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Ageism is the stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination against people on the basis of their age. Ageism is widespread and an insidious practice which has harmful effects on the health of older adults. For older people, ageism is an everyday challenge. Overlooked for employment, restricted from social services and stereotyped in the media, ageism marginalises and excludes older people in their communities. Ageism is everywhere, yet it is the most socially “normalized” of any prejudice, and is not widely countered – like racism or sexism. These attitudes lead to the marginalisation of older people within our communities and have negative impacts on their health and well-being.

That’s a quote from the World Health organization on ageism.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 13 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about courage, trolls and human Walls, but today I want to talk about ageism and retirement.

For decades, I used to always read a writer’s bio first, even before the first line of their book. I was obsessed with age. What age was she when she got her first novel published? What age was she when she got her second one out there? The nearer she was to my age, the more relieved I became.

Why? Because I, along with so many young people, are obsessed with this Wall of age, and early achievement. I used to see myself as a failure because I hadn’t published a novel earlier.

This is the culture we live in. You’re supposed to come out with something wonderful in our twenties, when we’ve barely experienced life.

This can have really bad side effects. I’ve seen many writers who had early success and never had another thing published. There were many different reasons for this. Trying to reproduce the same thing which made them successful then being called derivative. Not being able to write another book for over ten years because of the pressure they felt to “perform” the same way again.

As a young writer I was a somewhat bitter individual. I’m not too sure I’d like to have a conversation with that young man. He was fun but he hated a lot of things. He was an angry “intellectual” railing at everyone who’d sold out. Back then, I had no idea about story. I just did what I thought I was supposed to be doing. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and got angrier the older I got, especially the more I saw badly written books getting published.

Now, I am so grateful that my earlier novels were never published. Why? They lacked story. They lacked craft. They lacked emotional intelligence. This is not to say young writers aren’t valuable. There are many wonderful books published by people in their twenties, but now I’m glad it didn’t happen for me, because it’s allowed me to grow, and so allowed my writing to evolve in private, not in public, where oftentimes you are punished for not putting something wonderful out into the world first time out, and every time after that. It’s like a film editor friend of mine once said to me.

“I don’t mind if this movie is a failure, John. The spotlight is on the director, not the editor. I have the time to grow. A director has to hit it every time out the door, and most directors can’t sustain that.”

That friend is a very successful film editor now, but when I met him first he was doing indie documentaries, not big budget movies.

So, for the majority of creative fields there’s this pressure to hit it out of the park first time out, after college, with your first creation. Well, that’s a wrong-headed and destructive way of thinking and being in the world. It only leads to anxiety and depression or worse.

It was only recently I discovered Charles Bukowski, Raymond Chandler and J. L. Carr didn’t publish their first novels until they were 51. J.R.R. Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out. Harriet Doerr didn’t publish her first novel, “Stones of Ibarra”, until she was 74. And this is just novels. Think of memoirs, like Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes”, written in his sixties, after decades of being a teacher.

Then there’s drama. At 41, Beckett thought he was a failure. He’d had one novel published, “Murphy”, and it was forgotten. His career in academics was abandoned. He went home to take care of his mother in Dublin where he realized what he really needed to do. The beginnings of what he’d done in Roussillon in the south of France came alive: “Waiting for Godot”. Then there’s Ionesco, a favorite of mine. He didn’t write his breakthrough play “The Bald Prima Donna” until he was 40. And nobody liked it. They didn’t laugh. It was too far ahead of its time. Only later did people start to enjoy his play.

The mental Wall hits you with this:

“It’ll take too long. I’m too old to start writing/painting/designing, etc.”
“I should give up. I should have produced something when I was much younger.”

Well, that’s crap, the mind-ego building yet another wall.

This idea of being too old to start is ridiculous really. Picasso never stopped. He painted until 91, literally until three in the morning, a few hours before he died. Frank Lloyd Wright designed, Stravinsky composed, and Sophocles wrote (“Oedipus at Colonus”), all in their nineties. In her eighties, when Georgia O’Keeffe lost her vision and could no longer paint, she began making pottery. In their eighties, Willie Nelson and João Gilberto are still performing, Quincy Jones still producing.

Retirement? What the hell are people retiring from? Life? Why bother living any more if you’re going to retire from it? Why not create something instead? Why not re-create, not re-tire? Are you really that tired, or only tired because society says you are?

Young programmers, or more brogrammers, and certain unwritten company policies from the tech generation are even more willing to retire people. In his book Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble”, Dan Lyons says the tech industry are firing people at 40 now. They’re too old for the brogrammers. This is crazy.

