What if you only had a few more months left to live? How would YOU spend YOUR time? Would you stay at the shitty job you took to get your career started or because you didn’t know what to do with yourself, or would you restructure pretty much everything so that you could finally do the things you’ve been saying you’ll do for years? And that probably means travelling, time with family, and projects that might not work out.

Seriously think about that for a minute.

Think about the dreams you have in the back of your mind and which ones (yes plural) you are not pursuing right now. I’m sure you’re scared about them too, right?

But that’s not gonna cut the mustard anymore!

I’m going to share a list of ten things you likely haven’t considered simultaneously but seriously need to if you want to get out of your funk and start contributing to society proper. That means you need to take a good hard look at your life and what it is made up of and start dissecting many things and nurturing other less obvious things.

This is real talk! And not the creepy kind from R Kelly.

10 Sentences That Can Change Your Perspective On Life

1. People aren’t against you; they are for themselves.
2. Climb mountains not so the world can see you, but so you can see the world.
3. You learn more from failure than from success. Don’t let it stop you. Failure builds character.
4. The most dangerous risk of all – the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
5. Go where you’re celebrated not where you’re tolerated.
6. The person that you will spend the most time with in your life is yourself, so better try to make yourself as interesting as possible.
7. If you accept your limitations you go beyond them.
8. People often say that motivation doesn’t last, Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily.
9. Everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something, and has lost something.
10. Comfort is the enemy of achievement.

I originally found this list from imgur a few years back, so I can’t properly source it, other than the link itself, but here is the link if you want to do some investigating.

Today’s post dear readers is about this theory I have that most people are only willing to do the bare minimum to get through life.

You, yes you, as a creative person have a choice though – decide if you are willing to accept this as reality, or if you are going to fight with everything you have to stay passionate, to burn to produce something real, and to keep doing it until the day you die.

You see my friends, nobody is going to tell you the most obvious thing, they expect you to figure it out yourself.

We all have a reach that it is much longer than our grasp, in terms of asethetics/ability and our vision of what we will accomplish. We will always have this vision, from youth to our old age; but you have to work through potentially years of work in order for your talent to reach your vision.

Admittedly that last point is not my own idea, it comes from Ira Glass, host and producer of This American Life. I paraphrased it, but here is the quote I took the idea from.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.

But there is this gap.

For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.

We all go through this.

And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap. And your work will be as good as your ambitions.

And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Ira is right though. And I am gonna expand on his idea –  when we have nothing to lose AND we are physically able, we finally hunker down and start making beautiful things. And that’s when we start to close the gap.

Take for instance this song Clouds about a young man who was an incredibly talented musician.

As delicately as I can say it, the point I am making with Zach Sobiech is not that he FINALLY started to make art and follow his passion because of his cancer (though that is true), my point is that many of us finish school or enter the workforce and give up on our dreams. That was not Zach’s story, but look how much he accomplished in 4 years because he had a purpose and committed to it.

As I mentioned, most of us wait.

But if we wait until we get sick or when we retire and show signs of age, then decide to take up “hobbies” and finally start to share our unique visions with the world, we might not close that gap.

And that’s my theory for the day. Leave some comments or reach out to me with your thoughts! I’ll see you tomorrow with a Melodic Monday review.

Tim!