*Typing*

Creativity exists on a spectrum. At the far left end of the spectrum is the word RECOGNIZABLE. At the far right end of the spectrum is the word ORIGINAL.

Most of the work we come across on a daily basis exists on the left end of the spectrum. It's recognizable. This doesn't necessarily mean it's bad work. It just means that we've seen it before and we will probably see it again. Work that is recognizable has an easier time being understood by the masses because the audience has plenty to compare the work to. While recognizable work will never change the culture nor make its mark in the broader landscape of art, it tends to be highly commercial. This is a benefit.

Every once in a great while, we get work that is original. We get work that exists on the other side of the spectrum. At first, we might find ourselves hating this work because it's foreign, alien, strange, offensive, bizarre, etc. This is our brains way of attempting to wrap our minds around something we've never seen before. As consumers, it's important that we lean into the work we feel tempted to push away. As creatives who are after original work, it's important that we not get discouraged if it takes time for our work to catch on.

Original is recognized as original until after the fact.

Originality, at first, isn't unrecognizable.

Great art tends to be a confession. This is the difference between good art and great art. Good art tells people what they don't want to hear. Great arts tell people what you (the artist) is most scared to say. If we were to capture everything that has ever been said in a confessional and harness it as creative inspiration for music, literature, poetry, screenplays and paintings, we'd have some goddamn great art. This takes a great deal of courage, though. It requires balls the size of Montana to be a villain on the canvas or page. But, this is why there are so few great artists.

We make art to:

Confess our sins.

Make amends.

Forgive ourselves.

Forgive others.

Find acceptance.

Feel less alone.

Tell our story.

Share our perspective.

Challenge the culture.

Change the conversation.

Pay the bills.

Get laid.

Entertain ourselves.

Say "I love you".

Decorate our walls.

Laugh so we don't cry.

Cry so we don't die.

Find God.

You are scared. I am scared. We all are scared.

While humanity might not collectively share precisely the same fears, there are a few fears that seem to come up again and again. Fear of rejection. Fear of death. Fear of failure. Fear of embarrassment. Fear of disease. Fear of loss. Fear of heights. Fear of intimacy.

Like black mold, fear grows in dark, stagnant places. Our natural reaction to fear is to conceal it, hide it, sit with it, mull it over and ignore it. This only causes the fear to compound into something akin to phobia.

The only remedy for fear is to take it head on, the way the bull takes on the matador.

One of my best friend’s, Zach Janicello, tells me that baby bulls begin charging within days of being born. This isn’t because they are angry or spiteful. It’s because they are scared. We must face that which scares us like the bull: head-on, face-to-face, up close-and personal.

Save for impressing strangers at parties, knowing (and being able to recite) a bunch of facts isn’t all that useful. Why? Because we live in an age where facts can be found in our pockets in less than 30-seconds.

On this note, I love the story about Albert Einstein being asked how many feet are in a mile. The genius drew a blank...

“Why should I fill my brain with useless facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?”

If you are doing creative work (and I consider Einstein’s work to be creative), you’re far better off getting good at generating ideas rather than memorizing facts. Memorization requires an exorbitant amount of cognitive energy. If you were to spend your days attempting to memorize every digit in PIE after 3.14, you would have very little mental bandwidth available to generate new ideas.

Because ideas are original, they can’t be birthed from memory. They’re birthed from thinking, yes, but a sort of detached thinking that looks more like play.