Success and Failure are the same thing.

Hi hi,

This year, I made a promise to myself that I would actively invest in healing all aspects of my life, including facing my creative insecurities. I'm tired of self-doubt or worrying about what other people think. If you're a creative, you know this type of work requires a deep unraveling of self-limiting beliefs, wounds, and difficult emotions.

There are so many ideas and stories that are piled up in my imagination waiting for me to stop being...blocked? Afraid? Unsure? I don't even know what the exact issue is. Fear I'll succeed. Fear I'll fail. Fear people will love my writing. Fear people will hate it. Fear I'll be good. Fear I'll never be good enough.

I've been very frustrated, banging my head against the wall asking myself, what the fuck are you waiting for?

Here's the thing: the approach I've been using has been one of brute force. Drag myself into the office. Butt in chair. Shut up and just get the words done.

However, as I've been researching and writing Humane Productivity, I found myself wondering if there wasn't a gentler way, a more humane way to approach this creative force within myself. Where did this harshness come from and could I use a different method?

Elisabeth Gilbert: "Success and failure are the same thing."

Last week, I watched an old TEDTalk by author Elizabeth Gilbert and I've been thinking about it ever since. I am grateful that creatives like Liz are generous in sharing their honest experiences, particularly those that include incredible successes and heart-breaking failures.

I found her perspective on the unlikely similarities between great success and great failure to be fascinating. She says:

" Think of it like this: For most of your life, you live out your existence here in the middle of the chain of human experience where everything is normal and reassuring and regular, but failure catapults you abruptly way out over here into the blinding darkness of disappointment. Success catapults you just as abruptly but just as far way out over here into the equally blinding glare of fame and recognition and praise.

And one of these fates is objectively seen by the world as bad, and the other one is objectively seen by the world as good, but your subconscious is completely incapable of discerning the difference between bad and good.

The only thing that it is capable of feeling is the absolute value of this emotional equation, the exact distance that you have been flung from yourself. And there's a real equal danger in both cases of getting lost out there in the hinterlands of the psyche.

You can get lost in either too much success or too much failure. I'd never thought about it like that. The remedy then, is to return back to the anchoring point, which Liz calls "home." For her, it's writing, but it could also be family, adventure, service, or faith. She describes "home" as:

"that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential."

I think she's saying to just focus on the doing. As I mulled this over, I started to see the same message repeated everywhere:

Dr. Andrew Huberman has spoken extensively about dopamine and how attaching rewards to outcomes can actually decrease your motivation. Instead he recommends "wiring your brain to enjoy doing the hard parts." In other words: find reward in the doing.

James Clear writes about not worrying too much about outcomes and focusing on building solid systems that can create consistency. In other words: focus on creating conditions to keep doing the work.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Shree Krishna tells Arjun "You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction." In other words: You can only control showing up and doing.

Be grounded in the doing and not the results, be they positive or negative.

Ok. This made sense, but it still felt like it wasn't clicking in helping me solve this block. Wasn't I actively pushing the "doing?" Why was I still not writing?

Jamie Varon - The Key to Motivation is Love

It wasn't until I read Jamie Varon's Radically Content that I found the missing piece of this puzzle.

There were two major ideas that stuck with me:

1. Shame is a false motivator.

In her chapter about Shame, Jamie writes that many people use shame to motivate themselves into making changes, using it as a twisted form of inspiration. In my own creative life, I often feel shame that I should be further along in my creative writing. Jamie felt the same way:

I'd feel shame that I wasn't writing more, so I'd sit down and force myself to write for a few days in a row. The shame would subside, and then I'd stop again. And it would repeat. this cycle became addictive, and the only one I knew.

I wasn't going toward anything good; I was simply outrunning the shame.

Well, damn.

That's what I've been unintentionally doing too.

Despite being focused on the doing, the motivation behind the doing wasn't great. And in hindsight, I can see why using shame to call on your creative energies is not the healthiest approach. (As Julia Cameron would say, that's not a very nice way to treat your inner artist, nor convince them to step forward.)

