The only piece of advice I would give someone who is not where they want to be in life would be:
Create more
What do I mean by this?
Simple.
Most of us consume more than we create. In the game of plus/minus, most of humanity is in the minus category. We watch what others are doing, thinking “why isn’t that me?” - when it could be you. We are voyeuristic. Living our lives in the stands instead of being on the field. And, this is not how a human being is meant to live. You are meant to be the hero of your story, the main character.
How do you do it?
By doing what all humans are meant to do: create more. We are all artists, and with the voice, the pen, the camera, the computer, we can relate to masses of people, touching hearts and souls.
Or you could just watch another Netflix show.
At the peak of the Mountain is unbridled, unlimited creativity. You don’t even have to think - your hands do the writing without you even having input. God is speaking through you. Life’s answers start coming to you.
If you sit for just 90 minutes a day and write - in a couple months you will have a book. You will have a body of work that is able to touch the soul of another human being.
Watching hundreds of people visit my website to read my work is overwhelming to say the least. I may never meet any of these people, but they know who I am and have read words that I have put into the ether. That is pretty incredible when you think about it.
As you create more, you start to care less what people think: you’ve already heard it all inside of your own mind: ’this is no good’, ’nobody cares what you have to say’, ’you look silly’ and a modicum of other negative thoughts will have already come and gone.
There is nothing new under the Sun.
There is nothing you can be told by another person that you wouldn’t have already heard within. And, if you create enough, those thoughts start to subside, they start to become less and less present.
You beat them down with iteration of work, with your talent that is growing minute by minute.
The things that most people say are completely irrelevant, anyway.
Those that would criticize you have likely never created anything meaningful in their lives. The people that are busy building have no time to talk down to others. Only to cheer them on. The only opinion you should value is from someone that is far ahead of you in the field you are pursuing. If you are a budding film maker and James Cameron gives you a tip how to better do something, you can listen. But, someone that has never made a film before should be the last person you listen to.
The interesting thing is that the wall that you thought you were going to run into when you started creating doesn’t really exist.
It was in your mind.
You were worried what others would say, but they ended up liking what you had to say. Or, they just moved on with their day. No harm, no foul.
Creation is messy #
Your first blog post is not going to be good.
The first draft is likely going to suck so hard you will question if you even know the English language. I have been there, again and again. What you must do is move forward from there, and do it every single day. From there, you will gain a voice that you feel is your very own.
But you cannot paint a masterpiece if you have never picked up a brush before.
Your very first punch is not going to land. You have to iterate and iterate. And, from there, anything becomes possible.
When I sat down to write my first book, it took years to understand that all I had to do was write.
It wasn’t going to be good the first time around. All I had to do was get my ideas down, and from there, they could be developed over time. But, I had to sit down, everyday, and put words on the page. You have to take clay and sculpt it, throwing away and adding where it is needed.
You cannot do this if you don’t have clay to begin with.
If I had to tell my 20 year old self that it would take nearly 10 years to write a book, but it would only actually take 6 months, I would have laughed. But the truth is that I probably put 6 months into my book, over the course of ten years. That book could have well been written by the age of 22.
But I put it off, I didn’t know that I just had to write.