So, what do we say? How do we combat this? Don’t be ageist? Saying geezer is prejudicial? Old coot too? Calling someone decrepit is the same thing. I used to do it myself. I used to call people older than me, geezers. And as with all the brogrammers in Silicon Valley, I did it because of the one thing we really know about life, that we’re going to die. And as the Romans used to say “Timor mortis contrubat me” – The fear of death terrifies me. And what reminds you of death? Old people. So, we need to get them out of our sight, not listen to them, learn from, let them inspire us to be even more creative. I’m not saying old age makes a person wiser, but as Hemingway wrote in “Farewell to Arms”, it does make them “more careful”.

Just because the body fades doesn’t mean what’s inside it does not have the same incommunicable wildness that was there 50 years before. It’s about how old you feel, not how old you are. Don’t be agist. You’re only insulting your future creative self.

The World Health Organization has started four studies to define ageism and to discover ways to combat it. In their fact file: “Misconceptions on ageing and Health” they say one myth is that mandatory retirement ages don’t help create jobs for youth, quote:

Policies enforcing mandatory retirement ages do not help create jobs for youth, but they reduce older workers’ ability to contribute. They also reduce an organization’s opportunities to benefit from the capabilities of older workers. Age has not been shown to be a reliable indicator for judging workers’ potential productivity or employability.

They also cite surveys in the United States that found the majority of people approaching traditional retirement age do not actually want to retire. But still, many countries or industries have mandatory retirement ages. These discriminatory practices should be abolished. People should be allowed to participate creatively in whatever they want until whenever they want.

Even if someone decides working isn’t a creative or passionate practice for them, then retirement from work shouldn’t mean waiting to die in the living room. Life isn’t about sitting down all day, doing nothing, staring at the TV with your hands crossed. When you’re older you don’t have to make as much money to pay for the mortgage, the kids, the bills, etc. If anything, when you stop working for the man it’s an ideal time to start creating. It’s an opportunity. To create. To do what you always never had time to do, not to vegetate. Are you a vegetable, or a creative being?

It’s also an opportunity to help, to be of service to others, to help others create, to become what the Hindus call a forest dweller, to go out into the “forest” and bring back your wisdom to give to the rest of the world, what they call “Vanaprastha”. It could be doing art classes with a grandchild or daughter. Writing a journal of your life for your grandchildren. Helping people in your community. Anything.

For example, was poetry woven into your life from childhood, but then family and work took over? For a seventy-four year old woman who goes to La Muse every year this was exactly the case. She didn’t even consider becoming a “poet” — that was for Whitman, or T.S. Eliot, the pinnacle for her. But when she retired from wage work, she knew she wanted to write poems. So she went to La Muse with a book called “Poetry as Spiritual Practice”, and worked through it like a text. She hasn’t stopped since. They (both life and her poems) have only gotten better and better with time.

So, say no to retirement. Resist ageism. And if you’re younger, try to have compassion for people with older bodies. Just because they’re bodies are old doesn’t mean their hearts are no longer young, and just because your body is young doesn’t mean you have to create a masterpiece in your twenties. The imagination is not about age, but about patience, compassion and consistency.

So, no. Don’t compare your age to others. Don’t retire. Create!

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from the World Health organization and as usual I’m going to end with an Irish proverb. This one means:

Youth does not care where it sets its foot.

Is cum leis an óige cá leagann sí a cos.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Those are some of the words from the beautifully optimistic children’s book The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there? Hope yis are all well.

This is Episode 13 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about myths and lies, and today I want to talk about courage, trolls and human walls.

One way of looking at it would be to say: We have to start thinking from our heart mind not our crotch mind. Thoughts of other bodies, entering them, touching them etc. is the mind of our crotch. Thoughts of compassion, kindness and oneness come from our heart mind. And we have to the courage to create from our heart mind, from compassion and kindness for others, not condemnation and troll-like behavior.

Courage itself literally means “heart”, from the old French word for heart “cuer”. So, it means to have heart. To have the heart to do something. To create, you have to be courageous, true to yourself. The existential psychologist Rolo May wrote a whole book about this very idea, The Courage to Create. As many mystics and indigenous people would say, the heart is what we’re forgetting. We’re forgetting that the heart has a mind of its own, apart from the mind in our heads or crotches. Institutes like HeartMath actually study it.

Courage not to be blinded by the billboards to what is really important. The billboards only appeal to our base, instinctual drives, the crotch mind.

