Mike Sturm

“Painting of Russian writer Evgeny Chirikov” by Ivan Kulikov

Passion, Payment, and Perseverance

All throughout my childhood, my father worked 14-hour days at a job he hated. He would come home to cold dinners, after I was asleep. On weekends, he did whatever side-jobs he could to make money so we could move out to the suburbs, where the schools were better.

In the moments between his long and exhausting workweeks, my dad pounded the following message into my head: don’t take the job for money, get a job you love. That’s the key to happiness.

His benchmark test was this: if what you do in your job is something that you would do for free anyway — because you love it — that’s the ideal work.

I Ran In Search Of…

I took that advice and ran with it. I ran looking for the thing that would be a reward in and of itself — career path be damned.

I ran to art school. When I lost the passion for that venture, I ran to majoring in philosophy. I ran back and forth from there to political science. I ran all over academia, making sure that I found whatever it was that was going to ensure that I didn’t feel the way my Dad did during his working life.

I ran through some pretty unsavory situations in my twenties — all in the name of finding that job that passed my dad’s test.

As it turns out, I ended up running into a regular 9 to 5(ish) office gig. Why? Because that is where the money is — because there are more important things in life than professional success, and those things require money. Most of the stuff that I do from a day to day is not stuff that I would also do for free, so the job fails my Dad’s test. But as most of us have realized, part of growing up is realizing all of the ways in which our parents were wrong. Sorry, Dad, but as a millennial, I had to “hack” your advice a little.

The Hack: Terminal Side-Gigging

All of those places that I ran above: art, philosophy, political science — were all roads that ended in cul-de-sacs. What I ended up realizing was that writing was the thing all along. What I wanted to do, what I would do — and was doing — for free was writing. It only took me 14 years or so to realize it.

So yes, I work a regular jobby-job. I do things with spreadsheets, I give people performance appraisals, I deliver reports to and negotiate with customers. As a 20 year-old, I would have turned my nose up at such a job description. I would argue that a job like that wouldn’t fulfill me — it doesn’t pass my dad’s test.

But now I know better. As with everything, I’ve hacked, I’ve found a work-around. I have the side-gig. I write stuff like this online for free. I do it because I honestly enjoy it. It fulfills me to get this stuff out on the page, and to know that the thoughts that I think help you readers — no matter how half-baked they may be.

So why do I relay all this? How can this be generalized to apply to others? I think that the concept of a side-gig can save us from that nagging feeling that we’re not squeezing everything out of us in the jobs that pay us. It offers a safe place for our passions to live and breathe without being tainted by the worries and compromises of commerce.

Does that sound too hippy-ish, too immature? Perhaps it is. I struggle to evaluate that. But what I do know is that I feel thrilled and alive when I’m writing — especially about ideas that have grabbed hold of my interest. But if I also had to keep tinkering and worrying about how to monetize it, I’m not so sure that I would get that thrill. The more that became a part of the work, the more it would end up being like a regular job. So for now, I keep it as a terminal side-gig. The thrill comes first, and the money comes later.

The Whims of the Market

In the back of my mind, I think this could be a more sustainable model. I can tinker with my writing in the quest to do it better as writing, rather than trying to make it more marketable as a product. Then, if and when there emerges a market for what I’m already doing, the money comes without me having to twist and contort my writing to try to hook up with the market. My work can attract and mold some portion of the market — not the other way around.

Is this a crazy dream? Probably. But for now, I can keep doing what I’m doing — to varying degrees. If it works out, and I get paid to write what I love writing — great! If not, I’ll keep writing what I love to write. I’ll be able to keep the thrill of doing it untainted because I’m doing it to write better, rather than to leverage it into a career. It’s an odd position to take, for sure, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately.

So I guess here’s the more general thought: if you have a thing that you love to do, but it doesn’t match what people are falling over themselves to pay for, keep it as a terminal side-hustle. Keep doing it and honing it. Don’t hone it to make it more market-friendly, but hone it to to make it better in and of itself. So when the winds of market demand change (as they so often do), they may blow in your direction. And guess what. All you have to do to monetize your thing is to just keep doing your thing — exactly how you have been. Now how cool would that be?

