We fear a lot of things.

From an evolutionary perspective, fear keeps us alive. It’s not a bad thing in and of itself. As cave dwellers, we were right to fear the sabre-toothed tigers who would eat us without a moment’s hesitation. The fight-or-flight response has, so far, saved our species from extinction from a variety of threats.

As modern humans, we have the same physical reactions to fear–fight or flight–as our ancestors did. But having addressed the menace of the sabre-tooth tiger and with most of us adequately fed, watered, and sheltered, our fear-based self-preservation system has tuned its emotional radar screen to a more insidious source of danger: threats to our ego.

“The defense of ego is a driving force behind achievement in many fields,” according to Michael Clarkson writing in Intelligent Fear. Worrying about what others think is epidemic.

Yes, we fear failing. We fear embarassing ourselves. We fear becoming the guy who lives in his van down by the river.

But most of all, and most interestingly, we fear being successful.

We crave the fame and fortune, but we (secretly) worry about the changes that success will bring to the way our life is currently constructed.

All this fear leads, inevitably, to irrational choices and bad behavior. The biggest, meanest, baddest-mutha consequence, especially for creatives, goes by many names much like The Devil Himself.

Steve Pressfield calls it The Resistance.

Seth Godin sometimes calls it The Lizard Brain.

Eric Maisel calls it Anxiety.

By whatever name, “It” is the part of our psyche that sabotages our own success out of a fear for what failure and success will do to the present condition of our ego.

photo credit: Joaquin Villaverde Photography

If anybody knows how to improve your chances of sticking with your resolutions, it’s Dan Heath & Chip Heath, authors of Made to Stick and Switch.  Here are their five recommendations:

1. Don’t be ambitious. When change is hard, aim low. A friend of ours, the editor of a wellness magazine, has a “1-Song Workout” that she does on days when she doesn’t feel like working out. She tells herself, “All I have to do is work out for one song,” but of course she often gets in a groove and finishes a full workout. So don’t set an ambitious New Year’s resolution like “I’ll work out four times a week.” Instead, plan to do “1-Song Workouts” on Monday and Thursday. Leave yourself room to overachieve — that feeling of “nailing it” is what will keep you hooked.
2. Watch for bright spots. If you’re trying to eat healthier, for instance, don’t obsess about all the times that you slip and eat an Oreo. Instead, keep a constant watch on what does work. If you ate healthy food all day yesterday, how did you get away with it? Was it because you had healthy “heat & eat” food that was easy to fix? Was it because you never let yourself get so hungry that you’d crave fatty foods? Did you avoid the office lunch at the Mexican place? If you can understand what allowed you to succeed, you can do more of it. That’s bright-spots thinking. (Need a refresher on “bright spots”?)
3. Make simple tweaks in your environment. If you’re trying to increase your savings, pay with cash and leave your cards at home. If you’re trying to diet, carry around a Ziploc of apple slices. If you’re trying to jog, lay out your clothes the night before. If you’re trying to stop oversleeping, set up a double (or triple?) alarm system. (Or buy a Clocky with your Xmas gift cards!) This stuff sounds insignificant, but it will make a big difference.
4. Rely on planning, not willpower. Your Resolution calls for a new way of behaving. And that’s a challenge because you’ve been practicing the old way of behaving for a long time. The old way is well-paved and familiar and comfortable. So you can’t just bet on willpower or good intentions to ensure your success. Use your planning skills. Get yourself on the hook for something! Don’t plan to “learn Spanish.” Register for a Spanish course at your local community college. Do it right now — you’re already online. Or don’t “try hard” to go to the gym in the morning. Email your friend, right now, and tell ‘em to come get you at 7am on January 3.
5. Publicize your resolution. We all know peer pressure works. So use it on yourself. Tell everybody you know what your resolution is. They’ll bug you about it, and you won’t want to disappoint them. Just knowing that they know will make you more likely to succeed. Hell, if you want, tell us. We won’t bug you about it, but we’ll silently root for you.

Courtesy of the Heath Brothers.

I believe that creativity can peacefully and profitably co-exist with business.

But that’s not going to happen until we own up to the notion that the core skills we need to be an artist–even a genius artists–are not sufficient to be a successful artist.  Gifts and talents in the artistic realm don’t guaranty success in the commercial realm.

