Exposure to judgment and uncertainty aren’t going away. Nor, as a creator, do you want them to. Judgment, delivered constructively, provides the information needed to create at higher and higher levels. And uncertainty is a signpost of novelty and innovation, telling you that what you’re creating is really worth creating.

For most other endeavors, once that energy cedes to the more long-term, “get it done” nature of any meaningful creative endeavor, the discomfort and anxiety that ride along become a stronger and stronger force.

All too often, one of two things happens. The fear and anxiety lure you into wanting to move too quickly from freedom to constraint. They make you want to close off options, create rules, systems, and processes, stop exploring, adapting, testing, permuting, experimenting, and evolving. Not because it’s the right time, not because you’ve finally reached a point at which you’ve accomplished what you’re truly capable of, but because the uncertainty, the anxiety, the suffering that come from not being “there” yet or from fear of being criticized for taking a risk and getting it wrong is killing you. And you just want it to end.

Or the opposite happens. Your inability to wrangle the fear and uncertainty stops you from ever starting or makes you so freaked out about making the wrong decisions that you endlessly debate every step along the way, lose your ability to make decisions and take action, and end up stalled.

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It’s 9am on a Monday morning. You’re gathered around a meeting table.

“Listen up, people,” says the SVP who’s leading your team. “We need new ideas. Fresh, creative approaches, things that push the envelope. If we don’t get them, I don’t know what’s going to happen. You have until same time next week. I want to see a bare minimum of 5 raw ideas before this time next week. Go! Push the envelop, people, I’ve got pressure from above to make big things happen.”

Wondering if both your job and the future of your division lie in the balance, you set to work. The next morning you email the SVP a set of ideas. They’re rough, but highly-creative. You’ve never heard anything like them. Fifteen minutes later you get a reply. “Nice effort,” says the boss, “but these just aren’t quite right. Keep at it.”

The next day, you try again, submitting 3 new concepts, each one better than the first batch. Minutes later, a similar reply hits your inbox. “I really appreciate your hard work, but these are just too to different, too risky.” This dance goes on daily for weeks. Not just with you, but with the SVP and the other members of your team.

You begin to wonder…

How can a group of smart, innovative people brainstorm more than 100 ideas and have them all be rejected out of hand as being either too dull or, more often, too risky? Is the entire team really that incapable of creativity?

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I did a bit of an experiment over the last 2 ½ weeks.

Something most “experts” will tell you is death to any blog.

I stopped posting. For 2 ½ weeks. Not a peep.

Without explanation. Without notice. I just plain vanished.

Why?

A few reasons…

I’m often asked how many times a day or week a blogger should post to maximize growth, influence and impact. I have friends who post two or three times a month and experience extraordinary growth and sharing.

For some time, I’ve posted anywhere from two to seven times a week. And I wanted to see what would happen if I radically cut back on my posting frequency.

I wanted to see:

• What would happen to my traffic
• What would happen to my subscription rate
• Whether anyone would notice, and if they did…
• Whether anyone would care

So, here’s what happened. Over 2 ½ postless, totally AWOL weeks…

My traffic - Traffic to the blog dropped about 25%, but my deep history of links, SEO and ongoing social discovery kept a nice flow of organic traffic rolling in. This is the benefit of having a substantial number of evergreen posts built up over a period of years, especially authoritative ones with strong search-rankings.

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Scheduling spontaneity. It sounds counterintuitive.

But, the deeper you get into life, the more you’ve got going on, the more you need to schedule time to not have anything scheduled.

Ritual is important. So it routine. They help create certainty anchors in your day, moments where you know what’s coming next and you can get into a rhythm that allows creativity and productivity to flow.

But, without fail, the biggest ideas, the most endearing connections, the world-changing insights come not when you’re engaged in the process of trying to make them happen, but when you step away and give your mind a bit of space. When you let your brain breath.

That’s when data coalesces into genius. Conversations blossom into love. And the playful side of life swirls through you.

The busier you get, the more important it is for you to exalt and even schedule time to be unscheduled. To pause.

As John Lennon once shared -

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Schedule spontaneity and plan to live.

What do you think?

How often are you thrown off by an inability to see what’s right in front of you?

I recently had the chance to interview my friend and Money Magazine’s Online Career Expert of the Year, Alexandra Levit, about something she calls career blind spots and the book she just released on the topic by the same name. Here’s what unfolded…

In Blind Spots, you explore the ten biggest myths of business success.  What made you decide to write this book?

I decided to write Blind Spots because I was tired of reading silly theories and platitudes dispensed by business and career authors who sell their work by giving these myths credibility and by telling readers what they want to hear.  I wanted to be honest with people about what will render them successful in today’s business world, not yesterday’s.  I wanted something out there other than overly provocative advice that hasn’t worked for anyone I know, like quitting your job tomorrow and starting your own business the next day, or marching into your boss’ office and announcing that he should appreciate your individuality.

What’s your favorite myth and why?

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Today’s guest contributor is Jonathan Mead. Jonathan is a coach, writer, and barefoot runner helping people quit their jobs and get paid to be who they are.

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I always marvel at the way some people seem to rise from ground zero, to leading and dominating their market in a short amount of time. It seems as if their success is overnight, and almost supernatural.

Sadly, others spend years toiling away, working hard and their progress seems snail-like at best.

