Good morning John,
I'd like to make a quick logical argument,
two postulates, followed by a conclusion
Postulate 1:
creating is terrifying.
postulate 2:
everyone creates.
logical conclusion then, being,
that everyone is terrified.
It's actually not creating that's terrifying.
It's-It's sharing the creation, or even the thought
of sharing the creation that's terrifying.
Because once your creation is in front of another person, you have lost all power.
You've gone from a situation in which you have maximum amount of power
over this thing that you have made,
to no power.
You have nothing.
That's not true, actually.
You have all of your hopes,
and dreams, and values, and aspirations, and days or weeks, or months, or years, of work
that you've poured into this thing.
That you're now sharing with the world,
and the world has every right to despise.
So, yeah,
terrifying, right? Now onto the second postulate.
That all people are creators.
And now we've sort of been set up to believe that this isn't necessarily the case,
that we live in a world where Steve Jobs makes an iPod and we buy an iPod.
But that's not how the world is, even if you have no way of physically creating a thing,
you create ideas, and you create jokes, and you create friendships.
And then, you have the creation that matters most to all of us,
and that is the scariest, and most dangerous, and most intimate, and most beautiful creation
that everybody gets to make.
And you only get to make one of them.
And that's the self.
This is why I totally hate it when people give the advice to just be yourself
Because, like, who is that?!
Because we aren't born with a self.
We create ourselves.
You make you!
You make you out of the books that you read,
and the expectations of culture.
The interactions with your friends and your family,
and a million other factors.
And because the self is this terrible, intense creation,
and the most important creation that we all make
When someone tells you that they don't like that thing,
that's terrible.
Which is why talking to a stranger is always scary, like, to me anyways
I don't know, I feel like everybody must feel like this to some extent.
Because when you talk to a new person,
you are making you,
inside of them.
And you don't wanna do a bad job.
And that's why we all fear judgment so much. Because judgment
is just someone creating you inside of their head without your permission, without full knowledge of who you are.
They're making you, but they're making you improperly. It's terrifying.
That's absolutely terrifying.
There are a few ways that I've found to make it less terrifying.
You can create the bare minimum of creation,
you can not try very hard.
That's good.
You can be really bland, you can just create really bland
things that look like everything else that everyone else has ever created,
or you can create things that you don't care about at all.
Or for people who you don't care about
Or, you can just never ever share the things that you create
And, of course, all of theses strategies, are terrible ways to live
It's terrible to see people doing this with their creations
But the most terrible creation to see people do this with
is their self.
Trying to be boring, trying to look like everyone else, or worse, not trying at all
Which has led me to the belief
that you know, as the creator, how worthwhile your creation is
by how terrified you are.
I've only ever found one solution to this, which is just to create
To create in spite of fear and to create constantly
To create for children and adults, and your parents, and your idols, and your peers, and your community
and to consciously be creating yourself
everyday
to make you the you that you feel best inside of
And create friendships,
because I honestly believe that friends are the commodity by which we should all be judged.
It's the only way that I've found to temper the fear of creation
Just to create, constantly.
Because, to be clear, the fear doesn't go away
You just get more comfortable in it.
John, I'll see you on tuesday