Seth Godin, an extraordinary marketer who isn’t known for pulling his punches, said it best: “Those struggling artists at the local craft faire are struggling because they don’t have the guts or the wherewithal to take their work to the next level.”

While Seth might be right about what’s holding us back, I believe that if you’re willing to learn about yourself, focus on your strengths, delegate your weaknesses to pros & monitor their work, and remember to ship, you just might be able to enjoy your success.

Heck, even art schools are finally getting into the act.  CCA in San Francisco, Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Parsons New School and Pratt in New York City, and Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia now offer programs designed to teach not just how to think visually, but how to communicate in the language of business.

If art schools are doing it, don’t you think “all this talk of commerce” merits looking into?

An artist who understands both the creative and the business worlds, and who can clearly articulate their value to others, is much more likely to bridge the gap between creativity and business success.

You might call this person an artrepreneur.  Or an entreprenartist.  I prefer the infinitely more pronounceable profitably creative. What you choose to call this type of well-rounded person matters less than choosing to be this person.

Photo by Evan Long

Surfing the interwebs recently, I came across this little gem:

Back of every “Success Story” you will almost invariably find a story of hard work.  There is nothing startingly new about this observation, but it is one which can never be overlooked when you are interested in achieving recognition—and remuneration—beyond the average.  I am not denying that some people seem to get “the breaks” which push them ahead faster than others who might be just as capable and deserving, but this is the exception rather than the rule. And a lucky break never helped anyone who wasn’t prepared to make the most of it when it came. In other words, there is no such thing as overnight success.

Those words are as true for artists and performers today as they were when they first appeared in the February 1938 issue of Accordion World.

Scott Harrison built Charity: Water into a $5 million organization in less than three years.  But to do so, he relied on an e-mail list of 12,000 names he’d developed over years of working as a nightclub promoter, as noted by Chris Guillebeau in The Art of Non-Conformity.

It took Gary Vaynerchuk a mere 18 months from the launch of his site, winelibrarytv.com, to get a guest appearance as a wine expert on the Conan O’Brien show.  As Vaynerchuck explains in Crush It!, he’d been working in his family’s liquor store since age 16–selling the stuff before he could even drink it himself–and spent hours training his palate to discern exotic tastes ranging from mango and papaya to sweaty socks.

Look past the public hype, and you’ll see someone who’s been at it for years.  Even the youngsters.

Tiger woods might have been, at 21, the youngest player to ever win the Masters Tournament, but by that time he’d been playing golf for 19 years.

So the next time you hear some story about the latest phenom who seems to come out of nowhere, don’t get jealous.  Okay, maybe a little jealousy can be a motivator.  But don’t fall into the trap of thinking they got there–and “if only” you could get there–without hard work.

Photo by ACME-Nollmeyer

A lot of arteestic types say they’re too busy or they can’t be bothered to learn about commerce.  Some go so far as to say they’re not interested in material things.  They act as though they enjoy starving.

I call bullshit.

Arteests don’t try to learn about these unfamiliar, uncomfortable topics because it’s scares them.  Don’t underestimate how powerful The Resistance can be, and how easily our fragile egos will trick us into rationalizing away our fears as something–anything–other than what they really are.

Money, in and of itself, is merely a tool that simplifies the exchange of value between people.

For instance: You’re a goat farmer with a broken truck and I’m a truck mechanic.  You might offer me one of your goats as payment for my repairs to your truck.  If I like goat meat, we’ve got a deal.  Now if I’m a vegetarian who hates goat cheese, the goat’s value to me is questionable and the deal is off.  But what if I love goats so much I set the price for the repairs at one-and-a-half goats?

Money is society’s workaround for the one-and-a-half goat problem.  Or, as one of the central characters in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged explains it:

Money is the material shape of the principle that [people] who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.  Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force.  Money is made possible only by the [people] who produce.  Is that what you consider evil?

Where people and by extension, money, get a bad rap is when they want money without having to provide value for it–Rand’s moochers and looters–or they just accumulate money for the sake of having more without making or doing something meaningful with it.  Like animal hoarders or junk hoarders, money hoarders aren’t much fun to be around.  If all you’re focused on is counting ducats while you ignore your audience and your craft, then you deserve every bit of nothing that heads your way.

