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A Bouncing Baby Series

By Todd Henry

Today we launched our new series called “Pace” which is about some of the basics of establishing rhythm and “intervals” in our creative life. As I was preparing to launch, I was reminded of something that happened a few months back.

Last Christmas I needed to make a quick trip to the store to pick up a gift certificate for a family member. This is normally a quick and painless thing, right? But at this time of year nothing is painless when it comes to retail. It was raining heavily outside and upon walking into the store I already felt like I’d braved the gauntlet at a water park.

I was not comfortable.

I was pleased, however, to notice that there were only two people in line at the checkout stand. I made quick work of navigating the kiosks and displays in time to claim the title of “third in line.” I thought I would be out of the store, to my car and into some warm clothes in a few minutes flat. I was wrong.

One person in front of me was trying to pull some kind of money-changing scam using clothing instead of currency. (At one point she actually tried to return the clothes she was wearing and use a 30% coupon to re-purchase them.) The other person decided that she couldn’t remember if she had a credit card with this particular store and asked the cashier to call corporate and do a credit check. Lucky for me, it turns out that she didn’t have one and she decided to open one right there on the spot.

As I stood there dripping and cold, I suddenly felt a familiar urge well up inside of me – the urge to assert my rights. It was the sudden compulsion to explain to everyone else in the store how petty my little transaction was and that if they would simply turn around and look at me they would see that they are clearly inflicting terrible amounts of pain on an innocent and clearly justified bystander.

I’ve felt this feeling before. Usually it was within an organizational setting when I’ve been pushing for changes or over-extending myself in unhealthy ways to get things done. In some of my darker days, if there was even the slightest sense of lack of support from the organization I would spin out into a downward spiral of victimhood and self-pity. (Hey…I’ve learned all of this stuff we talk about the hard way, believe me.) In my better days I would simply take a defiant and compliant attitude and simply serve up whatever was expected, even if I knew we could do better.

That was until I learned a very important lesson about success in any field or by any definition – it requires patience. Quickened, miracle-grow teams or careers do not have the same root systems to support them that patient, organically grown understanding does. Having patience in the creative process means understanding that no one thing is ultimately important, but that every single thing is ultimately important. In other words, when we begin focusing impatiently on results and become myopic in our focus we miss opportunity because our field of vision is too narrow. We need to run to opportunity without sacrificing experience. We also tend to judge ideas too soon because we’re more focused on outcomes than process.

There is a kind of patient surrender of our rights that must happen in the creative process if we wish to achieve brilliance. We are not surrendering our individuality, we are simply laying down our need to assert ourselves and allowing the process to take over. We might think we know who we are and what we’re good at, but when we learn to lay down all of these notions we find that we’re discovering ourselves in the process of creating our art.

As we discuss “Pace” over the next four weeks, recognize that any kind of growth, process, or progression requires patient observation. There is no such thing as overnight maturation. We must come to patiently enjoy the process. The gold is not on the other side of the world, it’s two inches beneath our feet. Start digging.

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