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credit: Anton Fromkin

Yet Another Way that Writing Will Save Us All

Silence is an important part of the effective person’s repertoire. That may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. Effective people are intelligent — not in that they know all sorts of facts and pieces of data — but in that they understand what is going on in their immediate environment, and can realize connections and dependencies that others can’t. This intelligence, though, comes in large part from being able to listen and to think deeply.

I’ve written before about ways to listen more effectively, and those ways all involve saying less and leveraging silence for your own benefit. The more you allow others to say, the more you can gain insight into valuable things that can help you achieve your goals.

But being silent is difficult. In order to do it, you need to be able to clear your mind of all of the nagging thoughts that muddy up your ability to listen effectively. They are noise, that drown out the signal of the things you should pay attention to. Luckily, those of us that are constantly thinking and find it hard to quiet our minds in order to better listen have a great tool at our disposal: writing.

Make the Clackity Noise

One of my favorite writers on the internet has a great piece in which he extolls the virtue of “making the clackity noise” — i.e., typing on a keyboard. Y’know, writing. Dig it:

The only way I can tell I’m relearning this is I notice that the keyboard has been making the clackity noise for several contiguous minutes. I see that words have started to come out and sometimes they’re good and almost always they’re not and increasingly I’m not all that worried about it either way.

I’ve learned that my job is to just sit down and start making the clackity noise. If I make the clackity noise long enough every day, the “writing” seems to take care of itself.

Take this and apply it to thinking, with no goal to produce something publishable. To make myself clear: I am saying that the best way to clear your mind of the noise is to write about the noise. As you write, you will think, and as you think, the noise will (after a time) quiet.

With that noise out of your head, you can get back to silence. Once you can be (mostly) silent, you can listen better. Once you listen better, you can gain more insight, make more connections, and become wiser and more effective in your endeavors — whatever they may be.

A Bonus: Writing Helps you Look Better

Anyone who would be considered a “high performer” will tell you that preparation is key to success. I can’t deny that. You know what I’m going to say don’t you? Writing is excellent preparation. Literally sitting down for 5 minutes to bang out a mini-manifesto about any given topic on which you need to make a decision gives you infinitely better chances of coming to sound conclusion — one that you feel better about.

On the heels of being able to better decide on what to think and what to do about things, you will end up feeling and looking a heck of a lot better. You’ll be less frazzled and seemingly unprepared. You’ll know your own positions and plans better. You will be calmer and more collected. You will better understand what is important to you, and who you really are. All because you put some time into sussing out your thoughts by making the clackity noise.

Writing clarifies. Writing purifies. Writing makes your thoughts into roaring engines of achievement.

So go make the clackity noise.

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credit: Stougard

Some Thoughts on Why the Small Things We Do are So Valuable

Those in the English-speaking Buddhism community have a word that they use to talk about their spiritual habits: “practice”. So when you hear a dharma talk or read something by a Zen Buddhist (and probably a Buddhist in general, come to think of it), they’re likely to talk about “your practice”. Most often, the context is that of meditation, or mindfulness more generally.

The possessive pronoun “your” is placed in front of the word on purpose because each person’s practice is individual. Sure, there are some basic tenets of general practice that everyone should follow. But even if everyone did the same basic tasks and had the same basic habits, everyone would do them in a slightly different way.

But the truth is, the notion of a practice is much wider — it’s as wide as you allow it to be. The only requirement of a practice is that it be sacred — sacred to you, that it be purifying, and that it contribute — in some (very) small way — to the well-being of the world. Interestingly the smallest purification of yourself often makes a substantial contribution to the well-being of the world.

I’ve come to really like the word “practice” because it is so unassuming. And because it’s so unassuming, it’s also powerful.

You could use the word “ritual”, but that sounds too stuffy, and it sounds like everything has to be just so. You can use the word “habit”, but that sounds like a tool, not valuable in and of itself, and only appreciated as a means to some prescribed end. But practice — practice is humble, it admits of imperfections, in fact it assumes and welcomes imperfections. As an imperfect human being, I can most definitely get behind that. We should all be practicing. We should all have a practice, because we should all be trying to do better.

What Makes a Practice?