Survival is a creative act. People survive wars, famines. Diasporas are so creative because of their courage to survive. Instead of being passive, giving up, they keep going, find the heart to create a better life.

Courage is a virtue, to be bold. We all have something profound and wonderful to give to the world. Be audacious about it. See it, whatever you’re creating, as something that’s going to be great. It’s not a question of whether it deserves to get out there, but that it needs to get out there. That’s courage. Others will say you’re being delusional, and that’s fine, because that’s what you have to do to become what I called in episode 8, Black Sheep. You allow and en-courage yourself to be joyful about what you’re creating.

I particularly like a line that Tina Fey used in her acceptance speech for the Best Actress Emmy in 2008. In her list of thanks she said:

I’d like to thank my parents for giving me confidence that is disproportionate to my looks and abilities. That is what all parents should do.

That’s where courage can come from, from being en – courage.

Which brings us to how we pay courage forward. Who cares what others expect of you? When you’re criticized by trolls – those nasty hidden social media ones or the ones in plain view – you have to accept it and allow it to make you stronger, because it’s not about what happens to us that’s important, it’s about how we adapt to it, our attitude to criticism and setbacks. We have to have what American psychologist Carl Rogers called an “internal locus of evaluation”, where we rely on our own internal value system. As soon as we start to look externally, irrespective of whether it’s positive or negative criticism, we lose sight of our own internal judgement, our inner nature and purpose.

Remember, you create, but you also create your own life. You can also re-create a life. Life is possibility. If you make something “bad”, learn from it. See it as a blessing, the possibility to create again, something better. And your resource? Courage.

There’s another part to attacks to your creative heart: as the cliché goes, “Those that can do. Those that can’t criticize.”

Critics and trolls are everywhere. Most of the time they’re unhappy creatives, creative negators. They actually enjoy taking apart creators. You only have to go onto Amazon and look at any book with an average of 4.5. For the most part, the book is very good. But look at the 1 star reviews. There’ll be at least five to ten in every two hundred. And what do they say? The exact opposite of all the other reviews.

Unfortunately for the writer this is simply people who don’t like their kind of book. The reader probably bought it because it had a literary cover when it was a fantasy novel or vice versa. And when it wasn’t what was on the box, the reader got angry and one-starred the book, not based on the content, but because it wasn’t what they read.

Accidental critics and trolls, people who have no interest in what you are creating, are out there, in every field. Never mind the ones that are just angry, irrespective if they were misled to read your book. So, how do you deal with them?

Ignore them. As a blogger told me once, “Let your people/ readers/ audience take care of them. The nastier they are, the more your people will defend you. No matter what you do, don’t defend yourself. That’s what trolls love.”

Trolls don’t always hide in dark places. They can be people close to you, family, friends, colleagues. Remember when I talked about “villains”? A lot of these people may not even know how harmful they’re being when they say things that hurt you. It’s natural. How can they understand unless they too have created something and had it taken apart?

I call these people human walls. You’ve picked up your pen, your business plan, and instead of blue screens distracting you, a human wall appears as you walk into your office, studio, garage. What are human walls? They can be friends, family, acquaintances, other creators, people you work with. They’re emotional distractions.

One of my friends calls them “crazy-makers”. An artist friend of mine calls them “freak-shows”. He says they’re always putting on a great, charismatic show, but that’s all it is, a show. And in the end they waste his painting time by going on about their most recent drama, a boyfriend, sibling rivalry, their poor dog, and nearly always when he’s about to sit down with the paint brush to start work.

Another friend, a winemaker, calls them “energy vampires”. They’re always criticizing his wine, but at the same time they never give him any positive feedback. They look for what’s wrong with the way the grape was harvested, blended, presented in the bottle, represented on the label. They continue to buy his wine by the box, so they must like it, but they are forever telling him how he needs to change this and that, even though they have no idea what they’re talking about and when all he wants to do is go work on a blend, or spray or bottle or just eat his lunch.

Human walls are not always in your face freak-shows though. They can be very subtle in their crazy-making.

An established English art critic once went into the studio at La Muse. There was a Canadian and an American artist in there painting. They each had paintings on the walls, on tables, on easels. She said nothing, simply walked around pausing at each canvas, making faces. When she left, both artists stopped painting. They were both very upset, thrown off.

At the end of three weeks on retreat the critic had never said one word about any of their paintings. Both artists said it was worse than her saying their work was absolute sh*t. “That woman”, as the American artist called her from then on, is a human wall. From that day, we ask everyone not to go into the studio unless they are using it or invited.

