Justine Musk's Blog, page 35

the art of creative abundance

–1–

If you don't believe in your own abundance, you believe on some level that every act depletes you. That your talent is finite. That you only have so many ideas, and once they're gone, they're gone.

You're coming from a place of scarcity and fear.

–2–

The problem with fear is that it freezes you up. It literally hijacks your brain so that you're not capable of creative thinking (since all your mental resources focus on simple survival).

I've learned that fear is parasitic and deceptive. It's like a creeping ivy that grows through your sense of self. You start confusing it with who you actually are.

(Because you are not your fear.)

It masquerades as any number of reasons why you don't need to do the work today. You can put it off until tomorrow. And then the next day. And the day after that.

Steven Pressfield calls this The Resistance.

–3–

The Resistance is anything that prevents us from doing the work, including our tendency to prepare and prepare and prepare, or to keep putting off the work because we don't feel prepared enough.

The way to deal with the problem of feeling underprepared is to skip right over it.

Make some rudimentary notes, advises Pressfield. The entire outline of your novel should take up one page.

And then begin.

Just begin.

Trust the soup.

–4–

I love that phrase – trust the soup – which is another way of saying, Let go of your need to control, to know everything in advance. Control, after all, is the flipside of fear: when we're frightened of something we clamp down on it that much harder and try to dictate every aspect.

But we're using such a small part of ourselves: the so-called rational, conscious part that wants to believe all progress is linear.

Creative intelligence is more mysterious and expansive than that. If you believe in Howard Gardner's 'multiple intelligences' theory – and I do – than you know that intelligence exists on a number of different levels, both verbal and nonverbal. Creativity draws on these levels simultaneously, so that your work comes to you in feelings and hunches as well as words and images, through your body as well as your mind. It's an all-inclusive affair.

–5–

Elizabeth Gilbert gave an excellent TED speech in which she suggested that maybe the ancient Greeks were onto something. They believed that creativity flowed through you from an external source. You didn't own it – or control it – you were just borrowing it for a while, or maybe letting it borrow you. Your job was to keep those avenues as open and inviting as possible.

You did this just by showing up.

And then getting down to it.

Sometimes the Muse came, and touched you with brilliance, and sometimes it didn't. No worries. You just kept on with it, day after day after day, and did your part.

–6–

Trust the soup reminds me of that. In this case we're not calling on the gods but the power of our own psyche, while acknowledging how mysterious the process is – and in some sense beyond our control.

You could think of the soup as having different layers to it:

Your unconscious. That great underground storehouse of memory and dream and the things you don't know you know. The world bombards us with millions of bits of stimuli every moment, and in order to keep sane the conscious mind can only filter a fraction of a fraction of that. Everything else goes underground. That part of your mind mulls things over and dreams on them and evaluates them and arrives at its own conclusions, which it then floats up to your conscious mind in the form of a 'decision' that your conscious mind believes that it made (and makes up some reasons why).

The collective unconscious. This is the deep primal strata of myth and archetype, "the software of the mind". This is a Jungian thing that I won't go into here, but the basic idea is that we're all encoded with the same ancient memories, which is why different versions of the same stories show up in cultures throughout the world.

Your conscious mind considers itself an isolated entity.

Your unconscious mind knows better.

Neuroscience is beginning to show us how deeply we wire into each other through empathy, "mirror neurons", and networks of influence. Even when we don't think we're connected, we're connected: you are currently being influenced by someone you've never even met, but has influenced someone who is influencing you in ways you don't even realize.

As David Brooks writes in THE SOCIAL ANIMAL:

If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception. If the outer mind highlights the power of the individual, the inner mind highlights the power of relationships and the invisible bonds between people. If the outer mind hungers for status, money, and applause, the inner mind hungers for harmony and connection – those moments when self-consciousness fades away and a person is lost in a challenge, a cause, the love of another or the love of God.

Or, as Pressfield might say, for the love of the soup. The irony is that when you travel inward, you draw from a level of consciousness that draws information from other minds as well as your own.

–8–

And the Soup is always there. You cannot deplete it. It will not run out.

In fact, it's when you push yourself to the point of feeling completely drained and depleted that you come up with your best ideas.

This is known in brainstorming as the "third third". Most people don't brainstorm long or hard enough. It's only when you empty your mind of every idea you think you have that the true thinking starts to take place.

The "third third" refers to that final segment of a brainstorming session in which you always get your greatest and most original ideas. It's almost as if you have to pump the second-rate associations — all that is clichéd and hackneyed and familiar – from your head in order to create the vacuum that nature so famously abhors.

And then you can draw on The Soup.

So the more you give away, the richer your thinking becomes, the more original and interesting your ideas.

And when you feel empty and depleted, is the moment you are ready to begin.

the art of creative abundance

–1–

If you don't believe in your own abundance, you believe on some level that every act depletes you. That your talent is finite. That you only have so many ideas, and once they're gone, they're gone.

You're coming from a place of scarcity and fear.

–2–

The problem with fear is that it freezes you up. It literally hijacks your brain so that you're not capable of creative thinking (since all your mental resources focus on simple survival).

I've learned that fear is parasitic and deceptive. It's like a creeping ivy that grows through your sense of self. You start confusing it with who you actually are.