It makes me curious about what goes on behind the scenes of people that level up their business rapidly.

And I have to admit, sometimes I’ve looked at others rise to fame with feelings of envy when it seems like I’m doing all the same things, and making all the right moves, but getting radically different results.

These days I’ve gotten a lot better about not comparing my success to those of my peers. I realize that we’re all running our own race, and what matters is our competition with ourselves.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from the rapid evolution of others. I’ve become a kind of student, or mad scientist if you will, trying to find the common element that quickly elevates leaders to great heights.

Well, there’s one thing that I’ve found that may surprise you. It isn’t grit. It’s not genius, luck or even access to greater resources than average people.

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The publishing world is in mass-flux. While this terrifies some writers, other entrepreneurial-minded writers and self-publishers are licking their chops.

Sean Platt is one of them. You may know him from WriterDad.com, GhostWriterDad.com, CollectiveInkwell.com and his contributions all over the web.

But it’s a pretty radical new approach to “episodic” or serialized digital fiction with his Yesterday’s Gone series that’s turning a lot of heads these days.

In this in depth interview we look at how a new generation of authors is trying to leverage the exploding “kindle economy,” most with little success, and how Sean’s radically different approach may create a whole new model for e-fiction and beyond.

Links mentioned in the interview:

• Yesterday’s Gone (Season 1) on amazon
• SerializedFiction.com

If you’re the slightest bit interested in what Sean’s doing and how he’s doing it, I’d run and grab the entire first “season” (c’mon it’s like $4.99), read the short 100-page books and, more importantly, deconstruct how he’s writing each one differently than the typical novel and how it might apply to your own quest to bring great fiction to life, have a blast doing it and get paid well for your efforts.

+++Timely Tidbits+++

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• TribalAuthorCamp – Authors and aspiring authors who are willing to do the work needed to succes – the next semester begins Monday, October 17th – grab one of the remaining seats today. Click here to learn more

Every time I launch a new book, I learn so much.

While most authors hate the process, I love it. To me it’s one massive puzzle, and I treat it very much like launching a business. I shared a bunch of what I learned in a recent mammoth post over on Copyblogger. But that’s just the tip of the ice-burg.

I think the one thing I may enjoy more than launching my own books and businesses is sharing what I’ve learned, what to do and, maybe more importantly, what never to do. I spend a lot of time, energy and, yes, money trying all kinds of things, knowing full-well that some will be home-runs and others will bomb. I’m okay with that, I love testing new ideas and I’m willing to put my time and money on the line to do so. But, I also know, I’m very unusual in the world of authors. Most authors would rather just be told where to focus for the greatest likelihood of success.

That’s why I started Tribal Author Camps two years ago as live trainings in NYC and it’s also why I converted them to online/call-in trainings earlier this year.

Well, the next camp runs October 17-December 15th. Many of the seats were taken by people on the advance notice list, and the next training isn’t until 2012. But we’ve still got seats left in the October training if you’d like to claim yours. Here’s what I just said about it in the official announcement over on TribalAuthor.com:

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Yesterday, I sat in an airplane hanger with 4,000 CEOs and thought leaders from around the world, listening to a line-up of world-class speakers. The event was the HSM World Business Forum. And I’ve had the privilege of “covering” it for the last 3 years as a blogger.

Every year, I leave inspired beyond word. Not just by the ideas and conversations, but the quality of the speakers. As someone who aspires to speak to larger and larger audiences on larger and larger stages, I love to see how the best in the business do it.

But then, there are always those moments during the two-day event where extraordinary ideas converge with a radiant personal energy to create magic.

For me, Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conductor, teacher and speaker, Ben Zander, was that moment.

He was alive, literally floating through the audience. In fact, he started in the audience fluttering, skipping, dancing and prancing up and down the aisles. And, with the exception of running up to the stage to play piano in short bursts, he stayed in the audience for nearly two hours.

Minutes in he had 4,000 stuffed shirts singing happy birthday at the top of their lungs, gesticulating with their arms, animating their faces, laughing. Even more conservative genius marketing types like Derek Halpern (who happened to be sitting next to me) joined in. Not out of some awkward sense of being forced into a contrived experience (I’ve been to those, too), but because Zander swept us all away. Resistance was futile.

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Yesterday, Uncertainty was launched.

But, this post isn’t about the book, it’s about what happened during the 3 1/2 hour live-streaming book launch party that brought me back to what matters.

People were hanging out, bantering and connecting from all over the world. At points, close to 200 were at the party. That alone is amazing. That I could throw a launch party for a book, sitting in my friend, Lewis Howes’ apartment in New York City, yet be partying, goofing around and talking to people from all over the world.

But, that’s still not what this post is about…

At some point during the live-streaming launch party, we started to give away prizes. They started small, things like $25 or $50 gift cards for Starbucks or iTunes or Barnes & Noble. Then, at some point, someone in the chat room asked if they could buy books for us to give away to others at the party. Then someone else joined in. Then another.

By the end, Julia Roy, Rudy Nelson, Erik Proulx, Lisa Johnson and Baker had donated enough money to buy copies of Uncertainty for dozens of people.

Not because there was something in it for them, but because they thought it’d be a cool, nice thing to do. Both for me, and for the other folks at the party who would love a copy of the book, but maybe didn’t have the money right then.

That. Is. Amazing.

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