What makes something a practice is not that you do it all the time, or that you have certain way of doing it. Those things play a part, but they’re not the essential element of a practice. What makes a practice powerful is sacredness. You have to see the thing you do as a sacred thing, meaning that it means more than just whatever is going on on the surface level. I’m not sure what more to say other than that. You feel what is sacred. When you view a thing as sacred, you revere it, you draw emotion out of it, it breathes new air into you when you participate in it.

Whether it’s meditation, prayer, exercise, writing, making tea, or feeding a disabled loved one — keeping a practice, or ritual, sacred is really all you need. You can build nearly anything from just that. You can build a really good, peaceful life from that. You can use it to push yourself to be better, or to anchor you and keep you from wandering off. It is equally good for both purposes, and many others.

One caveat, though (and there’s always one of those): whatever the practice is, it can’t be something harmful. Plenty of drug addicts and alcoholics have a practice or ritual, but it’s destructive and harmful — to themselves and others. However, as many in recovery end up learning, that practice was actually a faulty means to the same end as a healthy one. They end up finding peace in a “replacement” practice — one that really gets them closer to that place they were seeking in their most destructive practices before.

Practice Makes….Life

The thing about how the Buddhists use the word “practice” is that they actually end up using it as another word for how we we live generally. Your life becomes an extension of your most sacred practices. As Will Durant famously said (in explaining Aristotle’s idea of character), “we are what we repeatedly do.”

A good life is built by good practices. Good practices are built on a foundation of holding things sacred, often the most little of things. So what do you hold sacred? What do you revere? How’s your practice?

Thank you for reading.

Between my freshman and sophomore year of college, my first long-term relationship ended. It was the first relationship I was in where the “l” word was exchanged. I wasn’t heart-broken by any means, and neither was she. We both made a half-hearted effort to keep up a long-distance relationship for two semesters, 60 miles apart. When I returned home for the summer, we quickly realized that we weren’t built for spending a lot of time together.

Regardless, the experience caused me to return to school in the Fall in a kind of self-examination/self-refinement mode. For whatever reason, that meant combing through the university library and checking out a translation of the Dhammapada — one of the primary texts of Buddhism. That transaction set the tone for my relationship with Buddhism, and perhaps the most useful thing that I have learned — your breath is your link to this life.

We Do It, But We Don’t

Buddhist meditation is based on being conscious of your breath. I have always appreciated this as an outstanding summary of life itself. We are always breathing, but we’re not always breathing the way we breathe when we’re conscious of it.

Try a little experiment. The next time you’re feeling angry, anxious, stressed, or whatever, remind yourself to take 3 breaths and let them go. The moment that you initially got to take the first breath, you’ll realize that you were barely breathing. The breath was shallow, contorted, and suppressed. Once you become conscious of your breath, and that takes center stage in your consciousness, the feelings that have begun to take hold recede, become less severe — they loosen their grip on you a bit. You become centered again.

The more you stay with your breath, the more you realize that breathing, like living, is something we do, but we don’t do. Breath — like life — happens whether we hold the reigns or not. But like riding an energetic horse, when we fail to take the reigns and drive, we give up control, and just go where the wild horse takes us. That’s no way to live.

When we make it a point to breathe consciously, we make it a point to live consciously. Being conscious of your breath allows you to then be conscious of how your body feels, of what kind of thoughts and emotions are swirling around your mind.

Taking time to center yourself in your breath gives you the reigns to drive your body and mind — if even for a few seconds. Even those few seconds can make all the difference. Just like a wild horse, all you need is a few seconds to change the direction the horse is facing, and you can make a drastic change in your destination. That is all you need — a few seconds here, a few seconds there. Ultimately, you’ll find enough solace in those seconds, that you will turn them into minutes, or more. At least that’s how it has happened for me.

We Forget, And That’s Okay

You will forget to breathe, all the time. And that’s okay. We all do; we all will. You will consciously breathe much less often than you consciously do it. That is also okay. It’s always just one thought away. It’s your little trick, when none other are available. It’s the one thing you can always remember. It’s the one thing that will always make a world of difference. It is the victory that is always at hand, and where you are always the favorite.

You will forget to breathe today. And that is great, because it feels so good to remember that you can breathe. And when you do it, it feels like nothing else does.

image credit: Rob Farrow

I’m tired of seeing the word “success” or “successful” in the titles of blog posts, Medium articles, newsletters, and podcasts. There, I said it.