(Because you are not your fear.)

It masquerades as any number of reasons why you don't need to do the work today. You can put it off until tomorrow. And then the next day. And the day after that.

Steven Pressfield calls this The Resistance.

–3–

The Resistance is anything that prevents us from doing the work, including our tendency to prepare and prepare and prepare, or to keep putting off the work because we don't feel prepared enough.

The way to deal with the problem of feeling underprepared is to skip right over it.

Make some rudimentary notes, advises Pressfield. The entire outline of your novel should take up one page.

And then begin.

Just begin.

Trust the soup.

–4–

I love that phrase – trust the soup – which is another way of saying, Let go of your need to control, to know everything in advance. Control, after all, is the flipside of fear: when we're frightened of something we clamp down on it that much harder and try to dictate every aspect.

But we're using such a small part of ourselves: the so-called rational, conscious part that wants to believe all progress is linear.

Creative intelligence is more mysterious and expansive than that. If you believe in Howard Gardner's 'multiple intelligences' theory – and I do – than you know that intelligence exists on a number of different levels, both verbal and nonverbal. Creativity draws on these levels simultaneously, so that your work comes to you in feelings and hunches as well as words and images, through your body as well as your mind. It's an all-inclusive affair.

–5–

Elizabeth Gilbert gave an excellent TED speech in which she suggested that maybe the ancient Greeks were onto something. They believed that creativity flowed through you from an external source. You didn't own it – or control it – you were just borrowing it for a while, or maybe letting it borrow you. Your job was to keep those avenues as open and inviting as possible.

You did this just by showing up.

And then getting down to it.

Sometimes the Muse came, and touched you with brilliance, and sometimes it didn't. No worries. You just kept on with it, day after day after day, and did your part.

–6–

Trust the soup reminds me of that. In this case we're not calling on the gods but the power of our own psyche, while acknowledging how mysterious the process is – and in some sense beyond our control.

You could think of the soup as having different layers to it:

Your unconscious. That great underground storehouse of memory and dream and the things you don't know you know. The world bombards us with millions of bits of stimuli every moment, and in order to keep sane the conscious mind can only filter a fraction of a fraction of that. Everything else goes underground. That part of your mind mulls things over and dreams on them and evaluates them and arrives at its own conclusions, which it then floats up to your conscious mind in the form of a 'decision' that your conscious mind believes that it made (and makes up some reasons why).

The collective unconscious. This is the deep primal strata of myth and archetype, "the software of the mind". This is a Jungian thing that I won't go into here, but the basic idea is that we're all encoded with the same ancient memories, which is why different versions of the same stories show up in cultures throughout the world.

Your conscious mind considers itself an isolated entity.

Your unconscious mind knows better.

Neuroscience is beginning to show us how deeply we wire into each other through empathy, "mirror neurons", and networks of influence. Even when we don't think we're connected, we're connected: you are currently being influenced by someone you've never even met, but has influenced someone who is influencing you in ways you don't even realize.

As David Brooks writes in THE SOCIAL ANIMAL:

If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception. If the outer mind highlights the power of the individual, the inner mind highlights the power of relationships and the invisible bonds between people. If the outer mind hungers for status, money, and applause, the inner mind hungers for harmony and connection – those moments when self-consciousness fades away and a person is lost in a challenge, a cause, the love of another or the love of God.

Or, as Pressfield might say, for the love of the soup. The irony is that when you travel inward, you draw from a level of consciousness that draws information from other minds as well as your own.

–8–

And the Soup is always there. You cannot deplete it. It will not run out.

In fact, it's when you push yourself to the point of feeling completely drained and depleted that you come up with your best ideas.

This is known in brainstorming as the "third third". Most people don't brainstorm long or hard enough. It's only when you empty your mind of every idea you think you have that the true thinking starts to take place.

The "third third" refers to that final segment of a brainstorming session in which you always get your greatest and most original ideas. It's almost as if you have to pump the second-rate associations — all that is clichéd and hackneyed and familiar – from your head in order to create the vacuum that nature so famously abhors.

And then you can draw on The Soup.

So the more you give away, the richer your thinking becomes, the more original and interesting your ideas.

And when you feel empty and depleted, is the moment you are ready to begin.

the art of creative abundance

–1–

If you don't believe in your own abundance, you believe on some level that every act depletes you. That your talent is finite. That you only have so many ideas, and once they're gone, they're gone. That you'll run out of things to say — assuming you have anything to say in the first place, which you maybe already kind of doubt.

If you don't believe in your own abundance, you're coming from a place of scarcity and fear.

–2–

The problem with fear is that it freezes you up. It literally hijacks your brain so that you're not capable of creative thinking (since all your mental resources focus on simple survival).

I've learned that fear is parasitic and deceptive. It's like a creeping ivy that grows through your sense of self. You start confusing it with who you actually are.

(Because you are not your fear.)

It masquerades as any number of reasons why you don't need to do the work today. You can put it off until tomorrow. And then the next day. And the day after that.

Steven Pressfield calls this The Resistance.

–3–

The Resistance is anything that prevents us from doing the work, including our tendency to prepare and prepare and prepare, or to keep putting off the work because we don't feel prepared enough.

The way to deal with the problem of feeling underprepared is to skip right over it.

