Creating a new context
We all get trapped on the creative treadmill eventually.
Running but never getting anywhere new. Executing but never elevating the work.
But when we do, there will always be a ceiling on what we can accomplish. Success will remain asymptotic, always approaching infinity, but never actually getting there. And unless we break the pattern, unless we change the user interface of our realities, we will fail to develop as creators.
In the first ten years of my career, I achieved moderate success writing books and giving speeches. The only problem was, I still wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I still hadn’t found a place that drew out my full ingenuity. Too many assets were going unharvested, and it was eating away at me.
And I remember thinking to myself, if it’s true that there are skills and talents that I have not yet tapped into to create value, then there must be useful strategies for influencing the environment that I have not yet taken advantage of.
Of course. That’s the first step to finding a better approach to success. Recognizing the limitations of our current one. Shedding the popular view of reality.
And that’s exactly why I started writing, producing, directing and scoring this documentary. Because it broke the pattern. It allowed me imagine a different world. To create an alternate reality. To gain a new understanding of the universe. To give my hidden talents a more prominent place in my work. To create a new context from which to relate to the world, one that afforded me the freedom to try other approaches to success.
And what I discovered was, once I engaged with that phenomenon of context––meaning, the environment that determined the limitations of my actions and the scope of the results those actions could produce––it literally altered my being. The experience of making a documentary changed the way I walked through the world.
That’s what happens when we create a new context. We create a new realm of possibility. One that did not previously exist before. One that provides us with a source of power that we did not have before. One that gets us off that goddamn treadmill once and for all.
What context could you create for yourself?