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Don’t chase the high, follow the heart

by hellomynameisscott on August 03, 2014 in Creativity with No Comments

During a recent podcast interview, I heard a hugely successful actor offer a great piece of advice to young performers.

Don’t be famous, be legendary. Fame is the industrial disease of creativity, he said. It’s a sludgy by product if making things.

What a bold statement. Considering we live in a world where attention trumps accomplishment, where a person’s fame tends to eclipse their actual contributions as a creator, his advice is sorely needed.

And yet, that doesn’t give us permission to hide from the world. If we insist on keeping our music locked up inside ourselves, we’ll always be winking in the dark.

The trick is finding the balance.

How time did you spend working on your legacy today?



We see what we can afford to see

by hellomynameisscott on August 01, 2014 in Identity with No Comments

Watching musicals inspired me to start playing guitar standing up.

That single change completely transformed my singing, songwriting and performing style. Proving, that innovation is born out of unexpected inputs that change or perspective forever. And the more of these moments we have, the more we can create, and the more we can create, the more we can push this world forward.

The challenge, then, is subverting resistance, which typically manifests as fear and conformity and laziness.

Tom Robbins tells a story about attending a rock concert in the sixties that jimmied the lock on his language box and smashed the last of his literary inhibitions.

When was the last time you had an experience like that? 



Focus is a function of identity, not activity

by hellomynameisscott on July 29, 2014 in Identity with No Comments

Diversity is not a business decision, it’s a way of staying interested.

We should all be so lucky to venture into various creative territories and mediums and platforms and avenues. It doesn’t mean we’ve spread ourselves too thin. It doesn’t make us a jack of all trades. In fact, diversity is the highest creative form of focus there is.

Because art isn’t about hammering one nail all our lives, it’s about hammering lots of nails¬¬¬¬––one way––all our lives.

Are you focusing on what you need to do or what you need to be?



Let your why drive

by hellomynameisscott on July 25, 2014 in Identity with No Comments

What you’re creating isn’t as important as why you’re creating it.

That’s what drives prolificacy. And the secret is, once you identify the running imperative that drives your creative behavior, the nobility behind your work and the posture with which you approach your art, the what will make a habit of present itself.

When I started preproduction on my first documentary, my videographer asked about my vision for the film. Having never worked in that medium before, I decided to let my why drive the process. And so, I wrote my creative vision for the movie, not only as a personal exercise, but also as a directorial rubric for the team’s behaviors at all phases of the creative process. Here’s what I wrote:

Here’s what am I trying to do with this movie. I have a bunch of songs and stories and sermons and scenes. They’re all meaningful to me and I want to share them with the world through the medium of a movie. I don’t know what it is, I don’t care what it is. All I know is why I want it to exist, and that’s because I’m a person who expresses and communicates and shares his feelings and ideas in a prolific way with the world. And since I’ve never tried doing so through this particular medium, I’m taking initiative and finding a new way to do what I do.

I have a passion to mass communicate, to beguile people with words and images and ideas and stories and music that transfix and compel, and I want to use every possible form of media to circulate my views, extend my sentiments and make my thoughts and feelings and expressions accessible to as many people as possible. Even if that means inventing new methods of communicating. I don’t care about making money or making a name for myself, I don’t care about being right or good or accurate, I just want to have this visual archive of these things that are important to me.

That was my why.

And over the course of the project, in those moments when I was feeling overwhelmed or tired or sick or not in the mood to do any kind of creating, I read that email to remind myself why I do what I do.

Sometimes I even read it aloud.

How do you remember why you do what you do?



Get out the basement and go play for people

by hellomynameisscott on July 22, 2014 in Belonging with No Comments

For the first twenty years of my songwriting life, I treated music as an escape. As a way to hide from the world.

Until one day, I read an interview with one of my songwriting heroes, who famously said, you have to get out of the basement and go out and play for people.

That sentence changed my inner geography. Something very real inside of me shifted that day, and I haven’t been the same since.

And so, now I perform every week. I’ve come out of music hibernation, hungry and active for nourishment.

Because I don’t need to hide from the world anymore. Music let me share another part of my heart. Playing and singing songs in real time, in front of real people, about real emotions, is fulfilling on a level that is hard to express.

Will you let the craving for togetherness trump the seductiveness of isolation?