It’s not that I don’t think people should chase goals, hustle, take risks, and make sacrifices. We should do those things. They are a pathway to growth. Notice that I said “growth”, rather than success. I have a feeling that we’ve been conflating those two terms. Just search the term “success” or “successful” on Medium, and see what pops up.

Most of the pieces that use the term “success” or “successful” are merely trying to give advice about how to improve. The problem is that that more subtle message gets drowned out by claims about “success”. Because, what if this one thing that Elon Musk and Bill Gates do doesn’t make you successful by the year’s end? You probably feel like you failed, and not in that sexy way, where you still have backing from other VC firms for your next startup — more like that way where you feel like everyone is doing better than you.

The Right Goal

I hate it when people succumb to the pressures of a wayward society — one that prioritizes status above virtue. So when so much emphasis is placed on success, rather than improvement, I cringe. I cringe because I don’t think that’s the right goal. I don’t say that because I think success is a mirage or because I don’t think people can achieve it. I just think that success is a goal in the same way “being awesome” is a goal — it’s nebulous, poorly defined, and nobody will define it in the same way twice. That’s probably why it’s so easy to use “success” as a kind of pseudo-clickbait word. Everyone likes the sound of it, but no one can really tell you what it is.

So how about we aim for a different, more practical goal: work on being better. Not better than anyone around you, or better than some media icon, but better than you were yesterday. Look at the things that others have told you you need to work on them, develop a simple plan to do better at them, then do it.

Stop for a minute or two each day and see if you are doing better — even by a little bit — especially by a little bit. It’s those really small changes — the ones that are hard to perceive day to day — that will ultimately lead to sustainable growth. And sustainable growth is the only kind of growth we should be interested in. 10x growth is likely not sustainable. 10K to 10 billion in one year is likely not sustainable. What is sustainable is that you were able to be less impatient today than you were all last week, that you made those around you feel more appreciated than you usually do. Because you know the simple way that you did it, you stand a better chance of sustaining it.

At the end of the day, if you made any kind of gains — be it monetary or otherwise — but you can’t sustain and build off of them, you gained nothing. You didn’t grow. It was a blip, and you’re none the better for it.

Not Always “More”

One more thing to keep in mind: sometimes, improvement is not done by addition, but by subtraction. Scratch that, many times, improvement is done by subtraction. The fewer things you focus on, the more likely you are to make sustainable progress on those things. The less complicated things are, the more likely you are to stay engaged.

The pursuit of more is a vacuous one. Improvement and accumulation are not synonyms. We can, and do, grow by avoiding accumulation of things, money, jobs, and other things. We improve by simplifying, eliminating, purifying.

I am not aiming to be successful — whatever that means. I am just aiming to be better, because I know that means. Come join me.

And How to Make it the Best it Can Be

We hear a lot these days about whether a person is an introvert or an extrovert. Books and articles abound about how to figure out which one you are, what the strengths are of each, and how to leverage them for success — mostly in the context of business.

But while whether one is an introvert or an extrovert is important, it’s only half of the picture when it comes to the important relationship dynamics in one’s life. Introversion and extroversion have to do with how one relates to others — interpersonal relations. But how one relates to others is just part of the picture — it’s just one kind of relationship. What about the other relationship, the most important one? I’m talking about intrapersonal relationships — or how one relates to oneself.

I hope that doesn’t sound crazy. If it does, that’s actually a big part of the problem. Read on.

How Do You Treat Yourself?

How often have you found yourself feeling angry, and out of sorts, but not at another person, or group of people — you’re just angry? You’ll find it manifest in sarcastic jibes at friends and loved ones, or in your just being short with people who clearly don’t deserve it. It’s background anger — like ambient noise, but emotional. You may be so used to it that you don’t even notice it’s there — because it’s how things have normally been for you for a while.

The anger usually comes from your having failed to meet expectations that you’ve placed on yourself. Even expectations that others have placed on you won’t hold a candle to the ones that you’ve internalized yourself. The funny thing is that in many cases, we take external expectations that others have of us, and internalize them — often without bothering to ask if they’re fair to us. Also, we often magnify the stakes of these expectations; we hang the hat of our very personal worth upon them.