Make sure you tell people they are not allowed into the place you create, especially when you’re creating. This includes family and those we love. The “creative space” is just that, for creating.

As French people say to cyclists going up a steep incline, or to someone having a hard time getting their work done: “Courage!” Have courage. Have heart and ignore the trolls and human walls.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an American and as usual I’m going to end with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

There’s no truth to story without an author, which basically means how can you trust a story or myth if the person telling it is not there.

Ní fiú scéal gan údar.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

That’s a quote from John F. Kennedy’s Commencement Address at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut on the 11th of June 1962.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there? Hope yis are all well.

This is Episode 11 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about perfection and Shakespeare, and today I want to talk about myths and lies.

Myths can move us towards Imagination or they can move us away from it. So, it’s important to understand the difference between positive myths, and negative ones, because they work, whether it be understanding common universal stories or reinforcing common lies, Walls. A good example would be so called urban myths, which are basically falsehoods, masquerading as truths. There are many of these types of negative myths when it comes to Imagination.

If you read Clarissa Pinkola Estés or Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung, myths take on a positive role in society. We can also watch Campbell talking to Bill Moyers about “Star Wars”. Or George Lucas talking about Joseph Campbell. They’re fascinating readings of our historic stories, although many would say we’ve been creating some very different universal myths in the last decades what with Climate change and the Doomsday Clock prognosis.

It took me a long time to discover the truth of myth the way these people did. They helped me understand that we are surrounded by myths, of Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Celts, Upanishads. And that there are modern ones too.

All these mythic viewpoints look at faith from different parts of the same animal. It took me a long time to see this too, and to understand that many of the myths I was fed as a creator are simply incorrect. Like Roman Catholicism, I was indoctrinated up to a certain age. Then I found, or more created my own spiritual myth of reality. And of course when I realized this I understood how the myths we’re told could be negative, counteractive to creation.

One of the first myths I was told was: All artists are broke. After my grandfather had anxiously wheezed, “Oh no … not that,” to me when I told him I’m going to be a writer, I asked him why? He hissed, “Artists never make any money.” Well, I say bulls**t.

Shakespeare was minted. If he were alive today he’d be in Hollywood driving around in a flash car. Picasso and Dali were filthy rich. Look at any “successful” artist. Are they broke? An artist I know makes 50,000 Euros a painting. It wasn’t so long ago I remember him not having enough money to pay for the nappies for his baby boy, and he and his wife were pregnant again. If I told you his name you wouldn’t know who he is. Is he not making money? Also, who gets paid to act, write, produce, and design all those Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu movies and TV shows?

Another one: All artists are drug addicts, drunks. Again, bulls**t.

Some of the hardest working people I know are creators. Some of them work ten hour days, a lot of them at least six days a week. They don’t have time for drugs. And they’re not stupid. They know drugs today are laced with all kinds of brain destroying chemicals. They want their heads together, so that they can get up the next day and write, paint, produce, build.

All creators are crazy. Bulls**t.

So, the Goldman boys on Wall Street, the people selling guns to countries to blow up other countries are not crazy? No, they wear tailored suits. They have luxury cars and watches and a woman half their age on their arms because they left their wife and kids. No. The artist in the garret, the inventor in her garage is crazy because she’s doing something she loves?

All creators are irresponsible. Bulls**t.

What, they all have multiple wives and don’t care about their kids? So do business men, teachers, any group on the planet. I’ve known many writers and artists who sacrificed decades of creative energy to raise their kids, the majority of them women, not that it ever stops them. It’s disrespectful and annoying to label these creators irresponsible. I left France for my family. My kids got into a wonderful school, and my in-laws are getting very old. I could have stayed in the mountains writing my novels like a true clichéd narcissist writer and running a successful business, but I left. It was very difficult but I don’t see it as a sacrifice, just that it’s the right thing to do.

One of the only persistent ways I’ve seen most creators being irresponsible is when it comes to representing their work, after it’s finished. A lot of them don’t. That’s irresponsible, or more, dishonorable, as it doesn’t honor all the hard work they put in to create their work. But each to their own. Everyone’s different.

Next: Artists are recluses. Bullshit. I ran a retreat. Creators go there from all over the world. If they didn’t need community, in a peaceful, inspiring place, then they wouldn’t go there. Creators are social. Again, this idea of the artist in the garret starving to death alone is bullst. Joyce had Beckett, Beach, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. Then there’s the Bloomsbury Group. John Lennon had the other Beatles. Shakespeare had all his actor friends and business partners. Creators cannot function in a vacuum. They always need other creators to bounce ideas off, read their work, help them out on the set of their film, build their website.

