“Access your internal GPS.
It already knows which way you should go.”

Is it Career Success Now? Or is it Life Fulfillment Always?

By David J Diamond
April 4, 2021

We experience the world and ourselves in the world. Energy comes through us in all of our relations with other people, our reading, our circumstances, everything we think about.

Then we allow all that we have learned, felt and experienced filter through our artistic practice and it emerges as creativity. As artists we want to not only experience but share our questions or beliefs and/or our thoughts with others.

We do this by filtering all of this input through our creative practice. What emerges is our “art”. This is why rigorous practice is vital. We want to create the artistic work with the highest level communication as possible that will connect with others (whether that is positive, negative or benign).

What feels like inspiration is actually a coming together of our experience and our practice in unpredictable ways. A great idea flows through us as energy. 

The wisdom that breeds that energy is always available to us, but we don’t recognize it because our attention is not pointed in that direction. When we start ‘thinking’ about something, questioning it, being annoyed by it, being thrilled by it, but not blocking the energy of it, we begin to experience insight.

We take that insight and filter it through our dance, our painting, our theatrical creations – any type of creation, and it takes on its own life.

ON RIGOROUS PRACTICE

As we ‘get better’ at the technical aspects of our practice, we have more tools at our disposal with which to express and we know better how to implement them. 

Learning new practices, even those seemingly unrelated to our primary media, can enrich our creativity even more. The ‘result’ (if there ever really is one) is what we choose to share with our audience, our reader, our viewer, our listener, our art-consumer.

Once the creation is ‘out in the world,’ we have many choices of how we engage with it and with our audience. We may want to engage in conversation with the ‘consumers’, or we may see how it pushes us towards further questions that we feel compelled to explore in new ways.

The energy that engages artists and compels them to create is always around us. As we know from Einstein, everything is made of energy. We have at our fingertips an infinite access to the energy that allows us to create. 

“Stuck” artists have the same access to this innate wisdom as inspired ones – they just don’t see it/feel it/experience it at the moment. It’s important that I say “at the moment,” because our level of consciousness (what we can ‘see’) changes regularly, a million times a day: A new insight is just around the corner. 

We are just ‘one thought away’ from a changed experience and a changed perspective.

WHAT GETS IN THE WAY

There is another energy that confuses us. This is the energy that fosters a belief that we cannot and will not be able to access our creativity again. It is a reliance on confused thinking, that — like a clogged drain — doesn’t allow the infinite wisdom to come through. Our access to clarity, to inspiration, to insight, dissipates and our state of mind suffers. 

We can be wonderful creators in states of confusion, depression, sadness, despair, as well as peacefulness, satisfaction and happiness. The state of our consciousness does not dictate our abilities or proficiency. What keeps us from accessing our deepest creative selves and allowing that energy through, is another type of energy – a block between the inspiration and the belief that creating is even possible. Two of the most common blocks are “I’m not good enough” and “I’m not as good as so-and-so”.

When we ‘clear out the drain’ of our blocks, we begin to experience again the creative flow. Many things can clear the block, including distraction, experiencing other works of art that shift us, talking with someone who can help an artist shift the direction of their thinking so they glimpse some of the possibilities that they have at their disposal – the energy or flow that we lose track of. 

ON STRUGGLE
It may seem ‘hard’ but there is a distinction between something being ‘hard’ and it being a struggle. A struggle is the heavy feeling of our suspicion that we won’t succeed and we must push or feel stressed in order to motivate ourselves. That is a fallacy. 

Being hard is just being hard. It doesn’t have an emotion attached to it if we don’t imbue it with that power. We do lots of things that are hard without ‘feeling the struggle’. If we expect something to be challenging, we are not surprised and we can carry on and often feel the satisfaction of having done something that seemed difficult. The emotional struggle could be there, but it doesn’t have to be. Struggling is not a pre-requisite for achieving great things.

I feel that my ‘calling’, if you want to call it that, is to help artists and others to look in another direction and perhaps see something they had not seen before.

CAREER SUCCESS NOW (“A MISNOMER”)

CAREER SUCCESS NOW is the name of a talk I used to share with theatre students. It seemed to be a good title, attractive to students and other theatre artists. Good marketing. Until I realized that I didn’t believe in it.

