You're overcomplicating it.
I love when I get called out on my shit.
My wife always brings the cows right on home when it comes to my over-the-top creative (complicated) ideas.
“Stop complicating everything! Just integrate one idea for now…”
Clichés are like a 5 year old speaking directly to the part of your heart that you’ve been trying to use eloquent language to understand.
There is so much truth in the simple, yet it’s all too easy to deem the simple as insufficient to your situation.
Why do we resist the simple?
As a creative I tend to adopt this silly belief that I’m so radically unique and obscure that nobody will quite understand my path so I have to struggle and suffer unnecessarily because clearly I have to find the most complicated and ‘creative’ ways of going about life to fulfill my uniqueness.
Crumple it up, light it on fire, throw it in the river….
Please not literally, but beliefs like these only keep us from actually showing up for life in the ways we are designed to.
No matter how unique or creative you think you are, the answer is always much simpler than you think.
You may have 33 amazing ideas for the next project, for the next business, for the next obra de arte but do you really think that it’s respectful of each idea to cram them all together in one thing?
Every time I’ve tried to incorporate multiple ideas into a design project the usual outcome is one that has significantly less cohesion and intuitive understanding than the projects where one strong idea leads.
The same exact metaphor expands to life and how you relate to yourself.
Throw in the perceived scarcity of time and the plot thickens quite a bit.
Allowing the scarcity of time to illuminate the scarcity inside of you is a slippery slope.
A legitimate deadline can light the proverbial fire under your ass necessary to bring magic from latent parts of your creativity into your physical process.
Conversely, when we relate to time through the lens of not-enoughness, we tend to only create complicated mental and physiological conditions that make it very difficult to sustain higher creative functions.
Here’s how wild our bodies are…
We introduce a perceived sense of scarcity relating to time, and that throws our operating system into a sympathetic nervous system response that starts pumping cortisol.
Internally, you’re body starts reacting a perceived threat from the outside world as if, “oh FCK, I’m being chased by a tiger!”
This all could be happening while you are just sitting at the kitchen table thinking about your lack of time and all the ways you could be applying yourself.
So here’s the wisdom…
Stress is a perverted understanding of time.
You are filled with creative energy, and at the same time and over-abundance of information…
You know too much to be able to commit to one idea and you have too many skills to focus simply on one…
An underlying ambition to do things above and beyond contributes to an over complication of applying yourself in a directed way…
The radical liberation occurs when you begin to realize that it actually doesn’t matter how you apply yourself.
Thinking endlessly about how best to proceed with everything you know is far more limiting than deciding that you don’t need to figure it all out nor put every good idea into the next step.
You cannot make a wrong decision.
You just have to commit and apply yourself in whatever way naturally beckons you.
Don’t think about it, just create.
When mental complication arises, just breathe and keep moving through life at the pace of focusing on one thing at a time.
The way through is actualized one step at a time.
