Category Archives: Creativity

All love is saying yes to something.

My parents flew in to be in the audience of the concert.

Wouldn’t have been the same without them.

Every artist should be lucky enough to have support like that. Relentlessly affirming, instantly encouraging, endlessly participating, radically accepting. That’s the kind of support system that makes or breaks an artist.

Growing up, we seven grandchildren were never met with tilted heads. Whatever artistic endeavors we pursued, whatever magnificent obsessions we turned our brains over to, there wasn’t an elder in the room who wasn’t on board at a moment’s notice.

And that’s the reason each of us went on to have unique and interesting and meaningful creative lives.

What are the characteristics of the most supportive possible environment you can think of for your own creative work?

An ocean under a fickle moon.

Life has a funny way of raising our fuel grade.

The rules we navigate by at the beginning shift by the time we get to the end. What we think love is differs from what we find love to be.

But it’s not just a pattern in couples, it’s also a phenomenon in creating.

My original motivation for making a documentary was purely creative. I just wanted to share my art with the world. To build a visual archive of ideas things that were important to me at this stage of my life.

But that was a year ago.

And now that we’ve entered into postproduction and can see the light at the end of the tunnel, new motivations have surfaced. Bigger ones. Better ones. More mature ones.

Now I’m making the movie because it’s an opportunity to fire on all cylinders. To engage in a process that draws out my full ingenuity. To take hidden skills and talents I have not yet tapped into to create value. And to up the emotional, psychological and financial ante, trading in my current success for something better.

I believe that’s why the process has galvanized me in such a profound way.

It’s demanded that I move to a courageous place that I rarely occupy.

How do your original motivations differ from your formed motivations?

If size mattered, dinosaurs would still be around

Life is only limited by our own prejudices.

Once we destroy them and cease to be at the mercy of ourselves, it’s amazing how many creative doors fly open.

We no longer have to struggle to find an audience for our work. We created our own leverage and built our own stage and manufactured our own opportunities.

Because the modern creator doesn’t need tickets for the starving artist lottery. They no longer have to wait for some invisible jury to stamp heir creative passport and tell them their art is okay.

They go out and create a market for what they love.

Not matter how small that market is.

If size mattered, the dinosaurs would still be around.

When will you voluntarily opt out of the mainstream?

Excessive quantities can reduce the yield.

Several years ago, I reached a point of diminishing creative returns as a writer.

I was making one lateral move after another. Running up the score on my creative resume, but never graduating to a whole new level of judgment and wisdom and perspective. Repeating a proven formula for success, but never growing into unknown territory and creating something new.

It was a painful place to arrive as an artist. Like the veteran employee who discovers she doesn’t have ten years of experience, but one year of experience, ten times. Ouch.

And so, I made a deal with myself. If I’m going to execute, I have to elevate. Volume can’t be the only boat that rises with the creative tide. If I’m going to continue my artistic journey, I have to do so ways that excite and exhilarate me.

As a result of this commitment, my entire creative horizon shifted. I started working bigger. The projects grew more ambitious. Instead of just recording another studio album, I began writing, producing and staring in a concert documentary. Instead of just writing another business book, I started building an innovative intellectual property development system.

That’s elevation.

Like a fine wine, constantly evolving and gaining complexity.

Are you creating things that call on more of your essence?

Create an unfair advantage for yourself

I made this movie to create a new context for myself.

To build up a proprietary asset that made his work completely immune from imitation. To build my own equipment and create my own leverage.

Like the marathoner who trains at higher altitudes to earn an unfair advantage over the runners who train at sea level, I’m trying uniquely position myself for success with an asset and a context that is mine and mine alone.

How could you join forces with the unreasonableness of life and create an unfair advantage for yourself?