What are the facts on the ground?

Execution is an inner battle.

It’s about managing the inevitable fears of putting our work into the world. We have to take control over the voices inside our head and liberate our artist selves to keep creating no matter what.

Otherwise the resistance will win. And we’ll be one step closer to dying with our music still in us.

There’s a tool that helps me win this battle inside my own head on a regular basis.

It’s called the reality waterfall.

It’s a chain of logic that gives me perspective on a potential negative outcome to such a degree that it seems ridiculous.

Think of it as a mashup of existentialist philosophy and cognitive behavior therapy.

Imagine you’re launching a new creative project, and you’re so scared of how the public is going to receive it, that you’ve been perfecting and procrastinating yourself into a ball of worry.

This is a normal fear to have, and particularly common in the final stages of work, since, resistance is always the strongest when the end is in sight.

But before you push the launch date back another month, consider a few cold bites of reality.

Most people have a million other things on their minds that are more important than what you want them to care about.

Almost nobody has high expectations for your work.

In fact, your new project could probably fail multiple times and nobody would even notice.

What’s the hesitation? Why not execute with all your might and see what happens?

May as well let the reality waterfall wash over you and cleanse the fear out of your system. Because these facts on the ground are real, unfair and devastating, and there is zero part of them that’s under your control.

And so, you may as well focus on doing the best work you can and shipping it out into the world as soon as you can. Before those voices inside your head get the best of you.

My mentor once joked with me that one of the reasons we should never, ever give up is because even if we did, most of the world wouldn’t notice anyway.

Indeed, that reality waterfall is cold and jarring, but you’d be surprised how quickly your mind can acclimate. It’s kind of like swimming in cold water. Your ability to withstand the temperature has less to do with physiological differences in body temperature and more to do with how you perceive the temperature in which it’s submerged.

If you’ve had multiple exposures to cold water and trust that you’re not going to freeze and your body will acclimate once it gets into motion, then it’s not so bad.

This is the inner battle of execution. Sometimes all we need is more exposure to the cold bite of reality to remind us that none of this matters and we’re all going to die anyway, so we may get what’s inside of us out into the marketplace.

What if you chose to reinterpret your creative fears with a more absurdist perspective?