Dear Creatives,

If you’re anything like me, you have a little voice in your head that assassinates your best ideas. That little voice is hunkered down in The Grassy Knoll, ready to shoot down that idea before it can travel through one synapse of your brain. So many of our instincts, intuitions, and inventions expire before we’ve even had a chance to express them. You ridicule your ideas and inclinations into submission, dismissing them as passing fancies, rather than acknowledging that they are something you thought of. Something you think is important. Something that calls to you. We have dreams, big and small, that come to us. How often do we listen to, let alone act upon these ideas? And how often do we assassinate an idea and call it a suicide-by-nonsensical-thinking? The idea killed itself, because it was too big/unwieldly/impossible/far-fetched/impractical/stupid/foolish/time consuming/ridiculous. But in reality, you killed it.

These assassinated ideas are unwritten novels. Unpenned screenplays. Forever silenced poems. Business ventures never ventured. And sometimes, they die alongside a novelist, a screenwriter, a poet, or a passionate entrepreneur. Our most implausible and most impractical ideas, are also the ideas that born from our grandest moments of inspiration. Sometimes we dream of something so big, that holding it in our minds seems too close to hubris. And like Icarus, we plummet back down to Earth. Not because we flew too close to the sun, but because we voluntarily stopped flapping our wings.

Why do we kill our big ideas?

Human beings are often cautious creatures, due to our fear of change and risk. Deviating from the norm is an anxiety provoking. We evolved to “keep doing something that works” (A.K.A. guarantees survival and provides the chance of a little tail). The yearnings in our minds that seem to hint at changes and opportunities that could be great for us, are also accompanied by fear. Bright flashes of inspiration, that must also be backed up by massive action, set off alarm bells in our ape brains. "Don’t take the risk. Play it closer to the chest. This won’t go well."

Among creative individuals, I believe that this suppression of potentially great ideas is even worse. I think that creatives fail to tackle their most ambitious projects, because our human nature encourages us to smother our most impressive ideas. These ideas are risky and challenging. You could fail.

And the kicker is, your brain isn’t wrong.

Devoting large amounts of time and energy to your ideas and instincts is a risk. It is challenging. There are many well-worn paths to success and happiness in society. You don’t have to blaze your own trail.

But there is a question you must ask yourself.

Do you want to live your life, or a life prescribed to you?

You get something like 80 trips around the Sun. Even less in some areas of the world, or if you’re unlucky and you meet an untimely demise. Still, if you live to reach the ripe old age of 80, that’s not a lot of time.

I have spent most of my life trying to fit in. I’ve made "smart choices" in the eyes’ of society. I’ve played it safe, and it has paid off to a degree. But it’s really not me.

If you’ve read this far, I bet you’re like me too. You’re a bit of a dreamer. You’re probably creative. You’re not good at following rules. I also assume you’ve experience a rush of inspiration that you’ve promptly snuffed out. Yeah, I’ve acted as the idea-assassin many times in my life too.

But we all are faced with a choice: you can snuff out your inspired and creative side, or you can choose to live and die by your own sword. You can follow your gut, and live with the consequences.

Look, there is a chance you’re a bit of an idiot. Don’t be offended. I include myself in the “possible idiot population”. Your ideas might not be so great. You might not be hot shit. But you have to live with yourself and play the hand you’ve got.

You can spend your life playing it safe, and buying into other peoples’ ideas of success, or you can live and die by your own sword. You might be your own worst enemy and assume too much risk by pursuing your ideal life, but you’ll at least get to live according to the standards you set for yourself, and chase the things you deem to be worthy of your time. At least you’ll have the pleasure of ruining your own life, rather than having someone else’s version of the ideal life bore you to death. This is living and dying by your own sword. It is better to fail by your own hand, rather than succeed in a pursuit you never wanted to be part of in the first place.

And that’s the worst-case scenario. You fail, but you failed at trying to do the thing that calls to you. You failed pursuing ideas that you thought were important. That doesn’t sound half bad to me.

But you also could succeed! There is a chance that you actually are on to something. You have a book worth writing, a movie worth seeing, a poem worth reading, or a business worth buying from. During the process of finding out if your ideas hold water, you’ll enjoy the journey. You’ll get to be yourself. You won’t be assassinating your ideas out of fear that they might be too big to handle, or that others won’t celebrate them like you do. You’ll have the opportunity to step into your authentic self. All the self-suppression can stop.

So, you are faced with a choice.

Do you follow the status quo? Or do you live and die by your own sword?

Both could be painful. But I think I know which one will hurt less.

Please feel free to follow me.

Read my opinion on Creating First And Asking Questions Later

Read my article on Vulnerability in Art

Check out my piece on What One Follower Is Worth On Steemit

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