If you want to create art for art’s sake, then do that.  Have a blast and don’t worry about the money.  Your art is your gift to society.

But if you’re trying to earn money from your creative efforts, then you need the marketplace–the intersection of art and commerce–because that’s where value is exchanged and, as British writer and metaphysicist Stuart Wilde reminds us, “the Universe cannot mail you a check from the clouds.”  And the better you understand the marketplace and commerce, the better you can “find other humans, satisfy their needs in some way, and have them transfer a little symbology into your bank account.”

It’s an unfortunate fact that most ideas just never happen.

After some extensive research with creatives, Scott Belsky writing in Making Ideas Happen, said that creativity itself is, “the greatest obstacle to seeing our ideas through to the finish.”

Whoa.  A bunch of real, working artists said the thing that goofed up their work the most was their own creativity?

Yep, and it gets worse.  Belsky goes on to identify the series of negative tendencies and challenges that accompany the creative psyche:

• self-doubts
• distaste for negative feedback
• tendency to use idea-generation as a way to escape the pain of self-discipline and execution
• rampant disorganization that (supposedly) fosters creative thinking

In my humble opinion, this is the real root of all evil… or at least the evil that stands in the way of our success.

Photo by sean94112

Two observations:

If you consider yourself a working artist, you’re likely a starving artist.

If you’re starving, it’s very likely your own damn fault.

Now I’m really going to piss you off.

Starving artists are much like the hordes of zombies that frequent our popular culture today. Think about it: they spend all day milling about with other zombies, mindlessly looking for morsels of food. If a fresh brain (or, potential audience) happens to inadvertently cross their field of view, they pounce (or, slowly coagulate en masse as zombies do) and a few of the zombies get some scraps or the brain is scared away, unscathed. Either way, the still-hungry zombie hordes shuffle off and resume milling about.

Why does this image endure in our society?

Because it’s largely true!

Does that piss you off? Good! It should.

Does that make it fair? No! It doesn’t.

Do you want to do something about it? Maybe even to prove me wrong?

Excellent! Read on.

As part of their “Tools for Creativity” mini-series, Make magazine recently posted to their blog an insightful and encouraging list of 10 tips for “The Care and Feeding of Ideas.” Some are good reminders; all are practical. My favorite:

Step 6: Make it ugly and quickly, at first
If you’re passionate about your idea (and you should be), your head may be exploding with possibilities … It can be easy to get overwhelmed by all the possibilities, and at this point it’s a good idea to remember the KISS principle. First time out, reduce your idea to its simplest, most minimal execution, and make that version. Otherwise, you can get caught waiting on the tools, time, or materials to make it “perfect” the first time.

Ideas are great, but they don’t happen until you get them out of your head and into some tangible form, no matter how tenuous or ‘ugly’ the first draft seems. Get nine more inspirations in the article.

The Care and Feeding of Ideas via Make

Author’s note: Why is an arts business expert writing about disaster survival?  Besides being an informative and intriguing read that I think can save lives, I saw a lot of similarities between what happens to disaster survivors and the tribulations that business owners frequently face.  What kills many in disasters is lack of preparedness, mental paralysis when faced with extreme fear, and inability to recover from the inevitable set-backs.  Substitute the phrase ‘business challenges’ for the word ‘disasters’ and you’ll see what I mean.

1. “They” can’t help you—at least not at first

In disasters of all types, the vast majority of rescues are done by ordinary folks well before first responders such as police, fire fighters, or medical teams have time to arrive.  Also, emergency response resources can easily be overwhelmed by a disaster.  The bigger the disaster, the longer you’ll be on your own.

You are responsible for your own survival.  A study of 20 years of serious airplane accidents found 56% of passengers survived, and their own behavior was a large determinant of their survival.  An Indian proverb, once quoted by Hunter S. Thompson, says it best: “Call on God, but row away from the rocks.”