These internalized expectations are often far from realistic, which is what makes them so harmful. And those of us who are actively engaged in self-improvement (be it through reading books and articles, taking classes, or other means) tend to have the most unrealistic demands of all. We have a lethal combination: we are great at being critical of ourselves, we are passionate about improvement, and thus we place high expectations on ourselves — ones that we passionately hammer into our subconscious minds.

So when you (unsurprisingly) fail to meet those unrealistic demands that you’ve placed on yourself, you create a cognitive dissonance — a space between how you perceive you should be and how you feel you actually are. Anger, sadness, anxiety, and the related negative emotions are a result of that. You feel a distance between who you expect yourself to be, and who you are. It’s a real and palpable existential divide that lies at the heart of so much of our daily angst.

How you treat yourself is ultimately how you treat others

The relationship you have with yourself is the foundation for all of the other relationships in your life. However you relate to yourself sets a precedent for how you relate to others. If you tend to harshly judge and blame yourself for even small things, you will likely do that for others — especially those close to you. Think of it this way: the worst way that you treat yourself is going to be the way you treat others in your life by default when you can’t put on a show.

How to Treat Yourself Better

1. Journal Regularly

Seriously. Write down your feelings — not your judgments about your feelings — but just how you’re feeling. All of us have some terrible thoughts, impure thoughts, crazy thoughts, from time to time. It’s important that we acknowledge those thoughts and feelings, then realize that those thoughts and feelings are not who we are.

We are not our thoughts and feelings, rather who we are is based on how we treat the thoughts and feelings that pop into our minds.

If we calmly acknowledge our emotions and choose let them flutter about until we can choose our next actions, we are wise and calm people. If we allow our fresh and harsh emotional reactions and random thoughts to drive our behavior, we’re doomed.

Journaling regularly helps to create distance between your reactions and your actions, between your emotions and your choices. But be sure to use almost entirely first-person language (“I feel that” “I had this emotion…”, etc.). Avoid making judgments about others — how they feel, what their desires and motives are, and the like. That will keep the focus where it needs to be, on you.

2. Don’t Identify With Your Thoughts

You are not the thoughts you think. You are not the emotions you feel. Those things pop into your mind, and you then choose how to relate to them, but they are not who you are. Realizing this can be difficult, but it’s the first step in developing a sense of yourself as a being to be loved and nurtured.

Yes, that’s right, you need to love and nurture yourself. That is not selfish. In fact, to really love and nurture yourself is necessary in order to really love and nurture others in any sustainable way. If you beat up on yourself, and deny yourself love and understanding — while trying to love and nurture others — it is only a matter of time before you have an emotional cave-in. And where does

3. Work a 4th Step

Of the many things that alcoholics and drug addicts can teach us, chief among them is the concept of a searching and fearless moral inventory. It’s an effective way to gain insight into the things that you need to focus on in order to become a more peaceful person. It’s important to note here: the goal is not to be “insanely successful” or to “10x” something or other. The goal is to be at peace with yourself. Nothing else worthwhile is obtainable without that goal being accomplished.

Being at peace with yourself is difficult. It requires a lot of initial work, and a lot of maintenance. It requires changing your disposition from being critical to being compassionate — to yourself and to others. The 4th step in AA and NA is a great model for anyone who wishes to get a better grasp on their emotional life. There is a great worksheet that I found, which is an excellent guide for doing a fearless and searching moral inventory. If nothing else, it provides a great prompt for journalling (see suggestion # 1).

If All Else Fails

If all else fails, remember this: at the end of the day, you are all you really have. Everyone and everything in your life is subject to the forces of decay and death; they can leave well before you do — in one way or another. But you are stuck with you for the rest of your life. The more you understand, accept, love, and nurture yourself, the better your life will be.

It’s difficult work, but I can think of fewer things more worthwhile.

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An Essay on Creativity and Craft

About 14 years ago, as a fresh-faced undergraduate, I stumbled across the Tao Te Ching. It’s a classic of the Eastern philosophical canon, and if you haven’t read it, you should. And if my endorsement isn’t enough, consider this: most translations weigh in at fewer than 75 pages. It’s a quick read the first time around, but you will find yourself coming back to it again and again.