Make some rudimentary notes, advises Pressfield. The entire outline of your novel should take up one page.

And then begin.

Just begin.

Trust the soup.

–4–

I love that phrase – trust the soup – which is another way of saying, Let go of your need to control, to know everything in advance. Control, after all, is the flipside of fear: when we're frightened of something we clamp down on it that much harder and try to dictate every aspect.

But we're using such a small part of ourselves: the so-called rational, conscious part that wants to believe all progress is linear.

Creative intelligence is more mysterious and expansive than that. If you believe in Howard Gardner's 'multiple intelligences' theory – and I do – than you know that intelligence exists on a number of different levels, both verbal and nonverbal. Creativity draws on these levels simultaneously, so that your work comes to you in feelings and hunches as well as words and images, through your body as well as your mind. It's an all-inclusive affair.

–5–

Elizabeth Gilbert gave an excellent TED speech in which she suggested that maybe the ancient Greeks were onto something. They believed that creativity flowed through you from an external source. You didn't own it – or control it – you were just borrowing it for a while, or maybe letting it borrow you. Your job was to keep those avenues as open and inviting as possible.

You did this just by showing up.

And then getting down to it.

Sometimes the Muse came, and touched you with brilliance, and sometimes it didn't. No worries. You just kept on with it, day after day after day, and did your part.

–6–

Trust the soup reminds me of that. In this case we're not calling on the gods but the power of our own psyche, while acknowledging how mysterious the process is – and in some sense beyond our control.

You could think of the soup as having different layers to it:

Your unconscious. That great underground storehouse of memory and dream and the things you don't know you know. The world bombards us with millions of bits of stimuli every moment, and in order to keep sane the conscious mind can only filter a fraction of a fraction of that. Everything else goes underground. That part of your mind mulls things over and dreams on them and evaluates them and arrives at its own conclusions, which it then floats up to your conscious mind in the form of a 'decision' that your conscious mind believes that it made (and makes up some reasons why).

The collective unconscious. This is the deep primal strata of myth and archetype, "the software of the mind". This is a Jungian thing that I won't go into here, but the basic idea is that we're all encoded with the same ancient memories, which is why different versions of the same stories show up in cultures throughout the world.

Your conscious mind considers itself an isolated entity.

Your unconscious mind knows better.

Neuroscience is beginning to show us how deeply we wire into each other through empathy, "mirror neurons", and networks of influence. Even when we don't think we're connected, we're connected: you are currently being influenced by someone you've never even met, but has influenced someone who is influencing you in ways you don't even realize.

As David Brooks writes in THE SOCIAL ANIMAL:

If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception. If the outer mind highlights the power of the individual, the inner mind highlights the power of relationships and the invisible bonds between people. If the outer mind hungers for status, money, and applause, the inner mind hungers for harmony and connection – those moments when self-consciousness fades away and a person is lost in a challenge, a cause, the love of another or the love of God.

Or, as Pressfield might say, for the love of the soup. The irony is that when you travel inward, you draw from a level of consciousness that draws information from other minds as well as your own.

–8–

And the Soup is always there. You cannot deplete it. It will not run out.

In fact, it's when you push yourself to the point of feeling completely drained and depleted that you come up with your best ideas.

This is known in brainstorming as the "third third". Most people don't brainstorm long or hard enough. It's only when you empty your mind of every idea you think you have that the true thinking starts to take place.

The "third third" refers to that final segment of a brainstorming session in which you always get your greatest and most original ideas. It's almost as if you have to pump the second-rate associations — all that is clichéd and hackneyed and familiar – from your head in order to create the vacuum that nature so famously abhors.

And then you can draw on The Soup.

So the more you give away, the richer your thinking becomes, the more original and interesting your ideas.

And when you feel empty and depleted, is the moment you are ready to begin.

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why you need to give it away (to be a successful creative)

We give it away because art is a gift, and the Internet is a gift economy.

"As the 'greed is good' exchange-based economic system goes into terminal meltdown, alternative paradigms are emerging."

We give it away because the purpose of gifts is to establish relationships, and we are entering an age of interconnectedness like never before.

Our fates are so interwoven that by keeping others down, you provoke acts of hostility and retaliation that ripple through your network and ultimately bring you down. But by lifting others up, you create a rising tide that lifts you up.

We give it away because each person you draw into your network increases your reach and influence and potential audience. They can share it with people in their network, who share it with people in their network, and so on and so forth.

We give it away because the law of reciprocity is embedded in our soul DNA. If I give something to you, you feel a moral debt to do something for me sometime in the future (ie: buy my book). For this to be true, though, the gift has to be honestly given with no expectation of return and no sense of obligation, otherwise it no longer qualifies as a gift.

"In a market economy, one can hoard one's goods without losing wealth. Indeed, wealth is increased by hoarding— although we generally call it 'saving'. In contrast, in a gift economy, wealth is decreased by hoarding, for it is the circulation of the gift(s) within the community that leads to increase— increase in connections, increase in relationship strength." — JoAnn Schwartz

We give it away because we live in an era of convergence. Just as your phone is no longer a phone, but a cell camera and a browsing device and a reading device and personal organizer and portable music player and entertainment system and the gods know what else, a writer is no longer simply a writer but also a marketer and producer of content, preferably across multiple platforms.