2. The best way to get the brain to perform under extreme stress is frequent realistic practice

Your brain is a pattern matching machine.  A disaster can quickly overwhelm your brain unless it has a pattern to quickly match to.  In the absence of training, the brain often chooses from unhelpful behaviors  like denial, procrastination, laughter, silence, milling about, paralysis, and even hallucination-like sensory distortions.  These are reinforced by a lack of preparedness.

A high sense of self-worth and self-esteem—factors that improve your survival odds—can be manufactured through training and experience.  Doing so also makes you rebound more easily.

3. Beware the hazards not reported on the evening news

The government, and by extension the news media, doesn’t do a very good job of keeping citizens informed of hazards in a manner than helps them make realistic risk assessments.  Deaths described as “freak accidents” are sometime very common.  Studies have even shown that reading the news (newspaper) is healthier than watching the news (TV) because you can more effectively filter out the hype from the meaningful data.

Security expert Bruce Schneier goes so far as to advise people, “if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it.”  Worry instead about the events that are so common they don’t make the news, like car crashes or domestic violence or cardiac disease.

4. The dread you feel about something is influenced by 6 factors – misread them and you’ll likely misjudge the risk

Uncontrollability, unfamiliarity, imaginability, suffering, scale of destruction, and unfairness are the factors that contribute to a sense of dread.  The higher an event scores on each factor, the more likely you are to dread that risk, even if the probability of the risk occurring is very low.  Car crashes kill many more people annually than plane crashes.  Yet people fear plane crashes more because they aren’t the ones driving the plane (uncontrollability), they spend a very small portion of their lives at 20,000 feet (unfamiliarity), they have no problems imagining a crash given the frequency of plane-crash images in movies and in the media, and plane crash sites are more spectacular and spread out (scale of destruction).

The reverse can also be true.  Many of the people who died in Hurricane Katrina did so because they chose not to evacuate.  Having survived the direct hits of Hurricanes Betsy (category 3, 1965) and Camile (category 5, 1969), they had become familiar with hurricanes, dreaded them less, and thus calculated their risk as lower.  What they failed to factor into their risk assessments was that many of the natural wetland barriers that protected the Louisiana coastline from storm surges in the 1960s, had been destroyed in the name of development.  Experience is not always a good teacher.

5. Fear is profound and primitive but negotiable

A little bit of fear can be a good thing.  It sharpens your senses, and prepares your body to fight or flee.  This makes good sense from an evolutionary perspective.  But in cases of extreme fear, stress hormones can function like hallucinogenic drugs, causing people to gain certain powers (like hearing) and lose others.  Most people, even professionals like police officers, experience some kind of altered reality, but few know what to expect beforehand so are completed distracted by the physiological changes they’re experiencing.

Everyone can benefit from some kind of preparation, which will increase their confidence, therefore decreasing their fear and increasing their performance.

6. Emotions trump reason—but that’s not always bad

Emotions—especially fear—are hardwired in unique ways.  There are special neurological pathways that allow parts of the brain to make physiological responses to threatening stimuli  (the ‘flight or flight’ response) without the need for any conscious processing.  When time is of the essence, or when good data aren’t available, this fail-safe mechanism has kept humans alive for millennia.

After studying patients who’d lost emotional responsiveness due to brain injury, neurologist Antonio Damasio concluded that emotions and feelings, the so-called irrational sentiments, are a way to improve, rather than impede, our ability to judge risk.

Let your emotions run free when you can’t get good data.  But when your feelings clash with known facts, try to check yourself.   Just because you feel goofy wearing a bicycle helmet doesn’t mean you should ignore the fact that wearing a helmet improves your safety.

7. Warning people of dangers doesn’t have to panic them

There’s a fine line between getting people’s attention and losing them to a sense of futility, but given reasonable, tangible advice, people can be very receptive.  Warnings work best then they are consistent, easily understood, specific, frequently repeated, personal, accurate, targeted, and tell people what to do.

Emergency response professionals including “the Government” have a tendency not to trust the public not to panic.  As a result, official announcements or warnings often lack specifics, as evidenced by the Homeland Security color-coded alerts: easy to understand but not much else.

8. In a disaster, the herd instinct—not panic—will likely take over the group.  Harness it to save yourself and others.

Contrary to popular opinion, the normal response of a crowd in a disaster isn’t panic but to seek out other people.  Use loud, clear warnings and gestures and tell people what to do.  In a disaster, our obedience to authority can be an asset.

