Creative Advice

If you live and work as a "creative" then you've likely been the recipient of often well-intended but mostly empty and unhelpful advice. This advice usually comes at the expense of yet another creative meltdown where you look at your work and wonder why the hell you keep trying. Well, we all know why we keep trying—because a.) we can't help it, and b.) it feels unnatural to do anything else. It's not because someone once told you to "never give up" or to “try harder.” It's because every time you think about giving up and resigning yourself to a future of desk jobs where you crunch numbers and prepare TPS Reports, you manage to feign a streak of creative inspiration that propels you out of the meltdown and into temporary awesomeness (at least until your next meltdown).

Successful people love to give advice. Hell, I love to give advice and I’m not even successful (but oh boy, I’ve got a few pointers that will really make a difference when you make your next set of macramé pot holders!). We all go through phases in our own lives where “GIVE ME ADVICE” seems to be tattooed on our foreheads. During the time that I was unemployed this year (ahem, most of this year), I heard a lot of advice. Some of the advice I got was helpful like, “if duct tape won’t fix it, it is definitely broken,” and, “don’t bite the hand that feeds you, even if they insist on feeding you shit.” It was the vague, general and ultimately shallow advice that seemed to eat away at my soul everyday—things like, "be yourself - that's enough," or, "you have to believe in yourself, and then your career will take off."

You know what?

Shut the hell up.

I’m not giving up because I’ve already made it this far, I can’t avoid being myself (although sometimes I wish I could), and I believe in myself enough to know that you are full of shit.

So how about that?

What you got now?

Yeah…that’s what I thought—don’t you bring that weak Chicken Soup for the Soul shit ‘round here no more!

(Sorry, my outbursts are unpredictable lately.)

Anyway, being the obviously harsh judge of friendly advice that I am, I came across this golden nugget of Ira Glass advice that made me heave a sigh of relief, and for a moment, allowed me to forgive myself for all of the mediocre work I seem to be vomiting out on an uncomfortably regular basis. I’m sure some of you have seen this before, or heard it, but the message is one we all need to be reminded of while calm and sane (i.e., before the regularly scheduled meltdowns occur).



“It takes a while; it’s going to take you awhile; it’s normal to take awhile. You just have to fight your way through that, okay? You will be fierce. You will be a warrior. And you will make things that aren’t as good as you know in your heart that you want them to be, but you just [have to keep] making one after another…”

Alright, now I'm going to go write a whole bunch of crap that—if I'm lucky—will make me cringe when I look back at it years from now.

Thanks, Ira.