(photo by Ashlee Raubach)
Competition can push you to be better, greater, stronger, faster, louder, and smarter.
It can also shut you off completely.
You walk a tightrope when you engage in competition. It’s an instant thumbs up or thumbs down on any creative effort you bring forth. It’s like aborting your creative offspring because you can’t understand what they will be. It’s a sickening parade of your most creative ideas like a horror show beauty pageant waiting for the judges to give your imaginative talent a score.
Creativity can’t always be scored.
Sometimes it takes you sideways, backward, upside down, and through a loopedy-loop. Sometimes you’re freefalling (screaming with joy the entire way), sometimes you’re suspended in place, your soul aching because it seems hopeless and all for naught. Sometimes creativity takes you into places that you never thought you would ever go.
Trying to do that and keep one eye on your competition, well, no wonder most artists go crazy, get a drinking problem, and often shoot themselves in the head. It’s too much pressure.
The antidote to competition is to ignore everybody. And in this fast-paced world, easier said than done. We’ve got blogs, social media, 34,000 television channels, print books, ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, and Youtube. We’ve got iPhones and iPads and Bluetooth and GPS and well, we need a whole lot less of THAT and a whole lot more peace and quiet.
But the peace and quiet is what’s the hardest. How often do you sit down to a nice quiet afternoon to work and you can’t even focus because all you can think about is that person you sorta admire online and he just posted this amazing photograph . . . or this girl who travels all over the world for her job and just seems to be having the best time. Or that other writer who has half a dozen kids and still churns out novels or memoirs or whatever.
We invariably sabatoge ourselves by haunting our waking dreams with our worst nightmares. And it’s got to stop.
1. Be creative now. Ignore everybody. Seriously. You and the page. You and the camera. You and html code. Go do something, anything. Just play, create, go sideways.
2. Quit measuring yourself up against your worst nightmare. The gal who sold 10,000 more books than you, who got the bigger advance, who has a killer book idea that you toyed with last year and didn’t pursue. The photographer who lands the big weddings in town, the clothing store that always has customers when you don’t. That mother from the PTA who looks perfect and who has children that are NEVER in detention.
3. Give yourself a goal and start making it happen. Pursue YOUR dreams, not someone else’s dreams. Go after what you want; quit chasing after what everyone else wants (or already has).
Action Tip: We’re competitive animals. We always have been. I think it’s healthy to always better ourselves, but there comes a point where you have to take a step back and think if Julia Child had looked around during the ten years she was writing her cookbook and had tried to keep up with someone else, would she ever have become Julia Child? Don’t waste your energy. Keep going.
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