And marketing is not what it used to be. People have learned to tune out traditional advertising and the Internet has exploded the traditional idea of the 'mass audience'. There are too many choices and too many different spaces online to hang out in for a single advertisement to reach "the masses". For a 'message' to penetrate the culture, the audience has to take it and engage with it and share it throughout multiple networks. Marketing, creation, and community converge:

"The consumer control era has meant that creatives must make things that people want, that they seek out and share with their circle, or with the world. It has meant that the marketing end game has transcended reach, just grabbing eyeballs, and it has become a matter of engagement, of inviting a conversation and making a meaningful, ongoing connection…."ads" can be almost anything – a film, a TV show, a mobile app, a blog, a retail experience, a product, a song, a game, a distribution idea, a tweet…" — Teressa Iezzi, THE IDEA WRITERS: Copywriting in a New Media and Marketing Age

We give it away because the most powerful marketing always had some kind of gift value: a level of meaning that reached beyond the so-called 'message' to touch or enrich the audience's life in some way.

"The truth was that these brands had become phenomenally valuable not only because of their innovative features or benefits, but also because these properties had been translated into [archetypal] meanings. They were worth millions of dollars because they had gained a kind of meaning that was universal, larger than life, iconic." — Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson, THE HERO AND THE OUTLAW: Building Extraordinary Brands through the Power of Archetypes

We give it away because that's how we attract the world. We give it away until they can't live without it.

"…50 Cent didn't get ensnared in that anxiety. Instead, he simply started giving his music away for "free" via mix-tapes and the Internet…[so] he could corner the street market and, in doing so, once again attract the labels' attention. Whatever he might initially lose in earnings, he would more than recoup through creating legions of loyal fans. Fans who would actually be first in line to buy his "real" albums once he was able to get a deal….

50 Cent had courage because he knew all he had to focus on was making music honest enough to inspire both him and the streets…[He] instinctively understood Sri Satchidananda's quote: When you're honest, the world is going to run after you." — Russell Simmons, SUPER RICH

We give it away because that's how we transform the world. Gifts can be material and also immaterial. A gift can be a form of education or a mentoring relationship that empowers, and inspires. Because of the law of reciprocity, we feel an internal pressure that can only be discharged when we return the gift or pass it on in some way. This is the power – and pressure – of gratitude:

"if the teaching begins to 'take,' the recipient feels gratitude…I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms" (47). Lewis Hyde, THE GIFT, Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

We give it away because in this networked, interconnected world, we must operate from a sense of abundance rather than scarcity.

"As the world goes vertical, something alchemical is happening: we are shifting from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance….Unlike physical resources (interestingly, though, much like love) knowledge increases when you share it. This is because of a curious property inherent in all networks:

As the nodes in a network increase arithmetically, the network's value increases exponentially.

…You increase value by developing immaterial assets and enlarging people's access, creating as broad a free user vase as possible and then charging for services that leverage that magnified user base." — Daniel Burrus Flash Foresight

We give it away because for a gift to be a gift, it has to be an honest expression of soul. Which means that when we give it away, we can discover who we are.

"You are only as good as what you give away." — Keith Ferrazzi

why you need to give it away (to be a successful creative)

We give it away because art is a gift, and the Internet is a gift economy.

"As the 'greed is good' exchange-based economic system goes into terminal meltdown, alternative paradigms are emerging."

We give it away because the purpose of gifts is to establish relationships, and we are entering an age of interconnectedness like never before.

Our fates are so interwoven that by keeping others down, you provoke acts of hostility and retaliation that ripple through your network and ultimately bring you down. But by lifting others up, you create a rising tide that lifts you up.

We give it away because each person you draw into your network increases your reach and influence and potential audience. They can share it with people in their network, who share it with people in their network, and so on and so forth.

We give it away because the law of reciprocity is embedded in our soul DNA. If I give something to you, you feel a moral debt to do something for me sometime in the future (ie: buy my book). For this to be true, though, the gift has to be honestly given with no expectation of return and no sense of obligation, otherwise it no longer qualifies as a gift.

"In a market economy, one can hoard one's goods without losing wealth. Indeed, wealth is increased by hoarding— although we generally call it 'saving'. In contrast, in a gift economy, wealth is decreased by hoarding, for it is the circulation of the gift(s) within the community that leads to increase— increase in connections, increase in relationship strength." — JoAnn Schwartz

We give it away because we live in an era of convergence. Just as your phone is no longer a phone, but a cell camera and a browsing device and a reading device and personal organizer and portable music player and entertainment system and the gods know what else, a writer is no longer simply a writer but also a marketer and producer of content, preferably across multiple platforms.

And marketing is not what it used to be. People have learned to tune out traditional advertising and the Internet has exploded the traditional idea of the 'mass audience'. There are too many choices and too many different spaces online to hang out in for a single advertisement to reach "the masses". For a 'message' to penetrate the culture, the audience has to take it and engage with it and share it throughout multiple networks. Marketing, creation, and community converge:

"The consumer control era has meant that creatives must make things that people want, that they seek out and share with their circle, or with the world. It has meant that the marketing end game has transcended reach, just grabbing eyeballs, and it has become a matter of engagement, of inviting a conversation and making a meaningful, ongoing connection…."ads" can be almost anything – a film, a TV show, a mobile app, a blog, a retail experience, a product, a song, a game, a distribution idea, a tweet…" — Teressa Iezzi, THE IDEA WRITERS: Copywriting in a New Media and Marketing Age

We give it away because the most powerful marketing always had some kind of gift value: a level of meaning that reached beyond the so-called 'message' to touch or enrich the audience's life in some way.