I had to shift the name of the workshop to accommodate my new thinking about what ‘career,’ ‘success,’ and ‘now’ really mean.

CAREER

Artists don’t have careers, they have lives. All day long, every day, we are artists and our lives are shaped by our observations and thoughts that we communicate with others. We are artists when we just observe the world and engage with it. 

We are artists when we share our creativity with others. That’s why it’s important to have a rigorous practice – so we can share what we want to share in the best way we can. 

The word ‘career’ is a business model word that implies some kind of direct trajectory from beginner-to-advanced with concomitant raises in visibility, income, abilities and recognition. 

For artists, the path is very different. Because art-making is about sharing our changing questions and concerns filtered through our creative practice, that direct trajectory is actually an irregular morass of lines going up, down, diagonally, across each other in no discernible or predictable way.

It’s not useful to use the moniker ‘career’ because it has too many implications that are not helpful and that can hold us back. We are very good at judging ourselves by how we see our ‘career’ is going (particularly as compared to other artists’ careers.) We are locking ourselves into a mindset that includes an assumption that certain achievements (that are not rules– we just make them up) are required to advance our ‘career.’ 

If, instead, we judge ourselves on a different scale, it changes how we perceive ourselves and allows us to continue our artistic work unfettered by negative thinking. The scale I like is: Are we excavating our deepest selves and allowing wisdom to come through us in our practice? Or, even better, but this is difficult: Don’t judge ourselves at all!

So, in renaming the lecture, I changed ‘CAREER’ to ‘LIFE.’

SUCCESS

When are we ‘successful?’ Who decides?

Success is a loaded word. It’s another one that requires self-evaluation. Others may also tell you what they think, but basically, we have to choose whether or not to believe what they say and decide what it means and how it will affect us moving forward. The most important things for an artist, it seems to me, are to continue their exploration (internal and external), improve their practice and share the art with an audience in the most effective way possible. 

Success can mean many things – it could be a brushstroke that we have been trying master and we finally do; it can be a moment in rehearsal when the actors make a breakthrough in their performances; it can be getting recognition for your work; it can be making an impact on a community you are trying to reach; it can foster systemic change in the society; so many things.

We get satisfaction and fulfillment from all of these things, but are they ‘success” as if ‘success’ was a destination, instead of a million moments along the road of our creation and communication. Is it a destination or a moment in time when we happen to be thinking about it?

If we look at success as a destination, what does that mean for our personal exploration? It can boost our ego perhaps, but it is short-lived. Artists tell me that either they don’t believe they deserve recognition they get, or they love it but are surprised that the good feeling doesn’t last, or that they are constantly trying to hold on to it and second-guess themselves by relying too much on thinking about what others think about them. It’s a lot of weight to carry. 

Going off on tangents, asking the next question, learning new things and new ways of expression, changing direction mid-stream are all part of the artist’s best life. Why not give up the idea that achieving success as the goal, and replace it with many, many moments of enticing challenge, hard work, and joy which are not tied to an outcome?

So, I renamed ‘SUCCESS - ‘FULFILLMENT.’

NOW

We are impatient with ourselves and with others. ‘Now’ is part our fast-paced culture – an efficient culture which prizes speed, immediate access, not having to wait…for…anything. This is not a helpful notion for an artist. Not only does art take the time it takes – and often taking a long time produces the best work – art is not served by an expectation that it can be created or consumed quickly. 

‘Now,’ is also limiting because ‘now’ lasts…how long? I don’t know. As soon as ‘now’ comes, it is past. Now is not now for long. If we have an expectation that our best artistic explorations will give us something we want immediately, not only will we be disappointed regularly, but it will pass as quickly as it arrives.

Our ‘fulfillment’ can come at any time. We can experience it and ‘feel’ it many times in a life, a year, a day, a moment. Why limit ourselves?

So, I changed ‘NOW’ to ‘ALWAYS.’

CAREER SUCCESS NOW has become LIFE FULFILLMENT ALWAYS

It feels better; I can breathe. It frees me to dream, to follow my desire and to find the joy in all of it.

THE RIGHT PATH

There is no ‘right’ path for artists. In fact, there is no path. The path only emerges after we have already tread on it. Then we can turn around and see what our path was. 

In the meantime, all we can do is take the next step, follow our desire and access our internal GPS, which already knows which way we should go.