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The lamest excuse for not doing something is, I don’t know how.  Bullshit.  Because if you care enough, you’ll find out what you need to know. That’s how execution works. Ideas are brought into reality not because of your knowledge, but because of your will.  When I was in college and decided to write a book about wearing nametags, I didn’t know the first thing about publishing. And to…

Codependency happens when too much of your sense of validation or security comes from others.  It’s when people become your primary conduit to a sense of self, your sole point of identification, and there’s an excessive reliance on them for approval and identity.  What’s interesting is how this dysfunction manifests in the creative process. Because making art is similar to a relationship, in that you can’t need too much from…

Shaking an apple tree is one of life’s magnificent experiences.  There’s the excitement of locating the most prolific tree in the orchard. There’s the anticipation of gripping the trunk and steadying your legs for the drop. There’s the exhilaration of shaking the tree and feeling the unrivaled sensation of the apples thumping off your head and onto the ground. There’s enthusiasm of gathering the biggest and best ones into…

Trying to fit yourself into an existing market is short lived. Being a cog in someone else’s great machine is a recipe for disappointment and disillusion.  And so, if you find that there are no projects that fit how great you are, carve your own destiny and hire yourself. Go out and create the market for what you love. Define your own rules, set your own standards and let…

The first thing performers forget is to enjoy the process.  To stay in the moment and be fully present and actually feel the experience of the show as it’s happening. After all, there’s so many moving parts to manage, so many things that can go wrong, so many expectations vying for our attention, who has time to look around and breathe the air and absorb the joy of what’s…

It’s morally incumbent upon us to live up to our uniqueness.  To make meaningful use of everything we are. To humbly and proudly return the product that we’ve been given.  In fact, we don’t have a lot of a choice in the matter. If there’s something special we have a gift for, something that we can do better than anybody else, it’s going to suck us along into it…

Most people get scared and stop.  They try something once or twice or even five times, and the moment the fear begins to soak their back, they convince themselves that they’re not good enough and their dream was stupid and the world doesn’t need their uniqueness and they were never going to make it anyway and they don’t deserve to be successful in the first place.  Unfortunately, that story…

I have a musician friend who has thirty songs in the can.  Ready to be recorded and released into the world.  But he’s paralyzed by the fear of volume. He’s scared that publishing to many songs at once will overwhelm his fans, since they’re used to hearing his work five songs at a time. That’s why, for the past two years, he’s been sitting on them. Nobody has heard…

Every successful goes through some version of boot camp.  It’s that initial indoctrination and instruction that’s designed to push them to their physical and mental limits, much further than they would normally push themselves alone. It’s intense, it’s stressful, it’s fast and it’s unforgiving.  And yet, nobody regrets it. Because when they look back five, ten, even twenty years later, they realize that their boot camp created the basis…

I have a friend who worked his way through nursing school washing store windows for nine bucks a pop.  It wasn’t the most glamorous or lucrative or stimulating job, but it paid in cash, it gave him a good workout and, most importantly, allowed him to do something mindless for a few hours a day.  Nursing, after all, is a deeply draining profession, both intellectually and emotionally. And so,…