"The truth was that these brands had become phenomenally valuable not only because of their innovative features or benefits, but also because these properties had been translated into [archetypal] meanings. They were worth millions of dollars because they had gained a kind of meaning that was universal, larger than life, iconic." — Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson, THE HERO AND THE OUTLAW: Building Extraordinary Brands through the Power of Archetypes

We give it away because that's how we attract the world. We give it away until they can't live without it.

"…50 Cent didn't get ensnared in that anxiety. Instead, he simply started giving his music away for "free" via mix-tapes and the Internet…[so] he could corner the street market and, in doing so, once again attract the labels' attention. Whatever he might initially lose in earnings, he would more than recoup through creating legions of loyal fans. Fans who would actually be first in line to buy his "real" albums once he was able to get a deal….

50 Cent had courage because he knew all he had to focus on was making music honest enough to inspire both him and the streets…[He] instinctively understood Sri Satchidananda's quote: When you're honest, the world is going to run after you." — Russell Simmons, SUPER RICH

We give it away because that's how we transform the world. Gifts can be material and also immaterial. A gift can be a form of education or a mentoring relationship that empowers, and inspires. Because of the law of reciprocity, we feel an internal pressure that can only be discharged when we return the gift or pass it on in some way. This is the power – and pressure – of gratitude:

"if the teaching begins to 'take,' the recipient feels gratitude…I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms" (47). Lewis Hyde, THE GIFT, Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

We give it away because in this networked, interconnected world, we must operate from a sense of abundance rather than scarcity.

"As the world goes vertical, something alchemical is happening: we are shifting from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance….Unlike physical resources (interestingly, though, much like love) knowledge increases when you share it. This is because of a curious property inherent in all networks:

As the nodes in a network increase arithmetically, the network's value increases exponentially.

…You increase value by developing immaterial assets and enlarging people's access, creating as broad a free user vase as possible and then charging for services that leverage that magnified user base." — Daniel Burrus Flash Foresight

We give it away because for a gift to be a gift, it has to be an honest expression of soul. Which means that when we give it away, we can discover who we are.

"You are only as good as what you give away." — Keith Ferrazzi

why you need to give it away (to be a successful creative)

We give it away because art is a gift, and the Internet is a gift economy.

"As the 'greed is good' exchange-based economic system goes into terminal meltdown, alternative paradigms are emerging."

We give it away because the purpose of gifts is to establish relationships, and we are entering an age of interconnectedness like never before.

Our fates are so interwoven that by keeping others down, you provoke acts of hostility and retaliation that ripple through your network and ultimately bring you down. But by lifting others up, you create a rising tide that lifts you up.

We give it away because each person you draw into your network increases your reach and influence and potential audience. They can share it with people in their network, who share it with people in their network, and so on and so forth.

We give it away because the law of reciprocity is embedded in our soul DNA. If I give something to you, you feel a moral debt to do something for me sometime in the future (ie: buy my book). For this to be true, though, the gift has to be honestly given with no expectation of return and no sense of obligation, otherwise it no longer qualifies as a gift.

"In a market economy, one can hoard one's goods without losing wealth. Indeed, wealth is increased by hoarding— although we generally call it 'saving'. In contrast, in a gift economy, wealth is decreased by hoarding, for it is the circulation of the gift(s) within the community that leads to increase— increase in connections, increase in relationship strength." — JoAnn Schwartz

We give it away because we live in an era of convergence. Just as your phone is no longer a phone, but a cell camera and a browsing device and a reading device and personal organizer and portable music player and entertainment system and the gods know what else, a writer is no longer simply a writer but also a marketer and producer of content, preferably across multiple platforms.

And marketing is not what it used to be. People have learned to tune out traditional advertising and the Internet has exploded the traditional idea of the 'mass audience'. There are too many choices and too many different spaces online to hang out in for a single advertisement to reach "the masses". For a 'message' to penetrate the culture, the audience has to take it and engage with it and share it throughout multiple networks. Marketing, creation, and community converge:

"The consumer control era has meant that creatives must make things that people want, that they seek out and share with their circle, or with the world. It has meant that the marketing end game has transcended reach, just grabbing eyeballs, and it has become a matter of engagement, of inviting a conversation and making a meaningful, ongoing connection…."ads" can be almost anything – a film, a TV show, a mobile app, a blog, a retail experience, a product, a song, a game, a distribution idea, a tweet…" — Teressa Iezzi, THE IDEA WRITERS: Copywriting in a New Media and Marketing Age

We give it away because the most powerful marketing always had some kind of gift value: a level of meaning that reached beyond the so-called 'message' to touch or enrich the audience's life in some way.

