Articles on Success, Significance and the Evolving Role of Work

A lot of folks, it seems, want to change the world.

I most often hear this rallying cry from talented, turned-on, tuned-in, twenty-something Creatives.

It makes me grin with envy.

It also makes me grit my teeth the way a parent reacts as they watch their toddler suddenly burst into a full-out run toward a closed sliding glass door.

How can one change something that is ever-changing?

The world is massive. Complex. Contradictory. It’s dynamic—in constant motion.

Trying to change change itself seems quite the Quixotic quest, if not a logical impossibility.

So what is it we really mean when we say we want to “change the world”?

I think it means we want to free ourselves and others from the baggage and burdens of life. Help the helpless. Empower and enable people. Right wrongs. See the unseen. Speak the unspoken.

But can we really? It seems there are a few possible approaches to change:

1.  We can try to change the world.
2. Or the world can change us (psst…it will).
3. Or we can resist change or being changed (and fail).
4. Or we can embrace change.

Let’s hone in on that last one.

I think Mohandas Gandhi—a guy who actually had some success with changing the world—got it right when he said,“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

What if you and I replaced our desire to change the world with a desire to be a changed human being in the world?

At some point in your life, you’ve probably encountered this quote attributed to Dr. Howard Thurman:

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

That’s it. He’s describing what being a changed person in the world is all about.

As we grow and mature, we shift our orientation from what we want to tell the world to what the world is telling us. More and more, I find myself sitting down to write asking, “What idea, ideal or information out there is trying to be heard? How can I give it life? A voice?”

Throughout this year, I’ve been researching a little thing called “the spillover effect”. This externality tells me that the things I do have positive and negative effects on the people and places around me.

Which means who I am and what I do spills over into the lives of others. It’s brought clarity to my role and responsibilities as an artist.

You might even say it’s changed me.

And that, for better or worse, changes everything.

Even, maybe, the world.

From May 2012 to July 2013, I wrote a weekly series of intimate essays for writers and artists seeking a deeper connection with their identity and place as modern creatives. I called this series Root Notes. This was an essay in that series. It was originally published on October 5, 2012.

It could be a word or phrase.  A person’s name. A song. Anything really. But all of sudden, out of nowhere, you start seeing or hearing something everywhere.

Know what I’m talking about?

My wife recently had this happen. Every time she looked at a clock, it was 12:34. Which is memorable because it’s 1-2-3-4.

For me, it’s been butterflies crossing interstates and highways.

No matter where I am, a butterfly sputters and spits across the road, tossed into chaos by the gust of passing cars.

I’ve begun to wonder how this is like art. Is art in today’s culture like a butterfly crossing a highway? Beauty trying to survive the onslaught of humanity? Transcendence lost in the transactional?

And whose place is it anyway? The butterfly’s or mine?

I believe we share this space. We co-exist.

Art needs the tension of our messy, self-centered culture for relevance. Just like the market needs the beauty and shock art offers.

Without the drone of everyday life’s transactional nature, moments of transcendence couldn’t happen.

As much as I want to take the side of the butterfly, I’m one of the human missiles careening down the road, noticing butterflies through near misses.

Which is kind of beautiful. And kind of sad.

Just like art.

From May 2012 to July 2013, I wrote a weekly series of intimate essays for writers and artists seeking a deeper connection with their identity and place as modern creatives. I called this series Root Notes. This was an essay in that series. It was originally published on September 26, 2012.

I take a lot of photos.

I’m not a photographer. Just a commoner with a camera. But I enjoy trying to grab a shot that brings out the beauty or uniqueness or humanity in something or someone.

I’ve noticed that taking a picture puts me in a strange predicament.

Part of me is in the moment, living it. Another part of me is outside the moment, trying to capture it.

So I’m never fully inside or outside any moment I’m trying to photograph.

The same is true when I write.

Part of me is hammering away on a laptop somewhere. Another part of me is in an imaginary world where characters come out to play. And where what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “primal warblings” float in the air like radio waves seeking an antenna.

I call these “in-between spaces”. They are like the overlapping area in a Venn Diagram. They are places of tension, where two or more things pull me in opposing directions.

My job, as an artist, is to exist in these in-between spaces—to work partly inside and partly outside each moment I’m given. Which means I give up being fully “in the moment,” as they say.

It’s okay.

By standing just outside life’s moments, I can capture their beauty and, hopefully, bring it into another person’s life.

Knowing this makes the sacrifices and hard work worthwhile.

From May 2012 to July 2013, I wrote a weekly series of intimate essays for writers and artists seeking a deeper connection with their identity and place as modern creatives. I called this series Root Notes. This was an essay in that series. It was originally published on September 20, 2012.

This is a brief meditation on choices that linger and haunt you. And what it offers you, as an author or artist.

Even if you don’t read or care much for poetry, you are most likely familiar with Robert Frost’s poem about “two roads” diverging in a “yellow wood”. At the end of the poem, the narrator claims to have taken the “road less traveled by” and says, with a sigh, it “has made all the difference”.

It’s this individualistic idea of choosing one’s own path—one not taken by the masses—that has led the masses to misquote and misunderstand what’s being said in the poem.

The poem is about the lingering presence of roads not taken in our lives.

“What should I major in, in college?” “Which career path should I pursue?” “Should I try to support myself full time as an artist, or get a day job?” “Should I accept that job offer and move my family?”

With every major choice in our life comes a loss. To choose one thing is to give up another.

What if you had married your high school sweetheart? What if you hadn’t slept with her? What if you had taken that European backpacking trip with your best friend after college? What if you had started writing seriously twenty years ago? What if…

We live in a world that will pay you handsomely for answers—for recommendations of roads to take. But the roads not taken—the what ifs—will forever haunt us.

Inside the “what ifs” lie the seeds of your art. Because art is beauty in tension.

Don’t deny them. Don’t try explain them away.

From May 2012 to July 2013, I wrote a weekly series of intimate essays for writers and artists seeking a deeper connection with their identity and place as modern creatives. I called this series Root Notes. This was an essay in that series. It was originally published on August 15, 2012.

If I were to tell you to write anything you want in any style you want and get it to me whenever you want, when do you think that would happen?

Now, if I were to tell you to find an interesting parallel between Pinterest and flea markets, and I were to want it by Noon tomorrow, what would happen then?

We are most creative when we are bound by limits.

Restriction creates tension. And tension creates art.

Great stories are built on tension.

Great songs are built on tension.

Great relationships are built on tension.

No limits, no tension. No tension, no drive to be free. No drive for freedom, no need for creativity.

As a writer, I could write whatever I wanted, then try to find publications in which to publish my work. But this gives me nothing real with which to work. It offers nothing to push toward or against.

Instead, I first find publications I admire, then write for them. This gives me a box in which I can freely work.

Likewise, I can spend my time trying to find readers for my words. But, again, that won’t propel my work as I’m doing it.

Instead, I spend my time trying to find words for readers. This too offers a box in which I can freely work.

Creativity is the ability to find freedom in structure. That’s why much of the world’s greatest art, literature, journalism, music, organizations and leaders rose out of tough times.

So box yourself in today—or embrace the box in which you find yourself—and watch how creative you can be trying to free yourself.

From May 2012 to July 2013, I wrote a weekly series of intimate essays for writers and artists seeking a deeper connection with their identity and place as modern creatives. I called this series Root Notes. This was an essay in that series. It was originally published on August 8, 2012.