Creating As Your Purpose
It’s taken nearly 40 years but I’ve finally figured out what I am.
When I say ‘what’ I mean how to define what I do and love. I’m a Creator.
Everything I have done and got so much joy of during my life is about creating.
Everything I have done and got so much joy of during my life is about creating.
Creating words, content, stories, strategies, food, businesses, ideas, events, dinner parties…it’s everything I enjoy and I’m good at. Suddenly my crazy looking life where I jump from creating one thing to the next and back again all in within 5 minutes, makes so much sense to me.
Sure it’s another label like being a mum or a business woman or a marketer or even a writer but Creator means so much more to me, especially after reading Seth Godin’s book ‘What to do When it’s Your Turn (and It’s Always Your turn)’.
I talked about Seth’s book recently in my business blog and how it inspired me to think of my marketing as creating but to the point here it speaks to my writing.
Seth is a marketing genius and inspirational author known for his incredibly popular blog and books such as Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable.
In What to do When it’s Your Turn he focuses on the concept of creating new and inspiring ideas. That creators are left with no choice but to put themselves out there in a big way. They need to embrace the fear and exhilaration that success but also possible failure can bring.
Creators are driven by the need to create and are utterly miserable when they don’t get to do it.
The most pertinent advice he gives is that you may put your blood, sweat and tears into your creation and when you’re finally ready to introduce it to the world you have almost a sense of entitlement that it must be your turn, that your hard work must be rewarded. That you’re owed something.
In fact it’s entirely the opposite. The world owes us Creators nothing. Forgiving our audience for not feeling grateful and that they owe us gives us the freedom to create for the sake of creating – for us we know no other truth.
We owe it to the world to put our creations out there. We’re the Creators and we owe it to the Analysts, the Fixers, the Nurturers, the Thinkers and everyone else, to create for them. It’s our job. It’s who we are. It’s our entire being.
Brutal advice from Seth and scary for a writer who is still slaving away on her first novels, but I can’t help but feel he’s right.
As he says, it is always our turn to put our creations out there. To have bad ideas. To let them marinate to become good ideas. He says that ultimately the person who fails the most will win because the person who gave up at the first hurdle can never win.
The sobering truth is that there are no guarantees but while you’re still creating you are still in the game and you have to be in it to win it.
Care enough to fail. Accept that this might or might not work. And get on with it and create!And thank you Seth for sharing the ugly and beautiful truth of creating.
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