The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?

by Seth Godin

How do I get more? vs. How do I give more? How do I guarantee success? vs. How do I risk failure? Where is the map? vs. Where is the wilderness? Do I have enough money? vs. Have I made enough art?

The old work: Bale that cotton, mow that hay, load that barge. Fill in this form, obey these instructions, take this test. The new work: Start something. Figure it out. Connect. Make the call. Ask. Learn. Repeat. Risk it. Open. What’s next? The old work is machinelike. The new work is for mythological gods. Gods in charge of their destiny. Gods responsible for their choices. Gods with power and the freedom to use it. Us.

Euhemerus

The purpose of myths is not to have us feel separate from the gods in the stories but to have us understand that we are capable of the great feats that they perform.

Omoikane,

思兼 or 思金

We’ve built a world where the only option is hubris, where the future belongs to anyone willing to act like the gods of our myths. Better coin a word for it.

kamiwaza.

When we strip away self-doubt and artifice, when we embrace initiative and art, we are left with kamiwaza. The purity of doing it properly but without self-consciousness. The runner who competes with kamiwaza is running with purity, running properly, running as the gods would run.

We have plenty of humility. We’ve built layers of propaganda to reinforce the false humility of the worker who settles for less and for the student who doesn’t ask difficult questions and for the artist who hides her art out of fear of offending someone.

Even Orwell was embarrassed by the egoism in his writing: “The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition—in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives.” I don’t think Orwell was selfish. I think Orwell had something to say, and I’m glad he said it.

Until we have a humility shortage, then, the real problem is this: We continue to fly too low. We’re so afraid of demonstrating hubris, so afraid of the shame of being told we flew too high, so paralyzed by the fear that we won’t fit in, that we buy into the propaganda and don’t do what we are capable of.

All the rewards for creating art are not present at its creation. That’s because the art isn’t truly art until it has connected you with another, until it has made contact and touched someone else. You take your art and move it from here to there with nothing but daring and faith and passion, and only after you land do you discover if your art was deemed “good.” This is the huge difference between art and direct marketing, between art and doing your job, between art and just about everything else we do in life. In all the other parts of our lives, the deal is “If you do this, you will get that.” In the world of art, the deal is “Well, other people have done something sort of like what you’re hoping to do, and sometimes, but certainly not always, it works out for them. You’ll have to do it to find out.”

Unfortunately for those considering a timid step into the world of art, the odds of external success start small and grow slowly. So we can’t just commit to one act of kamiwaza, one bold emotional risk, and be done with it. We have to commit to a lifetime of them. It’s a process, not an event. You don’t do a little art and then go back to work. Your work is your art (and vice versa).

When a work of art fails, don’t question your commitment to art. You can question how you see, how you make, how good (in quotes) your art was, but the artist in you won’t waste time questioning the commitment to art. When your art fails, make better art.

Better Art, Three Ways Fly closer to the sun. Become naked and vulnerable in front of those you give your art to, and Seek to make a connection.

A paintbrush or a spatula isn’t your art. Neither is a particular building or a programming language. You don’t commit to a venue or a medium or a technique. You commit to a path and an impact. Broadway is a venue. Joy through movement is an art. When the venue doesn’t support your art, you can change it without changing your commitment to the journey. The waitress who is an artist doesn’t work for tips. She does her work, bringing enthusiasm and making connections, because this is her passion. If her clientele doesn’t respond in this particular restaurant, there’s no humiliation in putting on that show in a different one. Or in moving her venue from a restaurant to a nightclub or a classroom.

One of the disconnects of our language is the confusion between enjoying a vacation, the somnambulistic, disconnected, drunken haze of lying on the beach, and enjoying your art, the sometimes frightening, grueling, high-stakes work of making a difference. No one wonders why successful musicians keep touring or successful authors keep writing even after they have no need to make a living. We don’t wonder because we understand and envy the joy that comes from performing what you love, the satisfaction that comes from making art instead of following instructions.

It’s precisely the high-wire act of “this might not work” that makes original art worth doing.

We make the art and then we get the feedback, but the art must happen first. If we’re in love with the feedback and trying to manipulate the applause we get, we’ll cease to make the art we’re capable of. When the critic pushes you to make better art, art that you are capable of, then her response is worth cherishing. But the critic who pushes you to fit in or dumb down your work—take that criticism with caution.

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it. —Jiddu Krishnamurti

Love is a commitment to a person, not to that person’s behavior.

