The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?

by Seth Godin

They sold you debt and self-storage and reality TV shows.

Your ability to follow instructions is not the secret to your success.

We know how much you care, and it’s a shame that the system works overtime to push you away from the people and the projects you care about.

The world does not owe you a living, but just when you needed it, a door was opened for you to make a difference. It’s too bad that so much time has been wasted, but it would be unforgivable to wait any longer. You have the ability to contribute so much. We need you, now.

Everyone in the room can care enough to do something—if they can overthrow the self-induced, systemically amplified censor that keeps them in line.

A revolution is here, our revolution, and it is shining a light on what we’ve known deep down for a long time—you are capable of making a difference, of being bold, and of changing more than you are willing to admit. You are capable of making art.

The industrial age built the trap we’re mired in, but it didn’t build the trap all at once; that took centuries to perfect. And we were seduced. Seduced by the bait of decent pay and plenty of prizes. Seduced by the apparent security of the enclosure. And once the gate was shut, we were kept in by the threat of shame, the amplification of risk, and society’s reliance on more and shinier prizes.

As the industrial age has faded away and been replaced by the connection economy—the wide-open reality of our new economic revolution—the fence has been dismantled. It’s gone.

But most of us have no idea that we’re no longer fenced in. We’ve been so thoroughly brainwashed and intimidated and socialized that we stay huddled together, waiting for instructions, when we have the first, best, and once-in-a-lifetime chance to do something extraordinary instead.

Why Make Art? Because you must. The new connected economy demands it and will reward you for nothing else. Because you can. Art is what it is to be human.

Daedalus,

Banished to prison for sabotaging the work of King Minos (captor of the Minotaur), Daedalus created a brilliant escape plot, described in the myth that we were told as children. He fashioned a set of wings for himself and his son. After affixing the wings with wax, they set out to escape. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun. Entranced by his magical ability to fly, Icarus disobeyed and flew too high. We all know what happened next: The wax melted, and Icarus, the beloved son, lost his wings, tumbled into the sea, and died. The lesson of this myth: Don’t disobey the king. Don’t disobey your dad. Don’t imagine that you’re better than you are, and most of all, don’t ever believe that you have the ability to do what a god might do. The part of the myth you weren’t told: In addition to telling Icarus not to fly too high, Daedalus instructed his son not to fly too low, too close to the sea, because the water would ruin the lift in his wings. Society has altered the myth, encouraging us to forget the part about the sea, and created a culture where we constantly remind one another about the dangers of standing up, standing out, and making a ruckus. Industrialists have made hubris a cardinal sin but conveniently ignored a far more common failing: settling for too little. It’s far more dangerous to fly too low than too high, because it feels safe to fly low. We settle for low expectations and small dreams and guarantee ourselves less than we are capable of.

The path that’s available to each of us is neither reckless stupidity nor mindless compliance. No, the path that’s available to us is to be human, to do art, and to fly far higher than we’ve been taught is possible. We’ve built a world where it’s possible to fly higher than ever, and the tragedy is that we’ve been seduced into believing that we ought to fly ever lower instead.

We don’t have time to reevaluate the safety zone every time we make a decision, so over time, we begin to forget about the safety zone and merely pay attention to its twin sister, the comfort zone. We assume that what makes us comfortable also makes us safe.

The safety zone has changed, but your comfort zone has not. Those places that felt safe—the corner office, the famous college, the secure job—aren’t. You’re holding back, betting on a return to normal, but in the new normal, your resistance to change is no longer helpful.

You can go to as many meetings, read as many books, and attend as many seminars as you like, but if you don’t figure out how to realign your comfort zone with today’s new safety zone, all the strategy in the world isn’t going to help you.

There’s still a safety zone, but it’s not in a place that feels comfortable to you. The new safety zone is the place where art and innovation and destruction and rebirth happen. The new safety zone is the never-ending creation of ever-deeper personal connection.

If you become someone who is uncomfortable unless she is creating change, restless if things are standing still, and disappointed if you haven’t failed recently, you’ve figured out how to become comfortable with the behaviors most likely to make you safe going forward.

Creating ideas that spread and connecting the disconnected are the two pillars of our new society, and both of them require the posture of the artist.

The bad news is this: Artists are never invulnerable. This safety zone isn’t as comfortable as the last one was. It took a hundred years for us to be brainwashed into accepting the industrial system as normal and safe. It is neither, not for long.

