The fear that all creatives carry with them.

If I haven't met that yet, then am I doing it right? What am I doing wrong? Everything. You know, people must not care about me or what I'm doing. Or it may look like having this thing that I'm so proud of. Like, I made a couple videos recently that I'm extremely proud of, but they flop. They just. Nobody seems to care. And so, you know, maybe you have a similar thing in the way that you make your work or you're putting yourself out there. But I want to talk about some ways that I'm learning to redefine this. And this is a daily thing. Because failure, by definition, is a lack of success. Failure, by definition, is a lack of success. And, you know, when we look at things like getting stuck or our expectations or, you know, having this thing that we're proud of but doesn't perform well, like, what we're really looking at is resistance. You know, we're feeling this resistance. We're feeling this fear.

And.

My fear is all about proving something. I have a long, long, long history of trying to be a prover. Like, I had so many people in my life in the beginning. That said, Lennon, you should really pursue a different path path. Because this is like this musician thing, this touring musician thing is not something people do. And from the get, I've just been like, all right, totally going to prove you wrong. You can suck it. And then what I've started to realize is that proving is doing nothing. It just leads. It's like. It's cyclical. It just leads to this constant continuation of that resistance, this fear. So my coach and I have been talking a lot about this. She says fear is false evidence appearing real. False evidence appearing real. But what we have to remind ourselves here is that if we didn't have that resistance, that would mean that the thing that we're making didn't mean anything to us. It would mean that we were just doing something arbitrarily, right? When I go out and fly the drone that we just got, there's no resistance there because it doesn't really mean anything to me. It's just about having a good time. And that's great, but you just have to be cautious, because that resistance can also keep you from going after your purpose and really defining what it is to be successful. Because the big issue here was that I hadn't defined what success was for me based on the things that I actually had control over. Say that again. I hadn't defined what success was for me based on the things that I had control over. Right. I was creating unwinnable games. All these things. Like Lennon, you have to be on all the social medias. You have to make sure that you're getting all this video out. It's got to be edited perfectly. Make sure that your retention rate is above 50% at the end of the video. You got to do this thing. And you also need to be a great husband and a great dad, and you need to make sure that you're keeping up with your salary, job, and you're doing all these other things, and then you're commenting to everybody. And it's not possible. It's not possible for us to meet up to all these. And where did these expectations even come from? They were put on me by somebody else's standards, right? These are things that were put on me because I chose to embrace them. I chose to pick the things that I couldn't control to focus on. So, like, for instance, getting stuck, you know, this idea of, like, getting stuck on a project and not being able to move forward, like, feeling that resistance. I don't have control over whether or not something is difficult, but I do have control over the fact that I can acknowledge that I showed up and did the work. I can give myself credit. I can still have love for myself because I just showed up and made something happen. And I can celebrate that. And I have control over putting something out anyway for it being imperfect and still trusting myself enough to do it regardless. And I have control over deciding to rest or take a walk or eat something. You know, we have a kind of a running joke in the house about halting. So if you're hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, take care of those things. And I'm the kind of person that'll just not eat if I'm working on something really hard or, you know, I'll just go forever. And I have to be cautious of that. But those are things I have control over, right? So I can go after that. And. And that is success. If I go over and. Sorry, if I push toward the thing that I have control over, that is success. If it's expectations for sales, I don't have control. Whether or not someone says, yes, I don't. I don't have control. But what I do have control over is whether or not I can continue to talk to people, to direct message, to put out stuff that I'm passionate about, to show up authentically as me. And I do have control over recognizing again that I've given it all that I can and trusting that, you know, it's all Going to come to me in due time when it needs to be here. I do have control over getting feedback on how I positioned, trying to sell something to see if I came across as dishonest or like, you know, I can ask people what they thought or how they felt about it so I can do it better the next time. I have control over that. And when we look at this idea of positioning everything based on what we have control over, we realize that failure is not a lack of success. Failure is a lack of perspective. Failure is a lack of perspective. I heard James Wedmore say that failure does not exist. And I love this analogy because he says.

It only exists. It only has life when we give it life. Right. It's something that literally is in our brain and can only manifest itself into the things that we do on the daily. When we allow it to be there, it is not tangible. We can't sit there and hold it. We don't have it. We can't, like, feed it to the dog. Right. Lord knows if I could, I would just to get the damn thing out of the way sometimes. Right? But we don't have that option. But what we do have the option of is understanding that it only breathes when we give it breath. So we need to retract the breath of failure so that we can step into the thing that we're supposed to step into. Because failure, by the world's standards, is going to happen every single day. Failure and creativity is like Chip and Joanna Gaines, like, they go hand in hand, you know, like, yeah, I don't know. I could go into a whole diatribe about, like, chips. Chip eating a cockroach or something and Joanna being disgusted. But I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna refrain. So having those. That understanding that failure is just a lack of perspective is really, really important. So success and failure is about getting clear with what you really want. So for me, it's more time with my family. It's being able to travel more. It's being able to have the freedom to buy a cup of coffee whenever I want to. You know, it's about simple things. It's about.

Yeah, being able to live in a different city for a month out of the year. You know, that's the feeling. And there's feelings within that. And what I realized is that so many of those things, spending more time with my family, being able to have freedom to travel, doing that stuff, a lot of that is already in my control. I just need to shift the perspective to realize that, yeah, it may not be. It may be more of a challenge right now than it is in the future, but if I'm already operating under the belief that I can just do it, it has changed the way I approach everything right now. I know that this is really more about me and, like, where I'm at. But I want you to see this perspective.

So that you can really go through the process yourself. Think about the why first. If you can't think about why you want what you want, then you'll never be able to tap into these feelings that you're really trying to go after. So, you know, why do you want more followers? Why do you want to make more money from your art? Because I know you don't want to be rich. I know you're not trying to be famous. You're just trying to make a living, right? So why do you want that? What does making a living from your art give you? That's the success. That's the thing. And there may be a dozen or more ways to get to that. You may be romanticizing the thing over here that's like, you know, want to play in front of 10,000 people. That's not bad to want that. But why do you want that? What is doing that get you? And can figuring out how to go out and build that same audience online be a similar way to scratch that itch and get there? Right? So think about the why behind it, okay? And if you can't ever. I wrote this down because this is so strong to me, forgive me for reading off a freaking iPad here, but if you can't answer why you want what you want, you'll never have the stick to already screwed it up. If you can't measure why you want what you want, you'll never have the stick to measure whether or not you're growing. And by the world's standards, you may fail, but all you need to worry about is growth. All you need to worry about is growth. When you use the world's measuring stick, you'll never see yourself as tall as you actually are. Go out there, guys. Redefine what success is to you. Take the breath away from failure and breathe that breath into the thing that you actually want, into the why that you're trying to get to. I'll see you guys soon.