*Typing*

You will likely never experience the luxury of having your own manager. And so you must become your own manager.

Much of your success will come down to how well you can manage yourself, your mental health and your emotions. Creatives are deeply emotional beings. It's this ability to feel––and to feel deeply––that allows them to create music, paintings, plays, books, poems and so on.

However, this more heightened emotional side of themselves also predisposes them to be erratic, irrational and fiery. While these are tremendous qualities as a creative, they're terrible qualities if you're a manager. Good managers are calm, collected, reasonable and level-headed.

If you want to create a successful creative career for yourself, you must not only work at being a great creative but a great manager. Elvis Presley had Tom Parker. Metallica had Cliff Burnstein. Led Zeppelin had Peter Grant. U2 had Paul McGuinness. Elton John had John Reid. Celine Dion had Rene Angelil. The Beatles had Brian Epstein. You have you.

We have a tendency to hold onto shit.

Something hurtful a classmate said when we were thirteen-years-old can shape the way we view ourselves for the rest of our lives. It's fascinating, really. We can experience hundreds of thousands of experiences––most of which are truly beautiful––but we choose to hold onto the dozen or so that are hurtful, allowing them to replay in our minds until they worm their way into our hearts and callus our skin.

This begs the question: Why do we have so much difficulty letting things go? Bad experiences tend to linger like the taste of sour milk. Accidentally take a swig of sour milk once and you will remember the taste for the rest of your life. If you think too seriously about the taste now, it's enough to send you lurching for the nearest bathroom. You likely can recall where you were the first time you drank sour milk.

Drinking sour milk is an awful experience. We can all agree to that. So, why isn't it something that continues to haunt us for the rest of our lives? Because we're able to let sour milk go. We don't take sour milk personally. We don't view it as fair or unfair. We understand that it's simply a natural process that happens when milk goes bad. We spit it out. We vomit. We tell a few people about it. Then, we let it go.

We struggle to do this with other negative experiences––defeats, break-ups, firings, financial losses, road rage, disagreements, mean shit others says, etc––because unlike sour milk, we allows ourselves to take these experiences personally. We deem them wrong, awful, unjust and cruel. They very well might be all of these things but they're also one of the many natural processes of the human experience. You will experience defeat. You will have your heartbroken. You will get fired. You will lose money. You will have someone cut you off in traffic. You will disagree with your friends. You will be the unfortunate soul on the receiving end of someone else's bad day. That's life.

Living a good, peaceful life is learning to spit this shit up like sour milk, vomit, vent and then let it go.

Sour milk is unfortunate but it's not personal.

Try and outsmart the mind and you will lose. You will get pummeled. You will feel as though you're facing off in chest against Kasparov, Karpov or Kramnik. The mind is far too complex and our understanding of it is elementary at best. I'd wager that our exploration of the mind rivals that of the ocean. Just 5%. Instead, we must work to manipulate the mind––we must by-pass the mind through the body. To change the mind, we must change our physical state.

When we feel numb, we must submerge ourselves in cold water. When we feel anxious, we must control our breathing. When we lethargic, we must lie down for a 30-minute nap. When we feel angry, we must sprint a time or two against the wind. When we feel hurt, we must slip into a warm, tepid bath.

If we attempt to think our way out of these feelings, we will only dig ourselves deeper into them. The mind has evolved to find problems everywhere. It's how we've kept from going extinct at the hands of saber-tooth tigers, disease, famine, war, etc. Instead, we must circumnavigate the minds physically.

Two weeks back, my best friend's dad was in town. He was kind enough to take myself and several of my close friends out to dinner. We joked and made small talk as we put in our drinks and appetizers. Eventually my best friend's dad––"Father Rob" as he is affectionally called by us boys––posed a question to the table. "Okay, so how is everyone really doing?"

It was silent for a moment as the entire table felt very vulnerable––as if we were asked to strip naked and make a lap around the restaurant––but then someone spoke up. "I've been struggling to be honest––tomorrow is the ten year anniversary of my best friend's passing."

I had no idea. Neither did anyone else at the table.

Over the next two to three hours, we each gave our answer to Father Rob's question. By the end of the night, I was overcome with the realization that sometimes the people who we are closest with are the people we know the least.

I love the question, "How are you really doing?" Because it elicits a deeper response than just simply, "I'm doing well." Furthermore, it's a five-word mantra that can remind us to go deeper with our parents, our siblings and our friends.

Because unless we ask, we can never truly know how someone is really doing.

It's difficult to fully appreciate something until it's no longer there. I had this unsettling realization at 3 a.m. this morning when I found myself without an arm. Or, so I thought.

I was awoken from a dead sleep feeling that something was very much off. I felt an empty void on the right side of my body. I went to clutch my arm and was horrified by how foreign it felt––as if it did not belong to me but a stranger that had crawled into bed with me in the middle of the night.

I stood up, shook my arm around like a rag doll and massaged the feeling back into it until it felt like my own flesh again. As I laid back down and quickly drifted back to sleep, I remember feeling a sudden newfound appreciation for the limb I that had never truly possessed before.

One of the great challenges of the human experience is learning to truly appreciate before having lost. Loss is inevitable. It's as natural as the setting of the sun––and like the setting of the sun, it can't be prevented.

Robert Frost said it best when he wrote the words, "Nothing gold can stay."