In a study of mine disasters, groups that survived each had a leader.  The leaders assumed that role not by rank or through bullying, but by being calm, knowledgeable, aware of details, and decisive, thus earning the group’s respect.

9. Group panic does occur, but only under three specific conditions.

Detailed research has shown that three specific conditions are required to trigger panic in groups.  People must (a) feel they might be trapped (knowing they’re trapped, like sailors on a submarine, won’t trigger it); (b) have a great sensation of helplessness; and (c) have a sense of profound isolation.  Eliminate any one of the three, and you’ve prevented the panic.

10. Resilient beliefs can cushion the blow of any given disaster

Preparation, supply-stocking, and training can’t prevent disasters, they can only improve your survival chances.  Certain beliefs have also been shown to speed the physical and emotional recovery of survivors.  They are:

• A belief that they can influence life events
• A tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil
• A conviction that they can learn from both positive & negative experiences

I’m feeling energetically giddy again.  I feel a great sense that anything is possible, good, and has promise.  And I want to do everything at once.  It’s energy overload.

This can be tremendously helpful in my creativity, but if I don’t learn to harness it better, I’ll get sidetracked by everything rather than making a quantum leap in impact for one thing.

I’ve been reading Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen.  I get so excited when an idea resonates.  The excitement starts with the thought, “I want to do that.”  And, because I’m fearful I’ll either forget the idea or lose the excitement driving it, I’m compelled to do that right now.  And I’ve stopped reading and started on that.  Then, I’m so excited about that, I want to do this.  And before I know it I’m simultaneously working on this.  Or this.  Or this.

Raw creative energy at its finest, manifesting itself as a thousand-ideas-at-once.  When it hits, it feels like being sidechecked and dragged around the ice by a sweaty, growling hockey player with no front teeth.  When the ride’s over, I’m breathless.  What a rush!  But am I any closer to the goal box?

Figuring out how to deal with this is a lot like asking how to wrangle a lightning bolt.  Here’s a trick that works for me:

Whenever I’m trying to focus on one task that’s generating a lot of other ideas I want to remember but don’t want to process in the moment, I take out a 3×5 index card, or if I’m feeling particularly frisky, a letter-sized page folded in half lengthwise.  Having a narrow width to write on (3″-4″)  seems key, so that I can keep it just to the right (or left, for you southpaws) of what I’m working on.

When I get an idea tangential to my chosen focus, I force myself to simply write it down without acting on it, and immediately return to what I was doing.

Simple, no?  Yeah, try it sometime, bub.

The real magic behind the trick is the immediate return to my chosen task.  By capturing the idea nugget, I mitigate the urge to deal with it for fear of losing it in the deluge of the idea storm.  I can have my daydream moment (or half-hour, as just happened while writing this–I never claimed to be perfect) and get right back (more or less) to the task at hand.

Photo by maggieandcharles.

Over on the Harvard Business Review blog “Managing Myself,” Rasika Welankiwar is discussing various methods she uses to keep her creative genius productively engaged.  When Welankiwar turned to the merits of the self-imposed panic states advocated by Shekhar Kapur in his (in)famous TEDIndia talk, I was reminded of the alarm trigger from Sally Hogshead’s Fascinate.  Either waiting until the last minute, or purposely making your earlier efforts unavailable as Kapur does, can work wonders for that final “get it done” rush of creativity.  I’ve do it myself all the time.

But there’s a dark side to all this thrashing.  As Seth Godin outlined in Linchpin, thrashing is the “apparently productive brainstorming and tweaking we do for a project as it develops.”  The catch: thrash too late and you’ll inevitability delay delivering your value.

In my seminars for artisans, I talk about the “great wall of self-doubt” that stands between the core business processes of Sales and Value Delivery.  The closer to your deadline you thrash, the more likely your alert muse will turn all panicky, giving rise to self-doubt that’s very resistant to acts of completion.  Fail to breach this wall and you’ll earn the reputation as the flaky artist who talks a good game but can’t deliver the goods when it’s time.

An alert muse is a wonderful thing.  Just don’t let her get panicky or you’ll never reach the summit.

Photo by woodleywonderworks