One of the themes in the book is one that actually isn’t unique to either it or the Eastern philosophical tradition: things are not what they appear to be. There is a deeper aspect of the reality we swim through — beyond the hollow descriptions that we so clumsily affix to the world we know. So the labels and roles that people self-apply and that others apply to them, are likely not the real story. More interestingly, the instruments we use to do our work — whatever that work may be — are also more than they appear to be.

The Instruments You Use

Consider a pencil. A pencil has a role that has been assigned to it: make marks on surfaces. The other end of it is an eraser. The eraser’s assigned role is to take away marks. Essentially, the roles are for the tip to create and the eraser to destroy. Most people who pick up a pencil use it in this way. But consider what happens when you change the assigned roles. Use the eraser to create white space, and use the white space to make an image.

This isn’t a new idea by any measure — artists have been doing it for years. But someone had to do it first. Someone had to look at the pencil and think perhaps the eraser is not exactly what it seems. More simply, someone had to understand the agreed upon role of an instrument and change it. The destructive became the creative. Things were changed forever.

So what instruments in your life and work are going unexamined? What things are arranged in such a way that you haven’t thought to look at their roles differently? At a higher level, what do you perceive as the role of your work itself?

Think about it: the best creative work is itself an instrument. It is an instrument for change, an instrument to evoke a reaction, to arouse emotions previously hidden —both in persons and in society as a whole. But each piece of work does this in a different way, by tugging on different heartstrings. Which heartstrings are you looking to tug?

Your Work as an Instrument

The work you do does work itself. It works on the thoughts and feelings of those who come into contact with it. The things you create also create. They create new movements and conversations. They stir emotions and animate passions. That all starts with whatever instruments you pick up, and how you choose to use them. This is not limited to music or visual arts.

Words, too, are instruments. The word “clearly” has a different sound, and evokes a different reaction than “unequivocally”. Choosing one over the other makes a difference; it changes the work. It changes how it is perceived, whether or not it persuades, what it moves the reader to do. The syntactical symphony adopts a new, perhaps richer tone as a result of the linguistic instruments you choose to employ.

All this is to say that so much in the creative process is about asking questions, and trying out new and interesting answers to those questions. When the question is what is the role of the instruments I’m using? the new and interesting answer can merely be: whatever the role, I’m going to try changing it.

You might fall flat on your face(and I’m sure it wouldn’t be the first time), or you might just catch a tailwind that pushes you to create that inspiring and innovative piece. You just don’t know until you begin trying things out. But doing that requires courage; it requires openness. In our best moments, we exhibit both of those traits. And the more we can exhibit those traits, the more we can push others to do the same.

We tug some heartstrings. We push some envelopes. We think outside of boxes. And so on. All of that can come just by asking the right questions — by blowing up the right traditions.

It’s Never Done

The truth is, our work as creatives is never done. But don’t take that statement at face value. It doesn’t mean that we need to keep working. It means that we need to be conscious of the fact that the words we write and the images we create never stop working themselves. They never stop impacting others. They never stop inspiring, moving, motivating, infuriating, saddening.

In so many ways, our creations are like children. We do our best to shape them and prepare them to be out in the world, but they have their own spirits that we can only watch take flight. It’s exhilarating, but it’s also frightening. It’s empowering, but it’s also eviscerating. It is the only way I would choose it to be.

James Ensor “Masks Confronting Death” — image credit

And Other Subversive Advice for Doing Great Things

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it can also the best way to get good at something.

When I was in art school — my first oil painting class — we had a project in which we were tasked to reproduce a masterwork. I chose to copy James Ensor’s Masks Confronting Death. I spent hours upon hours doing it, and though I hated and feared painting for years before that, spending time copying a great work melted all of that fear and hatred away.

This is a common practice in art education — hone your technique by imitating the greats. It works because it takes your mind out of the taxing and turbulent creative ideation zone and solidifies your mechanics. More than that, it works because when you’re done, you realize hey, I can make something great; I have the skill.

Once you have that confidence, you can go on to the fun stuff: ideation. Because whatever idea you come up with, you now know that you have the mechanics to give it life. This holds no matter what your chosen mode of expression — writing, design, sculpture, landscape architecture, you name it.

Begin with Idolatry, End With iconoclasm

Almost all of us begin our creative journey with a certain kind of idolatry. We have heroes who we emulate and imitate — to varying extents. We hold them in high regard, and in doing so, we end up inadvertently holding ourselves in low regard. We tell ourselves — often unknowingly — that we can’t do what those greats do.

