Setting out each day to set the world ablaze

Welles, while filming what critics have called the greatest movie of all time, coined a term called the confidence of ignorance.

Orson said that it’s when a person does something out of sheer enjoyment and creative fulfillment, unaware or unbothered that others consider them ridiculous and pretentious. Pleasure is derived from the activity itself, rather than from what others think of the activity.

This is a deeply liberating concept. What a relief to know that we don’t have to murder our creativity by demanding it meet the world’s approval. What a joy to realize that we don’t have to burden our work with the obligation to be interesting or good or relevant or useful.

We can simply get on with making whatever we want to make, without having to set out each day to set the world ablaze.

This confidence of ignorance, unfortunately, doesn’t resonate when you’re young. Because early in your creative career, you’re still obsessed with making it. You’re still putting all this pressure on your work to make a global impact and be the greatest thing that ever was.

If anything you make doesn’t change everything, you’re nothing.

And maybe that goal comes to fruition. Some exceptional creators live their whole lives sustaining this level of drive. It’s deeply inspiring to watch.

But for the majority of people, it’s not sustainable. You can’t just switch on the afterburners at age nineteen and never turn them off. Everything atrophies eventually.

My career reached a point about twelve years in where creating work for anyone other than myself, for anything other than inner joy, became a significant health risk. The choice was to either double down on my addiction to approval and continue to be a victim of my own creative insecurity, or let go of all expectation and embrace the confidence of ignorance.

Door number two it was.

The irony is, because of my freedom to focus on the enjoyment and fulfillment of the process itself, the product has never been purer. Stronger too, but also purer. Truer. Because it’s not stained or burdened by the need to become or accomplish anything.

It can just live. Just like it used to live when I didn’t know any better.

Welles was right when he warned young creators, you have to remember your old ignorance. You have to ask for the impossible with the same cheerfulness that you did when you didn’t know what you were talking about.

Are you scaring away your artistic gifts by demanding that they validate your entire existence?