Creators are all depression sessions. I won’t use that bad word again, but you get the message. I can’t remember the last depressed creator I met. In fact, most of them are the happiest people I’ve met. Why? Because they’re doing what they love.

How we see the world can change when we create our own myth, by asking questions about the positive and negative myths we are told. Today, ideas of progress and more and more as somehow beneficial because these ideas are beneficial to economies, are old myths. We can create new myths, positive ones, by questioning. We can question whether more is in fact positive. Whether progress is in fact progressive or simply a tool for the elites to push out what Plato called their noble lies. We can create new stories, where compassion and service to others become our new myths. Instead of slaying the dragon he or she can become our friend. Instead of heroism, something which only serves the kings and queens and the 1% of 1%, why not have new myths, stories based around compassion and service, amplify stories like Malala Yousafzai or Gandhi.

Is progress good for the planet, the forests of the Amazon, the animals disappearing because of the mass extinction occurring right now? Are we really profiting from all this loss? Our cultural mythologies of progress are not progressive. The insistence of more and more is costing too much, literally. Does all this new “wealth” everyone says our generation has — at least the white Western populations — make us happier? Are all the mass shootings a happy story? Do the mental health statistics paint a story of happiness? Is the myth that we are better off than our grandparents really true?

More importantly, does this myth of progress and more and more inspire us to live an inspired life? Does it really nourish us? Or would stories of compassion and service inspire and nourish us more? But do we look at myth like this? Do we see our stories as having meaning? Aren’t we simply relying on the myths of previous generations for our sense of meaning?

If meaning comes from the stories we tell ourselves, the myths we tell ourselves, then why can’t we create new stories instead of simply rejecting or accepting the old ones? Stories can open the Door into a new mythic world, one where we come together instead of apart, especially if we want to survive as a species. Yes, we have to know the old myths, and more importantly the negative ones, but we also need to create new ones, new Doors towards Imagination and creativity.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an American and as usual I’m going to end with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

There’s no truth to story without an author, which basically means how can you trust a story or myth if the person telling it is not there.

Ní fiú scéal gan údar.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; ‘these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions’; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: ‘the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life… for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy’.

That’s a quote from Will Durant’s 1926 book The Story of Philosophy, when he writes about Aristotle. And I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well with you.

This is Episode 10 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about genius, talent and originality but today I want to talk about perfection, another Wall away from Imagination and creativity.

First, there’s the idea that everything comes out perfectly.
Well, I’ve never written a chapter I didn’t have to change. Maybe that’s just me, and every writer I’ve ever known. Maybe there’s a writer out there who’s written a whole chapter without changing a comma. I doubt it.

Also, do you think Frank Gehry’s buildings always go up the way he first designs them? Did George Lucas use his first cut of “Star Wars”? How many times did Elon Musk have to test his Tesla cars before they went on the road? And even then, was that the end of it? Was every Shakespeare play finished when it was finished, perfect? Look at the iPhone. Every year there’s a new one.

Second, there’s the idea that every great work is perfect.

Well, what about all the times Shakespeare performed his plays in the provinces before showing them to the king and queen and court? Do you think he didn’t change a line here, a scene or character there, when the audience in the pit started booing or shouting at the actors on the stage, or flinging rotten fruit or eggs at them? Of course he did.

Another example: Leonardo Da Vinci. Would Da Vinci have called his Saint Anne perfect? He worked on it until his death, that is, over twenty years, consistently changing it.

Back to Shakespeare. When he was creating he had to bear in mind two audiences: the gallery seats, an educated audience who appreciated character development and subtlety, and those in the pit who wanted to see sex, action, fun. Do you think it a coincidence that after nearly every soliloquy, every quiet scene, there’ll be a scene that’s comic, or violent, a sword fight, a murder? Do you think Shakespeare didn’t change a line when one of his friends, the people he acted with, owned a theater with, suggested it? They were giving him advice as creators (actors) as well as creative business people.

Every time he picked up his quill, Shakespeare knew, in the coming months, by the time it was seen by the king and queen, his words, his scenes, maybe even whole acts, would change, countless times. That’s why he was such a great creator. He surrounded himself with great creators, learned his drama craft for ten years before he even started writing, then changed his work as often as he thought it would make his creation better, knowing it was never perfect, only ready when it was ready.

