Earlier this year, Chris Guillebeau and I had the pleasure of sharing some thoughts about being fearless at the TEDx conference at Carnegie Mellon. Well, we’ve both been thinking a lot about fear and the creative process since then and wanted to take the conversation deeper in a joint discussion. So, we’ve put together a panel idea called “Fear and the Art of Creation” and presented it to the crew at South By Southwest for consideration in next year’s interactive conference.

And, here’s where we’d love your help…

Panel’s are chosen, at least in part, by…YOU! Pretty cool, right. Anyone can vote on whether a topic sounds cool enough to be added to the roster. And, we hope you agree this is a conversation that needs to be taken to a much deeper level. So…

If you think our panel deserves to see the light of day, we’d love your help.

Here’s the description…

Fear and The Art of Creation – Ever wonder what keeps so many people from launching a new endeavor or scaling a creative venture into something exponentially more impactful? More often than not, the answer isn’t a lack of ideas, money, a team or a plan…it’s far more primal. The answer is fear. Instead of brainstorming new ideas, in this session you will discover how to move from ideation to action, overcome the three greatest fears that hold creatives, artists and entrepreneurs back, and find a more stable path to success.

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Not long ago, I posted about the lament of a local optometrist and how taking a much broader view of that industry and the role the internet might play could redefine how he solved his customers problems and potentially reinvigorate his business.

I’ve never stopped thinking about that example, because it was indicative of a wide swath of industries that sell a product bundled with either a personal service or need to “touch” that product before buying that are being redefined (read “hammered”) by the web.

Recently, I came across another example at the convention center in Melbourne, Australia.

My wife and daughter were bouncing through a mega-crafting show and as I meandered out to the cafe to do some writing, I passed by the presentation stage. At that very moment, a panel of craft industry experts were asked,

“how has the internet affected the crafting industry?”

One of the women on the panel answered that it’s made it far easier for buyers, many of whom are moms, to find what they need and be able to buy on their own schedules, often during random windows when their kids have gone down for naps or the evening. In fact, she added, the internet had so transformed her own retail business that she was about to shut down her brick and mortar store after 20 years and focus her energies entirely online.

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For a while now, I’ve had a section on my whiteboard wall called “Minor Commitments,” tasks, requests, small, one-time things I’d committed to doing.

What harm could these do? Turns out, a lot.

Because when I added up the time and energy it took to honor any 10 minor commitments, it equaled the time and energy needed to honor one big, fat honking commitment…THAT I DIDN’T MAKE because I’d already committed to the itty-bitty ones.

And, thing is, the return on the big, honking one I passed up would’ve been exponentially larger than the total return on all 10 minor commitments.

So, before you end up saying, “oh, it’s cool, I can knock that out in like no time, sure I’ll do it,” step back and ask yourself what seriously impactful, bigger thing you won’t be able to do if you commit to this one little sucker…and then another…and another..and another…

Put another way, try to get a beat on which minor commitments really matter, and which are more likely to be bottom-feeder obligations that keep you glued to the pond-scum, while brighter, cleaner water flows briskly just a few feet above…

If you only had the time to swim up there…

Thoughts?

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off… They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.” - Pearl Buck

“F@*# self-doubt. I despise it. I hold it in contempt, along with the hell-spawned ooze-pit of Resistance from which it crawled. I will NEVER back off. I will NEVER give the work anything less than 100%. If I go down in flames, so be it. I’ll be back.” -Steven Pressfield

“Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.” -Rita Mae Brown

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”—Clay Shirky

“I am not afraid…I was born to do this.” - Joan of Arc

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” ~Antoine De Saint Exupery

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Yesterday, my friend and insanely smart dude, Charlie O’Donnell retweeted this:

And, it got me thinking. So, I tracked it back to Jonah Peretti’s original series of tweets to get a bit more context.

Jonah’s next two tweets were:

I get what Charlie and Jonah are saying.

In many sports, you often do better if you don’t step up and swing for the fence or try to drive your golf ball 300 yards, but rather, have the intention to simply make good solid contact with the ball. Why?

Because, swinging harder usually means adding speed and coordination often degrades at higher speed (until you’ve practiced at speed for a long time). Two, when you set extremely high expectations, you increase the level of stress and that can interfere with concentration, coordination and performance. So, Charlie and Jonah were on the money when it comes to sports. But they weren’t talking about baseball.

They were using sports as an analogy to talk about business, especially start-ups.

And I started wondering…are these things really true in business? Especially in the world of start-ups and entrepreneurship?