Oscar Wilde wrote that art is “new, complex, and vital.” Art isn’t something that’s made by artists. Artists are people who make art.

Art is not a gene or a specific talent. Art is an attitude, culturally driven and available to anyone who chooses to adopt it. Art isn’t something sold in a gallery or performed on a stage. Art is the unique work of a human being, work that touches another.

Most painters, it turns out, aren’t artists at all—they are safe...

Seizing new ground, making connections between people or ideas, working without a map—these are works of art, and if you do them, you are an artist, regardless of whether you wear a smock...

Speaking up when there’s no obvious right answer, making yourself vulnerable when it’s possible to put up shields, and caring about both the process and the outcome—these are works of art...

Alas, there isn’t a pain-free way to achieve your goals. I’ve read these books. I’ve written some of them. And I love them all, but the ideas are not enough without commitment. They’re not enough because strategy is empty without change, empty without passion, and empty without people willing to confront the void.

This is a book about committing to do work that is personal, that requires guts, and that has the potential to change everything. Art is the act of a human being doing generous work, creating something for the first time, touching another person.

Art Is Frightening Art isn’t pretty. Art isn’t painting. Art isn’t something you hang on the wall. Art is what we do when we’re truly alive.

An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it (all of it, the work, the process, the feedback from those we seek to connect with) personally.

Art isn’t a result; it’s a journey. The challenge of our time is to find a journey worthy of your heart and your soul.

When you were rewarded for obedience, you were obedient. When you were rewarded for compliance, you were compliant. When you were rewarded for competence, you were competent. Now that society finally values art, it’s time to make art.

All we’re willing to pay you extra for is what we don’t assume, what we can’t get easily and regularly and for free. We need you to provide the things that are unexpected, scarce, and valuable.

Scarcity and abundance have been flipped. High-quality work is no longer scarce. Competence is no longer scarce, either. We have too many good choices—there’s an abundance of things to buy and people to hire.

What’s scarce is trust, connection, and surprise. These are three elements in the wor...

Another kind of scarcity involves physical resources. Resources keep getting more scarce, because we’re running out of them. Paradoxically, we’re also running out of places in our houses to store our junk and running out of room in our bodies to store what we eat.

The new, third kind of scarcity is the emotional labor of art. The risk involved in digging deep to connect and surprise, the patience required to build trust, the guts necessary to say, “I made this”—these are all scarce and valuable. And they scale.

Xeni Jardin

Revolutions bring total chaos. That’s what makes them revolutionary.

James Elkins points out that schools of art used to divide the arts into only two categories: fine art and industrial art. Then the intellectuals expanded the categories to: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry. From there it’s a quick leap to: performance, video, film, photography, fiber, weaving, silkscreen, ceramics, interior architecture, industrial design, fashion, artists’ books, printmaking, kinetic sculpture, computing, neon, and holography. To which I’d add: entrepreneurship, customer service, invention, technology, connection, leadership, and a dozen others. These are the new performing arts, the valuable visual arts, the essential personal arts.

The connection economy rewards the leader, the initiator, and the rebel.

If your factory burns down but you have loyal customers, you’ll be fine. On the other hand, if you lose your customers, even your factory isn’t going to help you—Detroit is filled with empty factories.

If your team is filled with people who work for the company, you’ll soon be defeated by tribes of people who work for a cause.

If you use your money to buy advertising to promote the average products you produce for average people, soon you’ll run out of money. But if you use your money to make exceptional products and services, you won’t need to spend it on advertising, bec...

The connection economy enables endless choice and endless shelf space and puts a premium on attention and on trust, neither of which is endless.

Art is difficult, risky, and frightening. It’s also the only option if we choose to care.

Art, on the other hand, is almost never coherent. It’s messy and comes in fits and starts. It’s difficult to write a table of contents or outline for. It’s unpredictable.

The opposite of coherent is interesting.

Competent people enjoy being competent. Once you’re good at something, changing what you do or moving to a new way of doing it will be stressful because it will make you (momentarily) incompetent.

Art is threatening because it always involves moving away from the comfort zone into the unknown. The unknown is the black void, the place where failure can happen (and so can success).

No one enjoys watching their house burn down. Revolutions do that. They destroy the perfect, disrupt the status quo, and change everything. And then they enable the impossible.