"The truth was that these brands had become phenomenally valuable not only because of their innovative features or benefits, but also because these properties had been translated into [archetypal] meanings. They were worth millions of dollars because they had gained a kind of meaning that was universal, larger than life, iconic." — Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson, THE HERO AND THE OUTLAW: Building Extraordinary Brands through the Power of Archetypes

We give it away because that's how we attract the world. We give it away until they can't live without it.

"…50 Cent didn't get ensnared in that anxiety. Instead, he simply started giving his music away for "free" via mix-tapes and the Internet…[so] he could corner the street market and, in doing so, once again attract the labels' attention. Whatever he might initially lose in earnings, he would more than recoup through creating legions of loyal fans. Fans who would actually be first in line to buy his "real" albums once he was able to get a deal….

50 Cent had courage because he knew all he had to focus on was making music honest enough to inspire both him and the streets…[He] instinctively understood Sri Satchidananda's quote: When you're honest, the world is going to run after you." — Russell Simmons, SUPER RICH

We give it away because that's how we transform the world. Gifts can be material and also immaterial. A gift can be a form of education or a mentoring relationship that empowers, and inspires. Because of the law of reciprocity, we feel an internal pressure that can only be discharged when we return the gift or pass it on in some way. This is the power – and pressure – of gratitude:

"if the teaching begins to 'take,' the recipient feels gratitude…I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms" (47). Lewis Hyde, THE GIFT, Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

We give it away because in this networked, interconnected world, we must operate from a sense of abundance rather than scarcity.

"As the world goes vertical, something alchemical is happening: we are shifting from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance….Unlike physical resources (interestingly, though, much like love) knowledge increases when you share it. This is because of a curious property inherent in all networks:

As the nodes in a network increase arithmetically, the network's value increases exponentially.

…You increase value by developing immaterial assets and enlarging people's access, creating as broad a free user vase as possible and then charging for services that leverage that magnified user base." — Daniel Burrus Flash Foresight

We give it away because for a gift to be a gift, it has to be an honest expression of soul. Which means that when we give it away, we can discover who we are.

"You are only as good as what you give away." — Keith Ferrazzi

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how to write a novel in 90 days

I like to think of writing fiction as a difficult and intricate kind of magic.

Magic = skills + art.

You need to learn a rather stunning array of skills, whether it's the rules of decent grammar or the principles of storytelling, and then you need to transform them into something your own. The dancer becomes the dance. You don't see the plot points, you only experience story.

So I love to read books and articles about how to write fiction. I think of it as writer's porn. Recently I read three very good books on the subject.

Each book will inspire its own post.

Today I want to say that Alan Watt's THE 90 DAY NOVEL effectively changed my approach to first-drafting through stressing the spirit of inquiry.

Instead of trying to control the narrative, you shape it through…asking questions. Asking and answering questions about the characters helps you create the conflict which helps you create the major plot points.

(Watt guides you through this process in a series of letters that speak to the heart of who we are and what we do.)

Then you write your way from plot point to plot point, with no revision or backtracking allowed – the important thing is to get the damn thing done.

(Besides, you can't do the heavy lifting until you see how the ending illuminates the beginning and all that falls between.)

Questions are powerful tools. By choosing what to ask and how to ask it, you frame – or reframe – what you're looking at. Questions open up new avenues in the material. They focus — and expand — your attention. They get your mind moving (since the brain has a compulsive itch to answer any question you put to it).

Questions rebel.

Questions disrupt.

We get trapped in habitual ways of thinking and doing, including how we perceive our material. It could be the project we are working on or the raw stuff of life that we're working with. The brain seeks out patterns, and then runs along those patterns. (Often when we think we're thinking, we're not really thinking. We're moving in the grooves.) It evolved this way to survive, to make sense of the world, to organize the constant bombardment of incoming stimuli as efficiently as possible. The more it can put on automatic pilot, the more space it frees up to focus on other things (or maybe just loaf around).

But it means that we have to make a conscious effort to step outside of those patterns. To shake things up. To see the things we're not seeing, or connect them in new ways.

Questions don't allow us to take things for granted.

This spirit of inquiry also allows for the mystery of the creative process while still creating enough of a structure to give it shape and purpose.

Stephen King once compared novel-writing to an archaeological dig. Bit by bit, you travel down through the layers and unearth the thing. It's as if the novel already exists and your job is to reach into that murky space and bring it up into the light.

This takes some of the pressure off. You're not expected to know all the answers, but simply to discover them, one by one by one. You state your intentions, ask your questions, and see what happens next.

That's your end of the bargain.

You don't need to be great.

You only need to be curious.

"Advice? I don't have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you're writing, you're a writer. Write like you're a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there's no chance for a pardon. Write like you're clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you've got just one last thing to say, like you're a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God's sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone. Write like you have a message from the king."

- Alan Watts

Hey you. Check out the 90 Day Novel Online. But before you do that, please sign up for my list! Because it makes the world a better place. Swear.

how to write a novel in 90 days

I like to think of writing fiction as a difficult and intricate kind of magic.

Magic = skills + art.

You need to learn a rather stunning array of skills, whether it's the rules of decent grammar or the principles of storytelling, and then you need to transform them into something your own. The dancer becomes the dance. You don't see the plot points, you only experience story.

So I love to read books and articles about how to write fiction. I think of it as writer's porn. Recently I read three very good books on the subject.

Each book will inspire its own post.

