Author: Chris Martin

What do you love more than anything in the world? Do you share that love with everyone you know or worry that you’ll be judged and not taken seriously? If you’ve been at your craft for longer than a day, you’ve bumped up against the wall of expectations. You want your audience, family, and even the world to perceive you in the best light possible, so you censor yourself. Then one day, you wake up hating that there is so much inside that you want to say but don’t know how to, so you stay stuck in the debilitating loop of people-pleasing. In today’s episode of Getting Work To Work, I want to encourage you to love what you love, share it with the world, and never stop being the delightful weirdo you are.

Today, I’ve got creative R&D on my mind. At first, I thought I’d be clever and change the R&D from “Research & Development” to “Routine & Discipline.” I was going to talk about the importance of a daily routine and why discipline is both needed for maintaining performance and a byproduct of what you do. But as I gathered my thoughts, I realized research and development are equally important in our creative lives. In today’s episode of Getting Work To Work, I’m talking about why we need to broaden our boundaries of research, slow down and spend more time experimenting and exploring sub-sections of our crafts, and align those efforts with our established creative processes.

We are storytellers—every one of us. From the day we enter the world to the day we die, we live in a world shaped infinitely by stories within and around us. We learn at a young age about good versus evil, heroes and monsters, beauty and beasts. When we are young, we are curious about everything and want to tell the world the stories that shape us. We go on quests, gain inspiration and experience, and realize there is so much we don’t know or understand. Our stories evolve. We repeatedly try until we become tired of fighting, of telling a story that no longer serves ourselves and others. So we cede the power to be storytellers to machines and industries and become collectors of stories. But that doesn’t need to be the end of the story.

How much pain and suffering would we avoid in our work and creative lives if we intentionally skipped to the end? If we took our present striving and extrapolated it into some point in the future and examined how we felt, how we lived, and what we became? We aren’t pre-cogs in a science fiction film trying to prevent the future, but we are trying to find ways to be more proactive in creating a life worth living. That is why we should probably skip to the end more frequently, especially as we get older and see the end more clearly.

There often comes a moment in our careers when we need to wrestle with some tough questions. You know the type: existential, philosophical, realistic. Cue your eye-rolling, hit stop, these questions are downright frustrating. Not just because we do not like asking them, or even answering them, but because they lead us to a new future that requires decisive action, change, and breaking down the walls of our comfort zone. As I was writing in my morning pages, I kept writing down question after question, wanting to find the tough questions I have been avoiding. I’m going to share what I came up with and encourage you to use them to find your own tough questions too.