Linchpin_ Are You Indispensable_ - Seth Godin [46]
Elizabeth warns us that the life of the writer is a life that could end up on "the scrap heap
of broken dreams with your mouth filled with the bitter ash of failure." Why do creative
ventures threaten our mental health, she wonders. Why is there writer's block but no
chemical engineering block? Artistry, it seems, always leads to anguish. This anguish is
caused by the clash between the daemon and the resistance. Society pushes artists to be
geniuses, as opposed to encouraging artists to allow the genius within to flourish.
Different tasks.
Anguish? Sure. The conflict between your ideas and the outside world. More important,
the chasm between the part of you that wants to be safe and invisible, and your daemon,
which is demanding to speak to the world.
Every time you find yourself following the manual instead of writing the manual, you're
avoiding the anguish and giving in to the resistance.
Artists write down what the daemon says. In Elizabeth's words, "I showed up for my part
of the job." The daemon is the artist inside of you; your work is just to allow it to do its
thing.
This is far more difficult than it sounds. In his classic book The War of Art, Steven
Pressfield calls our inability to easily free the daemon "the resistance."
Pressfield says that the daemon's enemy is the resistance. Your lizard brain, the part that
the daemon has no control over, is working overtime to get you to shut up, sit down, and
do your (day) job. It will invent stories, illnesses, emergencies, and distractions in order
to keep the genius bottled up. The resistance is afraid. Afraid of what will happen to you
(and to it) if the ideas get out, if your gifts are received, if the magic happens.
You know the resistance is there. You've felt it. Perhaps you didn't have a name for it, or
recognize all the symptoms, but you can be sure that it is a part of you.
I've seen it wreck people, teams, and corporations. The resistance is nefarious and clever.
It creates diseases, procrastination, and most especially, rationalization. Lots and lots of
rationalization, some of which you might be experiencing right now.
The resistance has been around for a million years and the lizard brain will not give up
easily. While the neocortex (that's where your daemon lives) is much newer from an
evolutionary standpoint, it's not stronger. Given the chance, the lizard brain will shut you
down and the resistance will win.
The resistance almost beat Elizabeth Gilbert. After selling millions and millions of copies
of Eat, Pray, Love, the resistance was afraid of what her next book might do to her
career. "People treat me like I'm doomed. Aren't you afraid you'll never be able to top
that?" she said. The lizard brain was loud and angry and afraid and it set out to defeat her.
Elizabeth wrote her next book, right on time, and brought it to a copy shop to print out
the first draft. Standing there, she read it. "It was different from just the anxiety and
insecurities that you feel when you're writing something," she said. "It was
nondebatable." The lizard brain won. She threw out an entire book, junked it, trashed it,
missed her deadline and started over. More than a year's work gone.
Fortunately, she has a new book on the way. She persisted and found another way to beat
the lizard. But it's clear that no matter what sort of creative work you're doing, no matter
how successful or acclaimed you are, the lizard will seek you out and probably find you.
What happens after that is up to you.
How the Resistance Evolved
Actually, it got here first.
The first part of our brain, the part that shows up first in the womb, the part that was there
a million years ago--that's our lizard brain. The lizard brain is in charge of fight or flight,
of anger, and of survival. That's all we used to need, and even now, when there's an
emergency, the lizard brain is still in charge.
There are several small parts of your brain near the end of your spinal