Today I want to say that Alan Watt's THE 90 DAY NOVEL effectively changed my approach to first-drafting through stressing the spirit of inquiry.

Instead of trying to control the narrative, you shape it through…asking questions. Asking and answering questions about the characters helps you create the conflict which helps you create the major plot points.

(Watt guides you through this process in a series of letters that speak to the heart of who we are and what we do.)

Then you write your way from plot point to plot point, with no revision or backtracking allowed – the important thing is to get the damn thing done.

(Besides, you can't do the heavy lifting until you see how the ending illuminates the beginning and all that falls between.)

Questions are powerful tools. By choosing what to ask and how to ask it, you frame – or reframe – what you're looking at. Questions open up new avenues in the material. They focus — and expand — your attention. They get your mind moving (since the brain has a compulsive itch to answer any question you put to it).

Questions rebel.

Questions disrupt.

We get trapped in habitual ways of thinking and doing, including how we perceive our material. It could be the project we are working on or the raw stuff of life that we're working with. The brain seeks out patterns, and then runs along those patterns. (Often when we think we're thinking, we're not really thinking. We're moving in the grooves.) It evolved this way to survive, to make sense of the world, to organize the constant bombardment of incoming stimuli as efficiently as possible. The more it can put on automatic pilot, the more space it frees up to focus on other things (or maybe just loaf around).

But it means that we have to make a conscious effort to step outside of those patterns. To shake things up. To see the things we're not seeing, or connect them in new ways.

Questions don't allow us to take things for granted.

This spirit of inquiry also allows for the mystery of the creative process while still creating enough of a structure to give it shape and purpose.

Stephen King once compared novel-writing to an archaeological dig. Bit by bit, you travel down through the layers and unearth the thing. It's as if the novel already exists and your job is to reach into that murky space and bring it up into the light.

This takes some of the pressure off. You're not expected to know all the answers, but simply to discover them, one by one by one. You state your intentions, ask your questions, and see what happens next.

That's your end of the bargain.

You don't need to be great.

You only need to be curious.

"Advice? I don't have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you're writing, you're a writer. Write like you're a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there's no chance for a pardon. Write like you're clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you've got just one last thing to say, like you're a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God's sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone. Write like you have a message from the king."

- Alan Watts

Hey you. Check out the 90 Day Novel Online. But before you do that, please sign up for my list! Because it makes the world a better place. Swear.

how to write a novel in 90 days

I like to think of writing fiction as a difficult and intricate kind of magic.

Magic = skills + art.

You need to learn a rather stunning array of skills, whether it's the rules of decent grammar or the principles of storytelling, and then you need to internalize them so well that you can transform and transcend them – or break them – to create something uniquely your own.

So I love to read books and articles about how to write fiction. I think of it as writer's porn. Recently I read three very good books on the subject.

Each book will inspire its own post.

Today I want to say that Alan Watt's THE 90 DAY NOVEL effectively changed my approach to first-drafting through stressing the spirit of inquiry.

Instead of trying to control the narrative, you shape it through…asking questions. Asking and answering questions about the characters helps you create the conflict which helps you create the major plot points.

(Watt guides you through this process in a series of letters that speak to the heart of who we are and what we do.)

Then you write your way from plot point to plot point, with no revision or backtracking allowed – the important thing is to get the damn thing done.

(Besides, you can't do the heavy lifting until you see how the ending illuminates the beginning and all that falls between.)

Questions are powerful tools. By choosing what to ask and how to ask it, you frame – or reframe – what you're looking at. Questions open up new avenues in the material. They focus — and expand — your attention. They get your mind moving (since the brain has a compulsive itch to answer any question you put to it).

Questions rebel.

Questions disrupt.

We get trapped in habitual ways of thinking and doing, including how we perceive our material. It could be the project we are working on or the raw stuff of life that we're working with. The brain seeks out patterns, and then runs along those patterns. (Often when we think we're thinking, we're not really thinking. We're moving in the grooves.) It evolved this way to survive, to make sense of the world, to organize the constant bombardment of incoming stimuli as efficiently as possible. The more it can put on automatic pilot, the more space it frees up to focus on other things (or maybe just loaf around).

But it means that we have to make a conscious effort to step outside of those patterns. To shake things up. To see the things we're not seeing, or connect them in new ways.

Questions don't allow us to take things for granted.

This spirit of inquiry also allows for the mystery of the creative process while still creating enough of a structure to give it shape and purpose.

Stephen King once compared novel-writing to an archaeological dig. Bit by bit, you travel down through the layers and unearth the thing. It's as if the novel already exists and your job is to reach into that murky space and bring it up into the light.

This takes some of the pressure off. You're not expected to know all the answers, but simply to discover them, one by one by one. You state your intentions, ask your questions, and see what happens next.

That's your end of the bargain.

You don't need to be great.

You only need to be curious.

Hey you. Check out the 90 Day Novel Online. But before you do that, please sign up for my list! Because it makes the world a better place. Swear.

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move through the creative gap (all the way to the power of awesome)

1

In a video that's totally worth your time, Nick Campbell talks about the "creative gap":

Nick Campbell – The Creative Gap: Becoming Better Than Most from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.

It's the gap between how good you are now and how good you want to be.

It's the gap between you and your potential fulfilled.