So this practice of imitation can help us work through that idolatry. You sit down and make something great that has already been made. You solidify your mechanics. You prove yourself to yourself. You literally answer — for yourself — the question of how your idol did that great thing.

With that out of the way, you can now walk among the giants of your field with the confidence of essentially being one of them. You can look at the work of the greats, and rather than asking how they did it, you can ask:

How would YOU have done it? How will YOU do your own thing?

Now you’ve moved on to the stage of iconoclasm — taking apart the greats. Killing your idols.

There is a favorite quote of mine about this subject from Zen mythology, attributed to master Linji:

If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha; if you meet the patriarchs, kill the patriarchs; if you meet an Arhat [enlightened one], kill the Arhat; if you meet your parents, kill your parents… in this way, you attain liberation.

Obviously, this quote is hyperbolic, but the point is meant to be strong. There is no room for idols in creative work. Sure, proper reverence of great works and their creators is admirable — but only for a time.

To paraphrase from a wonderful speech by John Waters, the true job of a creator is to wreck what came before. That means there is no room for looking on slack-jawed at great work, and worshiping those who did it. We can only waste so much time on that kind of idolatry. We need to quickly move on to the iconoclasm. We need kill the buddhas, kill the patriarchs. That is our real work to be done.

Technique, Schmechnique

If you’re not a master of texture like Chuck Close, or don’t have the finger agility of Yo Yo Ma, fine. Find a different approach — how you’d play different notes, make different brushstrokes, write different stories. Hell, you may not even use a brush at all. Yes, strong technique is a part of making great things, yes, but technique is not a narrow, well-defined thing.It begs to be questioned, overhauled, contorted — especially when it stands in the way of expressing something truly great.

Each artist has their own technique, but it’s only a means to an end. Thomas Kinkade was a great technician. Proofread Bot is a great technician. But neither have sparked a revolutionary fire in humanity with their firm grasp of technique. Remember: Jimi Hendrix couldn’t even read music. Technique as we knew it was a hurdle over which he chose to jump, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in honing your technique, but it does mean you shouldn’t let being unskilled deter you from letting it rip.

In summation: Find your idols, briefly admire them, and kill them. Kill them beautifully and passionately, technique be damned.

c/o:

A piece of unintuitive advice

Every day, I catch myself thinking something that I know I shouldn’t. Someone cuts me off on the way to work, and I immediately think terrible things that I dare not repeat here. I see someone with a bumper sticker or pice of clothing bearing some slogan, and I immediately write them off as a person. After finishing a few drinks at a party, I think about another, edging toward full-on party mode, on a Tuesday night. Though these are not the worst impulses I have, they’re all related to that part of me that formulates the worst impulse — that selfish ever-grasping impulse for more — for power, for pure, unbridled expression of whatever emotion I happen to be feeling.

I live 99% of my life — as I’m guessing you do — suppressing this worst impulse. I try to be generous, kind, and practice restraint. That is fine; it’s what we should be doing most of the time. But only doing that is actually not good for us. It effectively ignores the deeper issue. If we ever wish to be better people, we need to address those parts of us represent our worst impulses. We need to set aside time to do exactly the opposite of what we spend most of our days doing. Perhaps we can actually gain something if we give way to our worst impulse — at least for a little bit.

Get to Know Your Id

Freud theorized that there are three parts to the human psyche: the ego, the superego, and the id. The Ego and the Super-ego are the parts of the psyche that have been influenced, modified, and restrained by the outside world — incorporating values and norms in order to create a personality in accordance with the balance of civilization. The id, on the other hand, is that raw, wild beast within each person, operating on impulse, instinct, and unadulterated passions.

It’s that id that, since we so wish to control it as adults, we can’t afford to write off. Yes, it is the germ of our worst impulses, and is the driving force behind exactly the actions that we shouldn’t take, but ignoring it while we stifle it is no way to live.

In fact, we ignore or worst impulses at our own peril, and perilous it is. Ignoring your worst impulses is like ignoring the clunking sound coming from your car. You can get by for a while doing it, but eventually, whatever is not working properly will have implications, and you’ll have to address those at some point. If you don’t, everything will eventually grind to a screeching halt — leaving you stranded on a dark roadside.