In that world, I’m not so sure if I buy the notion that swinging for singles makes you more likely to hit home runs. I haven’t experienced it, nor have I seen it unfold all that often with other entrepreneurs I know.

And, imagine an entrepreneur presenting to a venture capitalist and saying:

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I’m writing this final dispatch from NYC, after very deliberating missing last week’s dispatch. There’s a reason for that…

A while back I wrote post about how an increasing number of bands were getting pissed off at fans using their cell-phones to record and share their concerts in real-time. Not because they were concerned about the video and photos getting passed around, but because the process of documenting and sharing the show while it happened took the audience out of the experience of the show. And, the band’s wanted their fans to be “more there.”

And, interestingly, as I started to roll into the tail end of our across-the-world experience, I started to feel something similar. I noticed myself documenting more, wondering “how can I share this,” rather than just being in the experience. I was constantly pulling myself out of the moment in the name of reporting on it.

I began to feel like I was cheating both myself and my family, just the slightest bit, out of the most engaged journey possible. So, I made a decision to take notes here and there, shoot pictures when I could, but also to be more present in this once in a lifetime adventure.

So, this final dispatch is based more on recollection as I look back over the last week and a half of our month-long journey.

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Today’s weekly guest contributor is my friend and go-to tech-genius, Glen Stansberry. Glen is the co-founder of the LifeRemix blog network (which I am incredibly grateful to be a part of), he writes about helping creative people create at LifeDev and Tweets regularly. Today, Glen shares some killer wisdom on the importance of community.

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Can you believe the nerve of this guy?

While Jonathan’s lazily propping his feet in a hammock, we’re here slaving away for him. He’s sipping drinks with tiny umbrellas and playing with his family while we’re grunting away at our own jobs. I mean, it’s bad enough that he keeps rubbing it in that he’s in a tropical paradise, but what really chaps me is that he’s taking a vacation and asking others (like myself) to do his work for him.

It’s easy to be a little really jealous of Jonathan, but the truth is that we’d all be in Bali right now if we could. Vacations and breaking out of our normal routines are like espresso shots for our creativity. I expect some high-caliber stuff out of Mr. Fields once he returns.

It takes a lot of work to be able to relocate for a month to a somewhat-remote place, and the fact that Jonathan is pulling it off is pretty impressive. What’s most interesting about Jonathan’s trip is that he was able to effectively use “peersourcing” to help him get away.

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This week’s guest contributor is my friend, Alexis Neely. On the outside, Alexis is a driven mom entrepreneur who has built two million dollar plus businesses, trains lawyers, and appears frequently on television. On the inside she’s got dreadlocks, at least half her body tatted, and lives a Burning Man life.  You can grab her life and business growth kit on her blog and follow her on Twitter @alexisneely.

This week she shares some great insights on getting unstuck in business…

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If you are reading this blog, it means you are a pretty smart cookie.  You love to read, think, critique, improve.  Me too.

Reading at three.  High school and college, a breeze.  Graduated first in my law school class (more to do with over-studying as a result of massive fear that I was the dumbest person in the room than to innate smartness).

A smarty-pants.

With all this smarts, I was baffled by how hard it seemed to get ahead in business.  I saw people who were clearly not as smart making way more money, serving more people and making a bigger difference.

What was I missing?

It took me a few years to learn a reality that may be hurting your business success … in business, smart often translates to stuck.

As a business strategist to lawyers and other very smart people, I see it all the time – the smarter we are, the harder it can be to experience business success.

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Imagine having no last name and more than 25% of the population having the same first name as you…

That’s how it works in Bali. Here, kids aren’t given any old name. Each of the first four children, in any family, receive the same name. The first kid goes by Wayan, the second by Madé or Kadek, the third by Nyoman or Komang and the fourth by Ketut. Instead of last names or family names, at three months, parents then choose a second name that represents either a quality they’ve noticed emerging in their infant child or one they wish the child to embody.

One person’s second name we met was Apple, because she apparently looked like an apple. Another’s was the Balinese word for Wisdom. So, with so many people sharing the same first names and having no family names, how do tourists and Balinese know where to find each other? Part of it lies in the community structure.

Villages, Crafts and the Rule of 150.

Balinese villages are organized on two levels. By family and by craft. When Balinese marry, it’s not unusual for the wife to move into the compound of the husband. And, it’s also very common for that compound to belong to the husband’s parents, and for them and all other male siblings to live there with their families. The set-up is part a function of tradition and part about the huge different in how much money it takes to buy your own home in Bali versus how much the average Balinese person earns.

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