It's the gap between the people who stay amateurs and the people who turn pro.

Everybody, Nick points out, has the experience of making something, looking at it, comparing it to the thing that your creative hero or role model made, and thinking, Oh God I suck so bad.

This is around the time that many people quit.

The trick is not to be one of those people.

2

Seth Godin expresses a similar idea when he talks about The Dip.

The Dip is that long slug through drudgery and pain when you don't seem to be getting any better or making any progress or getting anywhere at all. When the voices of self-doubt (and maybe certain family members) start eating up your head. Meanwhile, the life you want is on the other side of The Dip — but many people quit before they can get to it.

(Quitting isn't always a bad thing. Often you need to quit something when you realize it's taking you in the wrong direction, so you can take all that time and energy and resources and apply it to the right direction. This requires its own kind of courage. But this is not the kind of quitting I'm talking about.)

This makes me think of characters from the Hero's Journey monomyth known as threshold guardians. Their whole reason for being is to block the protagonist and scare her away from her quest. This is not because the quest isn't worthy of her — but to test her resolve and her character, to see if she is worthy of the quest. If she's not prepared to battle her way through, then she should save us the time and trouble and find some other, more appropriate quest.

The Dip is kind of like that.

Because the Dip is a bit deceptive. When we are learning something new, we progress rapidly at first and then we plateau. We go for a long period of time when it seems all the practice in the world isn't making us any better — because what we can't see is how that practice is literally rewiring our brain. When we perform a new motion, we trigger a new set of brain neurons to fire together — and as the saying goes, neurons that fire together, wire together. A substance called myelin starts to wrap itself around those neurons, and everytime you repeat that motion, the neurons fire again, and another layer of myelin wraps round them and binds them together. Eventually you've created an entirely new pathway in your brain, and the more myelin = the more bandwidth.

So one day you're going about your practice and you suddenly perform everything with ease and perfection. All that progress you didn't think you were making arrives all at once. The threshold guardians step aside. The Dip gets flatter. The Gap gets smaller.

You take your practice to a whole new level.

And plateau all over again.

So it goes.

–3–

This is what's known as deliberate practice. It's not enough that you log a minimum of ten thousand hours at your chosen craft to get truly good at it…because your practice cannot be half-assed. It has to keep you at the very edge of your ability, which means that you're falling on your ass, making mistakes and failing. But the important thing is that you're failing forward. The brain learns through mistakes — mistakes force it to stop and evaluate, to pay serious attention, and think its way through what it's doing. That added intensity of consciousness encodes those actions into your grey matter and carries you farther through the Dip.

The thing about deliberate practice is — it's uncomfortable.

Anything that pushes us past our comfort zone is going to make us uncomfortable — whether it's trying something new, taking it to the next level, or exposing ourselves to painful but much needed constructive criticism.

Which is why Nick advises aspiring creative types to get comfortable with discomfort.

Learn to love discomfort.

Discomfort is the price — and sign — of growth.

–4–

But why bother to put yourself through all that?

Because other people won't.

It's too hard. It takes too long. There's too much process and not enough on reward and glory.

But it's the hard stuff, as Nick points out, that will set you apart. We're living in this age of incredible tools that we get to play with — to take pictures, or make videos, or publish fiction. Used to be that these tools were complicated enough, that learning to use them properly and well was a marketable skill in itself. You had to go through college or some other kind of training program. But now the tools are easier, more sophisticated, and readily available. The Internet is thick with video tutorials and other forms of online instruction that anyone who can get connected can access.

Knowing how to do the thing no longer makes you special.

You have to be able to do stuff that can't be explained step-by-step in a Youtube video, or in bullet points in a series of blog posts. You have to be on the other side of the Dip, when your skillset becomes so fused with your own personal vision or signature style that they can't be separated; they shape and form each other. The dancer is no longer just running through choreography. The dancer becomes the dance.

Nick refers to this as your developed good taste. In my blog I refer to it as originality or, more often, as soul. It's when our creativity is given a deep and true self-expression because we have the necessary skills to translate the vision from inside our head and body to the world. (After all, I might think I'm being creative and self-expressive when I'm playing piano, but let's face it: I'm plunking out 'Heart and Soul' like everybody else.)

–5–

The thing about creative growth — and this applies just as well to social media, which is its own form of creative work — is that you can apply what Brian Tracy calls the Law of Accelerating Acceleration.

Fully 80 percent of your success will come in the last 20 percent of the time you invest.

He adds: Just think! You will achieve only about 20 percent of the total success possible for you in the first 80 percent of the time and money that you invest in an enterprise, a career, or a project. You will achieve the other 80 percent in the last 20 percent of the time and money that you invest.

You can prove this principle on paper.

Double a penny every day for 30 days. By the 30th day, you will have several million dollars. However, on the 29th day, you will have only half of the amount that you will have on the thirtieth day. And on the twenty-eighth day you will have only one quarter of what you will have on the thirtieth day.

Imagine all of what you would miss out on if you quit too soon.

If you didn't push your way through the Dip.

If you didn't resonate with the tension of the Creative Gap.

The paradox of progress: it is long, slow and steady…and happens all at once.

That's what it looks like when you get through the Dip, says Godin.

[The] superstar, the only choice.

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