2. Love is in the Actions.

In a later chapter about living an intentional life, Jamie writes that after you've identified what you deeply want you have to go and do it. "Not to prove anything to anyone," she writes. "but to honor yourself and your desires. To take what you want seriously. To love yourself through actions. Love is in the actions."

Love. Is. In. The. Actions.

That changes the motivation behind the doing: we're not doing it out of shame or fear, but out of love. As a way to honor ourselves. Doing the work becomes a demonstration of self-love.

"If you say you want something, truly, and then act in direct opposition to it, it creates an internal struggle. It creates anxiety. It creates unhappiness."

Bingo.

And the only way to end that agony? Action.

"The nerve has to come from the showing up. The confidence has to be earned, built, and cultivated."

It's about changing the meaning of the action itself. Instead of waiting to feel confident to show up, you have to show up first, and the confidence will follow. And more importantly, show up with joy, not with shame. Why we show up is just as important as showing up.

Putting it all together: Doing as an Act of Love

I wanted to write, but I was foo focused on the outcomes. I kept forcing myself to sit down and write from a place of shame and fear. This process was painful, and it wasn't working. It was taking the joy out of something that I loved.

That's when it clicked.

The only thing that matters is showing up. Writing as a process includes resistance and doubts and block sometimes, but that's ok, because I just need to keep returning to my draft. I need to keep putting faith in my words.

More than that, I need to redefine what showing up means.

Sitting down to write is an act of devotion to my deepest creative dreams. It signals that I believe my writing is important enough to be prioritized. That I believe in myself as a writer, and that belief is the only one that matters.

Every time I work on my novel I'm strengthening that relationship with my inner creativity, choosing love instead of shame. Showing up creates the trust that builds confidence, because showing up demonstrates confidence.

Mind. Blown.

Who cares about the outcome? I can't control outcomes, but I can control making my creative work an untouchable inner sanctum.

That's how my writing can become a home that will withstand both success and failures. I finally understand how to stay anchored in a practice where the results are inconsequential.

Going back to Elizabeth Gilbert's TEDTalk, she recounts having books that were highly successful and books that totally flopped, and how it stopped mattering.

"I'm writing another book now. And I'll write another book after that and another and another and another and many of them will fail, and some of them might succeed, but I will always be safe from the the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live."

That's what I'm trying, with slow, small steps. To let go of shame and to build a foundation where the focus is the work, the joy comes from the doing, and the ego is not attached to the outcome.

But most importantly, remembering that each action is an act of love. And there is no better invitation to creative joy than love.

From the Web:

Keep an eye out for Paris Paloma's new song, "Labor", which is blowing up on Tiktok. In a previous dispatch, I wrote about how women were getting fed up with the burden of invisible labor and the mental load. This song perfectly captures the simmering rage that women are feeling not just for themselves, but for their mothers and grandmothers too. It comes out March 24th. I think you're going to start hearing it everywhere.

Over on Twitter, Jackson Greathouse Fall, gave ChatGPT-4 a budget of $100 and instructed the AI to make as much money as possible. The whole saga is unfolding and so fascinating. This is the tip of the iceberg for what we're going to be able to do with these tools.

On Instagram, Geert Weggen has been photographing a squirrel for the past six years and the pictures are so whimsical and cute and the perfect reset from our society's slow march towards the unleashing of AI tools that we are absolutely not prepared for. (I'm working on a dispatch about this topic that will hit your inboxes soon!)

Foushy Updates:

Currently:

I'm recovering from a cold and binge watching the Below Decks series on Netflix. It's such a great example of managing teams, personal communication styles and conflict resolution (ok, ok, and rich people getting sloppy on a yacht is funny AF.) I'm kind of obsessed. I'm focused on having a slow and restful weekend to feel better. After so many health issues last year, I'm grateful to my body for battling viruses. For the first time, I'm not impatient or irritated, I'm thankful and trying to support my body as best I can.

Up Next:

At the farm, the Mason Bees have popped up, heralding the arrival of spring. I highly recommend these inexpensive bug hotels from Amazon, they help our insect friends find homes. We have three and will be installing more. I'm looking forward to spending the next week at home without ANY SCHEDULED CALLS! Time to make big pushes on my Quadrant 2 work.

The Foush Report