The world thrives on progress. Progress is transformational. It changes and improves millions of lives globally.
The world needs more creators, not consumers.
We have come this far because a few bold innovators and creators chose to create, build, make, do, or start something.
It’s your turn to share your best work with the rest of us.
You don’t even have to change the world but it matters that you create. That you show up.
◊♦◊
Great discoveries often evolve as slow hunches, maturing and connecting to other ideas over time.
Never miss an opportunity to show up and share. Make something no matter how small is work.
Work that matters. Work that creates lasting value. Work that brings out the best in you. Work that makes you creative.
The alternative (waiting to be picked or waiting for world to align in a way that permits you to share your work with the rest of us) is hardly worth pursuing. It kills dreams.
The alternative slows progress, and hardly moves the needle.
If you want choose to write a book, start writing. Not because it will sell, but merely because you can.
◊♦◊
Today, more than ever, attitude, grit and commitment to a process trumps background, genes, and talent.
It’s easier to choose yourself and make something of value. It’s never been easier to decide to be responsible for your own work.
Pick yourself, and keep making art until you are so good they can’t ignore you. Waiting just doesn’t pay. Choose your future. Choose your reputation.
Action begets outcome. Outcome begets action.
Rinse, lather and repeat and you have momentum. You’ll become unstoppable.
One of the secrets of happiness is creation.
◊♦◊
I don’t know about you — but I am happiest when I am stuck in the “flow” of creating or in a “flow state” as psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says it.
Brett & Kate McKay of The Art of Manliness explains, “…when you create instead of consume, your capacity for pleasure increases, as opposed to your need for it. Being a creator gives you a far more lasting and deeply satisfying happiness than consuming ever will.
Choose your audience and start serving!
Who do you want to serve? What information or art do you possess that can be refreshed, repackaged, remodeled, reinvented and rebranded?
Choose to be your authentic self, let go of who you think you should be to be who you are. Choose to create and share your work everyday.
We are more like Einstein, Leonardo, and Mozart
What if what the world really needed was you? What if your ideas mattered but they were getting lost because you forgot you can create?
Everyone of us is creative. Creation is not rare. We are all born to do it.
If it seems like some of us are better at it than others, this is because it is part of being human, like talking or walking. It needs practice. Choose to be a creator and you will get better at it.
And when you do, pass it on to your kids, friends, colleagues, and people you come across. Celebrate your kids’ creativity, even if it doesn’t make sense right away.
◊♦◊
The world needs you to contribute. Build things. Share your authenticity.
We need employees who invent things. Writers who inform, educate the rest of us with their creative work. Entrepreneurs who create things, and freelancers who design things.
People with creative capacity and technical literacy who choose to share their side-projects with us, even when it’s not perfect.
We need people who are brave enough to start side projects they deeply care about and stay-at-home dads who write amazing novels. We need more creators, not more consumers.
Start living a life of adventure and experiment boldly. Creation means taking an active role in the world instead of a passive one. Making an impact, and creating your world instead of consuming it.
Give yourself time in your life to wonder what is possible and to make even the slightest moves in that direction.
This article originally appeared on Medium and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
—
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project, please join like-minded individuals in The Good Men Project Premium Community.
—
Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash
Yes! My friends and I used to call this the “Freedom to Suck”. Give yourself permission to create, then see the beauty and the possibility in the outcome, even if it isn’t what you envisioned at first. I needed to hear and remember this right now! Ira Glass said it so well, “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s… Read more »