Art is a commitment to a process and to a direction and to generosity, not to a result.

The art is too important for these reviews to be indulged. Walk away. Let them be wrong. They are critics. Critics are always wrong.

amygdala,

The security theater at the airport is a cultural roller coaster, with the TSA using uniforms and hassle to (they hope) incite fear among some travelers and comfort among the rest.

The biggest cultural roller coaster of all is the one that pushes us to keep our heads down and comply, the one that is short-circuiting your art. This is the unspoken threat (the one we’re reminded of from first grade) that you’re just one misstep away from being fired, ostracized, thrown out, and exiled from the community. It’s not true, but your lizard brain doesn’t know that, any more than it knows that a roller coaster at Six Flags isn’t going to kill you. None of this is rational. All of it is effective, because it touches our fear and shame.

When the world changes, industrialists get stressed. That’s because the industrial system is optimized and polished and stretched to be good at maximizing profit. Like a show dog that could never make it in the wild, industrialism is pampered and brittle.

I want them to discover that they are artists; everyone is an artist, a creator, and a refiner of sensibility without knowing it. —Yves Klein

Our economy has worked overtime to emphasize and reward the lizard. We have built a society around making the artist the exception and heroism the rare instance that proves the rule.

Edmund Bergler

the resistance took over for writing just as writing became important. A hundred years earlier, it wasn’t unusual for writers like Trollope and Dickens to write forty or more books over a career—while keeping a day job. You sat down and you wrote and then you were done. Starting in the 1950s, though, when writing became godlike, when creating the great American novel had a lot of kamiwaza associated with it, the drinking started and so did the blocking. It was easier to talk about making art than it was to actually do it. And that’s where we are today, except that everything we’re counted on to do that’s important is also fraught with risk, because it flies in the face of the easy path of obedience and blame. Everything that matters is like writing, because it’s all art.

Bold doesn’t always mean bellicose or dramatic. It might merely mean connected.

We’re drawn to connect with people doing art. They are us at our best. They are the new gods of our myths.

It takes confidence and guts to intentionally create tension. The workman wants no tension. The cook or the person following instructions in the Dummies guide wants nothing more than to meet spec and avoid the possibility of tension. But the artist trusts the work and the audience enough to delight in bringing the tension to the boiling point before relieving it.

Kamiwaza doesn’t mean all-powerful and perfect. If the gods were perfect, there would be no point to the myths we tell. We tell them precisely because the gods aren’t perfect—they are merely bold.

The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these.

“This might not work” isn’t merely something to be tolerated; it’s something you must seek out.

We’ve greatly exaggerated the risk of sinking, without celebrating the value of swimming.

Art has no safety map, no easy-to-follow manual, no guaranteed method. Once those things exist, the art becomes paint by numbers and is hardly worth doing.

The choice between being the linchpin (the one people can’t live without) and the cog (who does what she’s told). The choice between doing art (and forging your own path, on your own terms, and owning what happens) and merely doing your job (which pushes all the power and all the responsibility to someone else). The good news is that it’s your choice, no one else’s.

The army spends billions of dollars to stamp out grit, to find soldiers who won’t comply—and to get rid of them. The basic part of basic training is all about eliminating the grit, the burrs and the edges that interfere with the coherence of the group. The army wants the group, not the soldier, to have grit.

All industrial systems abhor grit, the unmeasurable little bits that gum up the works and make outcomes unpredictable. Digital smoothness is the antithesis of grit. Proven processes are the opposite of grit.

Grit is our ...

Grit is the unexpected bump, the decision that cannot be changed, the insistence on a vision, or the ethics of a creator. Grit stands in the way of the short-term compromises of the industrialist.

We measure sandpaper and grindstones in terms of grit—their ability to stand up to resistance. Someone with grit will grind down the opposition, stand up in the face of criticism, and consistently do what’s right for their art. Mostly, they mess up the machine.

Tenured college professors live in fear of the committee chair or the journal editor or student reviews—except the ones who don’t; they stand up and speak up and make an impact. Assembly-line workers live in fear of the foreman and the union boss—except those who don’t; they point out the inefficiencies, the safety issues, and, most important, the overlooked contributors waiting to make a difference. Creators live in fear of the critic, the sharp-tongued pundit who can take them down with the stroke of a keyboard. Except for those who don’t. The ones who don’t are willing to take the short-term critical hit and then go on to change our culture.