Author Archives: hellomynameisscott

A labor for which no adjective applies

Reinvention isn’t about turning everything on its head for the sake of change.

Sometimes, it’s a simple matter of upping the creative ante. Sinking your teeth into a new project that’s bigger than you. Pursuing something that’s more of a gamble than a guarantee. Something that requires you to hold and nurture a large idea. Something that forces you to expand as you the idea comes to fruition.

That’s one of the reasons I decided to make a music documentary. I wanted to feel engaged and tested and stretched. To travel with an idea to a deeper place, one that I had never dared venture before.

And as we wrap up production, the feelings of fulfillment have never been stronger.

Turns out, there’s a unmatched sense of pride you feel from having lived up to the higher expectations set for yourself.

When was the last time you reinvented?

Up your creative ante

When I first stared my career, publishing hadn’t been fully democratized yet. The process was still somewhat difficult, expensive and extensive. The powers that be actually had power.

Meaning, without some knowledge, resources and wherewithal, anybody couldn’t just become an author overnight. It took significant time and money and labor to put art into the world.

But then the revolution came. And now that creators are wired directly into the ecosystem, now that the need for the middlemen of the world has vanished, and now that there are nonexistent barriers to entry in all forms of the publishing world, it’s anybody’s game.

And that’s precisely the problem.

When anyone can do anything, they will. When scarcity goes the way of the dodo, value plummets. Which means, being an author of something doesn’t carry as much weight as it used to. Because anybody can do it.

And so, if we want to rise to the fore, we have to raise the stakes. We have to raise our voice, be on our toes, working smarter and faster than the pack, always showing them why we’re out in front. We have to raise our artistic level to where we’re never lost in the dust.

Are you the hero people remember or the legend that will never dies?

Opportunity is subordinate to wherewithal

Obama famously said that opportunity is who we are.

That the defining project of our generation is to restore that promise, and that no one is better positioned to take advantage of those opportunities than us.

The challenge, though, is that opportunity isn’t the only variable. There’s a larger creative equation at work that centers around the idea of wherewithal, meaning everything needed to buttress opportunity, including knowledge, resources and courage.

Because even though creating art is work, creating the opportunity to make art is work too. It’s a much more strategic, measured and entrepreneurial type of work. But it’s work nonetheless.

When I first moved to a major metropolitan city, I started busking in the park with my guitar. Not an activity I ever anticipated doing, but it created an opportunity make art, from songs to performances to a documentary film.

The point is, we get our start by giving ourselves a start.

That’s where opportunity grows.

What is the opportunity is going to pass you buy if you don’t act on it?

Inspiration is incidental, not intentional

Artists make things because they want to move people. To inspire them to become better.

But the creator can’t jumpstart other people unless her battery is charged first. There has to be a source current. A substratum of energy from which to supply power. Johnny has his own version of this.

And so, we all have to repower our own source current. We have to inspire ourselves, first and foremost. Because our job as creators isn’t to inspire people, but to keep doing what we love, that way people can discover the same about themselves through that work.

If we want to move people, we have to remember that inspiration isn’t the target, inspiration is the reward our audience receives when we hit the target.

When was the last time you made the choice to be inspired?

Define reality in a more direct way

Seinfeld once said that that the most fun game is one you’ve never played and you’re inventing as you go along.

I couldn’t agree more. Creating art is one thing, but the more sophisticated experience of categorical creation, that is, inventing entirely new mediums, crafting innovative ways to circulate our ideas and thoughts and feelings, now that’s really exciting.

A few years ago, I got burnt out on writing books. And I knew there were useful strategies for influencing the environment that I was not taking advantage of, so I took initiative to find a new way to do what I do.

The result was this documentary, which combined four of my favorite things, singing, storytelling, socializing and sermonizing.

Going in, I knew the project was going to be ambitious, complicated, expensive and extensive. But I also knew that by shedding the popular view of my own artistic reality, new possibilities would emerge.

And they did.

Where have you misread your own reality?