Acting Without the Drama

January 28, 2009.  There are certain things in my life that I’ve always held to be incontrovertible truths.  No other success compensates for failure in the home.  Kindness is always the better way.  What goes around comes around.

Creative people aren’t good at business.

What?

Now, you can pretty much subsitute anything logical or scientific where the word “business” is, and the voices in my head will respond with a resounding, “Of COURSE!  How could anyone think anything different?”

I started out my academic career as an aerospace engineering major.  I excelled at physics and calculus in high school (as well as English and theatre).  I enjoyed (honestly, “enjoy” is the right word there) exercising my brain that way.

But somewhere along the way, someone taught me that you couldn’t be good at the sciences and also be an artist.  Creativity and logic simply cannot coexist.  Even my testing bore this out.  When I scored high in math, my verbal scores went down, and vice-versa.

Now, here I am, stepping in with both feet creatively, embracing the fact that I want to be successful with my art.  And running a business.

And I find myself perpetually petrified.  I don’t know how to do this!

Except that I do.  I’m a smart guy.  I actually know quite a lot, and my instincts are pretty good.  The things that I don’t know are all things that I can learn or figure out.  There is absolutely no reason to panic.

That panic response is a funny one.  We panic when we’re presented with something outside of our comfort zone.  The panic, by its very nature, causes us to want to run away screaming or fight whoever’s the closest.  Neither one of those responses helps us learn much.

When I just take a second to calm down and settle the internal voices, things have a tendency to get a lot clearer.  Once again, the importance of breathing reasserts itself!

So, I’m taking some figurative time to breathe and calm down.  The things that I’m doing don’t have to be terrifying.

After all, I’m doing this so that I can be a better and more successful artist.  That sounds like a pretty worthwhile goal to shoot for!

Rate it: 1 2 3 4 5 (2 ratings)	Email it