Linchpin_ Are You Indispensable_ - Seth Godin [63]
city). She's well dressed, with sunglasses on her blond (not her real color) hair. Here's her
cycle, which she repeats every sixteen seconds (I timed it):
She looks left, then right.
Adjusts the hair over her left ear.
Looks ahead to see if anyone is watching.
Adjusts her sunglasses.
Pulls her skirt down a quarter of an inch.
Adjusts the hair over her right ear.
Repeat.
Over and over and over. This is obviously not intentional behavior; it's baked in. Her
ancestors did it on the savanna, and she's doing it here. It matters a great deal what the
herd thinks of her. Instead of creating something, connecting, or learning, she's stuck in a
lizard cycle of preening and fear.
When the resistance settles in, here's the cycle my lizard brain forces me into:
Check my e-mail box to see what people think of my work. Answer them.
Check the tribes online site to see what's going on. Adjust if necessary. Check my e-mail
box.
Check my blog feeds to see what's happening. Read the relevant ones; comment if
appropriate.
Check the status of my Squidoo pages.
Repeat.
I can do this forever. It's like adjusting a pair of sunglasses. It never ends.
Artists never do this while they're being artists. When I put myself on an Internet diet
(only five checks a day, not fifty), my productivity tripled. Tripled.
Sprint!
The best way to overcome your fear of creativity, brainstorming, intelligent risk-taking,
or navigating a tricky situation might be to sprint.
When we sprint, all the internal dialogue falls away and we focus on going as fast as we
possibly can. When you're sprinting, you don't feel that sore knee and you don't worry
that the ground isn't perfectly level. You just run.
You can't sprint forever. That's what makes it sprinting. The brevity of the event is a key
part of why it works.
"Quick, you have thirty minutes to come up with ten business ideas."
"Hurry, we need to write a new script for our commercial . . . we have fifteen minutes."
My first huge project was launching a major brand of science-fiction computer adventure
games (Ray Bradbury, Michael Crichton, etc.). I stopped going to business school classes
in order to do the launch.
One day, right after a red-eye flight, the president of the company told me that he had
canceled the project. He said that the company didn't have enough resources to launch all
the products we had planned, our progress was too slow, and the packaging wasn't ready
yet.
I went to my office and spent the next twenty hours rewriting every word of text,
redesigning every package, rebuilding every schedule, and inventing a new promotional
strategy. It was probably six weeks of work for a motivated committee, and I did it
(alone) in one swoop. Like lifting a car off an infant, it was impossible, and I have no
recollection at all of the project now.
The board saw the finished work, reconsidered, and the project was back on again. I
didn't get scared until after the sprint (then I passed out). You can't sprint every day, but
it's probably a good idea to sprint regularly. It keeps the resistance at bay.
Downhill Versus Uphill
Launching your art into the world often feels like an uphill climb, an ongoing series of
challenges and obstacles. At any step along the way, the resistance can cut you down. All
you need to do is falter, and your work is wasted. You're pushing a rock uphill, and if you
stop for a second, the thing rolls all the way down, erasing all your effort.
It's possible, though, to view the work that comes with the launching of your art as an
inevitable gravitational process, like an avalanche or a giant slalom. Start at the top of the
hill, not the bottom. One little step to get you started, and then it grows and grows, ever
faster. No amount of resistance can stop this from happening.
The Internet can amplify this effect. You put up a video, and then in a week, a million
people have seen it. You send an e-mail message to the right six people, and a project
begins.
That's why authors