one person in the audience) won’t get you, won’t accept you, won’t embrace you.
That’s what art is.
Art is a leap into the void, a chance to give birth to your genius and to make magic where there was no magic before.
You are capable of this. You’ve done it before and you’re going to do it again. The very fact that it might not work is precisely why you should and must do this. What a gift that there isn’t a sure thing, a guarantee, and a net.
It’s entirely possible that there won’t be a standing ovation at the end of your journey.
That’s okay.
At least you lived.
Before we take the steps to reach our goals, we should understand why we’re taking them. Part of the fulfillment lies within the process of reaching them.
– Seth Godin
Seth Godin wants to know what you are afraid of.
In one of his most challenging books yet, Godin shows why true innovators focus on trust, remarkability, leadership, and stories that spread. And he makes a passionate argument for why you should be treating your work as art.
>>Download a short PDF excerpt from Seth Godin’s “The Icarus Deception”.
Tags: Innovation, Leadership Engine, Seth Godin
