Your creativity owes you nothing

On comparison, creative motivation & internet brattiness

When I interviewed the author Seth Godin a few years back, I quoted a line back to him from his book The Practice:

“One of your lines is: what would you do if you knew you could not fail—”

“No, that’s not right.” He bluntly corrected me mid-flow. “The line is: what would you do if you knew you would fail. It’s all about asking yourself what you would do even though it probably won’t work out.”

Oh— yes that makes it a lot harder. We live in a world of constant comparison and achievement-based carrots on a stick. We all want to succeed at everything we do. Immediately.

I receive countless emails asking me “how to launch an award-winning podcast” expecting the first episode to go viral. I know plenty of people who are convinced they have written the next Great American Novel, but won’t show it to anyone, because they can’t know how it’ll be received and they don’t like uncertainty. (I get it). So many of us want what the other person has, and we all know someone who is convinced, after a few glasses of wine, that if they posted a few things on TikTok, they would be famous.