If your work doesn’t work, what’s next?

Most creative people live on the edge.

Not because we have adventurous and perilous lifestyles, although some do. And not because we’ve chosen economic situations that threaten our wellbeing, although some do.

But the core psychological risk in our journey of bringing ideas to form is, this might not work.

There are very few guarantees in life, and creating art doesn’t exactly make the short list. We’re always taking a chance that this new painting or movie or software that we’ve spent hours and hours perfecting, nobody needs or wants.

Creativity is a fundamentally irrational act.

But the comforting part is, we’re not alone in our struggle. There are no creators who are exempt from this cold, absurd reality.

Goldman, the award winning screenwriter and novelist, wrote a riveting book about the inner sanctums of the film industry. He gives outsiders a firsthand look at why and how movies get made. And one of the recurring theses in his text is the concept that nobody knows anything. Here’s my favorite passage on the subject:

Nobody, nobody, not now, not ever, knows the least goddamn thing about what is or what isn’t going to work. There is one thing they absolutely do know, and that is what has worked. Which is why it is safe to say that movies are always a search for past magic.

Now, reading such a passage might make you feel cynical, hopeless and unmotivated. But personally, it’s invigorating to me.

Because we’re all fighting the same inner battle. We’re all rolling our own rock up the same hill, albeit from different starting points. And so, going all the way out to the edge, taking chances and trying things that might not work, that’s all part of the process.

If we can’t find a way to accept, embrace and even enjoy that, then we’re doomed from the start.

In my twenty plus years of making art professionally, a large percentage of my work hasn’t worked. Hell, I labored for hundreds of hours writing entire books that not a single person on the freaking planet has ever read a page of, much less even heard of. It sucks to high hell and almost makes me want to throw in the towel.

But this risk is the reality of the job. Some things just don’t work. And never know which one, unfortunately, so all you can do is keep making things.

All you can do is keep iterating over and over, trying to spiral up creatively as you evolve personally.

Compare that approach with the alternative that many creators take, which is imagining what’s going to work.

Man, talk about something that really doesn’t work. The only way to find out for real is to organize your day around executing your ideas. To keep living on that edge, so to speak, until you make something that works.

See you out there.

Are you so worked up thinking your work is not going to work out that you can’t imagine how it will?