Diagnosing Yourself

So take a tip from diagnosticians and use the unsavory goings-on in your psyche to figure out the nature of the problem. Like you would follow that bad sound in the engine of your vehicle to figure out where the problem is, take a look under the hood of your mind and follow those unsavory thoughts. They have a basis; they are likely a reaction to something. They didn’t just spring up from nowhere.

But in order to effectively diagnose and treat, you have to sit and observe. You have to sidle up to your id, watch it as it does its thing, without judging it or trying to do anything to it.

You know where this is going: mindfulness. You’ve likely read it in every self-help piece out there, and are probably sick of hearing about it, but there’s a reason it’s ubiquitous these days — it works. Mindfulness is the state that ideally we should all be in as often as possible. There’s nothing fancy about it; it is merely the state of being present in the current moment, and being aware of what’s happening in your mind.

From mindfulness comes the ability to embrace any thought or feeling that pops up, and the the ability to follow it down the rabbit hole to find where it comes from.

Be a Gardener of the Mind

Once you’re down the rabbit hole, you switch from being a mechanic to a gardener. You examine the garden of the mind, infested and overrun with weeds — thoughts and feelings you’d rather not have there. Then you begin the work of pulling out the weeds, tilling the soil around the good stuff in your mind, and cultivating desirable thoughts and feelings. But like gardening, mindfulness takes continuous work to cultivate a bountiful yield of good stuff. You have to be vigilant about identifying and rooting out the stuff you don’t want in your mind.

But, what we often fail to realize is that in order to root out something — be it plant or habit of thought — you have to first grasp it. Think about pulling a stubborn weed. The grip has to be firm, but still a bit loose. If it’s too tight, when you attempt to pull out the weed you will tear it where it meets the ground. The root remains, just under the soil, and the weed grows back — within days, keeping the already strong root as another weed grows. If that happens enough, you will have to dig into the soil, down to the bottom of the root system, and remove the whole thing using a more laborious process.

All of this applies to rooting out aspects of your psyche as well. Fear, anxiety, sadness, anger — they often have deep roots in the fertile soil of the mind. To really get them out, you have to take hold of them and dig to where they have roots. That means taking hold of those negative thoughts and emotions.

That means digging into the soil of your mind — the deep soil that hasn’t seen daylight in years. It means taking care to make sure that you get to the deep roots of the negative thoughts and emotions, carefully taking them out. More than anything, it means devoting time and attention to your own mind, and how it works.

But once that work is done, any future weeds are easily extracted. Being even somewhat mindful, you’ll notice when an unsavory thought pops up, and it will be easier to gently remove. I won’t lie. I’m not there yet — few people are. But it’s something to aim for.

Just know that your worst impulses are not who you are; they are just weeds in your mind’s garden. So get your hands dirty, and see if you can grow something great.

It’s the best, most sustainable business plan. Always has been, always will be.

Obligatory business picture, courtesy of pexels.com

Across divides of language, culture, customs, and best business practices there is one thing that remains at the bedrock of any solid organization. It is the one thing that will — no matter what your product or service is — be the essential element of why your company is valuable. It is what customers yearn for, and what competitors strive to do better.

That thing is help.

You can sell people or other organizations any product — an app, server space, a machine, or just plain money (in the form of financing). You can create a marketing campaign that highlights the great things about your product, a list of the people or companies that have used it, and ratings from all sorts of satisfied customers. But it all has to speak to the same thing: how it will help.

Everyone has challenges — whether personal, professional, or spiritual. When a product, service, or person clearly shows that they can help with said challenges, and they deliver, the sky is the limit.

This is probably not a revelation to anyone. But at the same time, I don’t quite see it in the talk about scale, burn rates, IPOs, and other talk around the bonfire of business. That makes me a bit sad.

Your business should help people, or it likely won’t survive. Founders and executives should help people gain a foothold in business, learn the ropes, and find their talents. To that end, business — at its best — is about lasting relationships. It’s about lasting relationships with customers who trust the businesses they partner with. It’s about loyalty and service to employees, even when reciprocation is uncertain. It’s about lasting ties to, and service of the community — as far out as that community may go. It is help and relationships all the way down.

Again, this should not be a surprise. This is what life in general is all about. Why think business is any different?