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Generosity is the tax you pay for talent
Happiness comes from freedom, and freedom comes from finding a home for all of your talents.
And so, imagine a world where you were firing on all cylinders. Keeping all of your passions in play. Drawing out your full ingenuity. Making use of everything you are. Leaving no faculty untapped, and leaving no asset unharvested. That’s happiness. Because with every new talent you give yourself permission to exploit, you open a new vein of freedom that didn’t exist previously.
It’s simply a matter of permission. Allowing yourself to give your hidden gifts a more prominent place in your life.
I spent twenty years writing and singing music before I had the guts to share my songs with the public. The material was just too personal. Too bloody. To precious to be subjected to the cruel ear of the world.
But then I had an epiphany. Generosity is the tax you pay for talent. If you’ve been given a gift, something special that allows you deliver value that nobody has ever delivered before, you have an obligation to share it. To regift it so it brings joy to others. Anything less is an act of ingratitude.
And so, I finally gave myself permission to share my songs publicly. And when I did, everything shifted. My relationship to the music, my context in the world, my identity as an artist, my leverage in the marketplace and my connection with the audience.
What strength, skill or gift do you wish to use more fully?
The freedom to pursue what’s inside
The only artistic goal worth pursuing is freedom.
Freedom over what I create, freedom over why and how I create it, freedom over whom I create it with and freedom over what I do with it once it’s created, that’s all I care about. Everything else flows from there.
Macleod famously said tat the sovereignty we have over our work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will.
Making this documentary has inspired me to find new ways to express myself through the instrument. To find new ways to be free and to own my world. To own my media, own my platform, own my career and ultimately own my life.
Tastes like freedom to me.
Are you conquering your work, or is your work conquering you?
Hire people to amplify what you do
When it comes to creative work, there’s nothing wrong with being a control freak. The fiercely independent artist deserves sovereignty over their work.
But you can’t do everything yourself forever. There comes a point in every creator’s life when you have to defer. You have to hire people to amplify what you do. Otherwise you impose a ceiling on the level of impact you can have.
Over the years, I’ve contracted dozens of designers, illustrators, developers, coders, editors, researchers, programmers, virtual assistants, audio engineers and public relations specialists. Each one of these people filled in the skills gap when I surpassed the perimeter of my competence. And with their support, all of my projects grew light years beyond what could have been possible on my own.
That’s a form of creativity too. The resourcefulness to find the people who can help you become what you need to be.
Because if you pick the right people, all you have to do as the artist is cast a vision, sit back and watch them do their magic.
It’s actually quite liberating. Once you let go of trying do everything, it feels like you can do anything.
Who was the last person you paid real money to amplify what you do?
Darkness may find me, but I shall never choose it
At the heart of what it means to be a person is the act of dreaming, doing and finishing. Coming alive through the pursuit of your ideas.
And the good news is, there has never been a better time go all in. The digital revolution has made that process more accessible than ever before.
But every great moment in human history has an opposition that is proportional to its greatness. And that’s the downside of dreaming. Spend five minutes online, and you’ll discover a universal voice of anonymity waiting to shit on your dream. A chorus of haters, frustrated that their dreams have not come true, whose sole purpose in life to make yours feel like a nightmare.
But we can’t let those uncompromising forces of reality scare us into working small. Otherwise the dream devolves into something worse.
Pressfield explains that our dreams don’t dissipate if we turn our backs on them, they invert. They go underground. They turn negative and act out. They surface as shadow forms of our heart’s desire. And those shadow versions are never pretty.
And so, as dreamers, we are obliged to at least try. To at least believe that our sweetest dreams will not be stolen from us.
Because who knows? As my mentor once said, some of us are lucky enough to experience the euphoria that comes with the knowledge that life has granted us the grace of a dream realized. And even for those of us who come to the end of our dream and, sadly, have nothing to show for it, at least we can be grateful to have lived in place where dreams were had and followed.
Did you work on your dream today?
Open a new vein of freedom
Henri famously said not to bother about your originality, but to set yourself as free as you possibly can, and your originality would take care of itself.
One of the ways to we accomplish that is by putting whimsy on wheels. By giving ourselves permission to follow seemingly ridiculous ideas to fruition. Even if they don’t work out. Because the point is in the trying. The purpose is in the practice. The goal is to strengthen our freedom muscle until it’s quivering and veiny and oiled up, poised to step across the lines of artistic safety and create something people don’t even have a name for.
When I first conceived the idea for this concert documentary, what most excited me about the project was the freedom use the talents I might never exercise anywhere else. Singing, strumming, songwriting, storytelling, these were the musical gifts I’d been honing for so many years, but had never found a home for.
Until now.
And the more footage we edited, the prouder I felt about the movie’s originality. Not because I was trying to be unique, but because I was trying to be free.
Henri was right. Freedom is what creates the most hospitable environment for your greatest talents to do their most original work.
Are you building the house where your freedom resides?