Crystallize your goals. Make a plan for achieving them and set yourself a deadline. Then, with supreme confidence, determination and disregard for obstacles and other people’s criticisms carry out your plan. ~Paul Meyer
It’s easy for someone to tell you to be clear about your goals, to make a plan to achieve them and set yourself a deadline. And it’s just as easy to say you must have supreme confidence and a disregard for obstacles and other people’s criticisms.
So then, what factor will actually determine your creative success?
Creative Commons by Nick Wheeleroz
Delusion
In order to have supreme confidence and a disregard for criticism you’ve got to be willing to be considered delusional.
No one who has ever accomplished greatness was considered rational and level headed. Those are for the average ticket punchers.
Greatness comes with a price and it’s your sanity through the eyes of others.
You Are Not Average.
So don’t act average.
We are taught all of our lives to fit it, to be normal and to comply. And yet, it’s not possible to create anything that matters if you’re fitting in, acting normal and simply complying with the rules of society’s every one is the same game.
Besides, if you really are a ticket puncher, a software program will eventually take your place anyway.
So much for fitting in and complying.
In order to be creatively successful you must check your sanity at the door and step away from predictability.
Can you make a difference? Yes. You Can.
You’ve got to be determined to make a difference.
Nearly everyone will tell you that you must have a specific goal.
I’m not going to tell you that.
You might not have a specific goal right now, but what you probably have is an idea, just a notion of what you want to create, and that’s enough to get started.
It doesn’t help to make a specific goal for something you don’t completely understand yet. (If you agree, tweet it.)
The more important issue is to begin working your idea and allow it the flexibility to go in any direction.
Explore your idea and give it the room it needs to breathe and grow.
A clear goal will get you from point A to point B, but an idea has wide open possibilities.
Before you can set a goal you must discover what all the possibilities are and which way you want to go with them. Then you can start setting goals.
What’s more important is the determination to do something with your idea.
There are dreamers and there are doers.
It’s best to be a dreamer who is a doer. (Go ahead and tweet this.)
A dreamer who is a doer does whatever it takes to make his or her dream a reality.
When you make it a reality you won’t be considered delusional anymore, you’ll be considered a genius.
It’s kind of weird how that works. Isn’t it?
Know this:
Others who are compelled to try to stop you do it because they themselves are not willing to be considered delusional and they are always going to strive to fit in.
Seriously, there’s not much striving in fitting in.
They perceive you as a threat to their way of living, and if you succeed then what are they really doing?
Not much.
But they are creative, too. They are just not willing to see it or believe it, even after you show them what is possible.
Be crazy, be a ruckus maker, and for Pete’s sake be as unique and different as you are. It’s okay to be seen as delusional.
You do not need to fit in.
And if someone else says it can’t be done, well, they won’t do it. But you just might.
What creative adventure are you exploring today? Share in the comments.