A famous contemporary example: the often told story of Jack Kerouac and his novel “On the Road”. The story goes that he wrote the novel in three weeks. It’s used as a quintessential example of a beat generation creator just spontaneously banging something out in no time, perfect.

Well, it wasn’t, and he didn’t. Yes, he typed one version of it out in three weeks, but he had worked hard on his craft before that. He had reworked “On the Road”, in his head, in his journals for years, and then on the typewriter. Then in the fifties he reworked it again, for about seven years. So, the three weeks of a perfect manuscript really took him about ten years.

Perfection is the enemy of creation. Creation is not immediate, it comes in bits and pieces. In the south of France they have a wonderful expression: “Petit a petit l’oiseau fait son nid.” Bit by bit the bird makes its nest. A nest takes time, effort, and patience.

Nothing comes out perfect, especially at the beginning. You have to go looking for the bits like a bird, and assemble them, piecemeal, into a nest. It’s a messy, rough process. It looks rough and weird at first, but by the end the nest works, practically and aesthetically. This is the joy of creating, when you connect unrelated things in an inspired way. To use Wordsworth, you become surprised by joy, because you experience the connections that make us stop, pause, then think: Wow, that’s a creative way of looking at it.

If immediate perfection comes, it’s from years of practice, years of gathering, from creating other creations, to arrive at the creation that “came out of nowhere”, finished. Picasso was once asked how he could charge so much money for a drawing he did in a few minutes. He responded that it hadn’t taken him a few minutes, that it had taken him 80 years to draw it.

Your focus has to be on growing, mastering your craft, mastering what you create. Theory gets you nowhere. Create. Repeat the messy process to find out the work you want to really get into. You don’t, won’t know, what that is until you’re in it, doing it, lost in it, like Shakespeare. And don’t think you’re only going to have one go at it either. Imagination leads to more imagination. Creativity leads to more creativity. As Maya Angelou once said:

Like electricity, creativity makes no judgment. I can use it productively or destructively. The important thing is to use it. You can’t use up creativity. The more you use it, the more you have.

Hemingway never knew whether he was writing a novel or not. He’d start writing a short story and when it got longer it became a short novel, like “The Old Man and the Sea”. When it got longer again it became a novel. He kept working, kept creating. He didn’t try to create the perfect novel. He wrote. He created. Then he moved onto the next one.

Perfection kills creation. If you think what you’ve created is awful, so what. Nobody ever has to see it, read it, know about it. Let it be awful. If you don’t create, you have nothing. You can’t change a program with no code. You can’t change an un-carved block. You can’t change an empty page.

In the future, you can. You can make your creation better. If you create nothing because you want immediate perfection, then ironically you have nothing to perfect.

Change leads to discovery. You find out what you’re creating by doing, by making mistakes, and a lot of the time, you don’t even realize you’ve progressed.

Five years ago, we were in the truck going down to Carcassonne for groceries, from our retreat in the mountains of southern France. I asked the young Sydney memoirist in the front seat a question.

“How’s your essay collection edit going?”

Her answer was immediate.

“Shit. I’m just so full of self-doubt about the whole damn thing now.”

“Are they all bad?”

“No. One is really strong. Two are pretty good, but the others are really shit.”

“Sounds like you’ve made great progress then.”

“What?”

“Well, last week, when we were coming down you said all of them were shit.”

She stopped looking out the window to stare at me. “Shit, I’d forgotten that.”

The Wall of self-sabotage is the friend of perfection and fear, your natural enemies, negative structures we build inside our own heads. It can shelter you, make you feel safe and comfortable, happy to do nothing. It’s a fantastic wall. And there is not one creator on the planet that has ever escaped self-doubt.

And self doubt usually leads to self-sabotage. We all do it. So many false starts appear because of self-sabotage. It’s just the way it is. But you can’t give up. Self-doubt, limiting belief systems, fatigue, the shadow side, misery, are natural. Everyone gets stuck. The responses are countless. Everyone fails at some stage, but if you can’t accept failure you’ll never come up with a new creation.

The thing is to find solutions. Walls can be circumnavigated, moved through, with love for the work. And a lot of the time we don’t even realize we’ve progressed from where we were, like that Sydney memoirist.

Also, don’t compare your unfinished creation to someone else’s finished masterpiece, or any of your previous finished works. Months, a lot of the time, years of hard work have gone into those masterpieces and creations. Never mind all the changes afterwards, like Kerouac.

Yes, it’s hard not to compare, but it’s only because we can’t sit down and watch Da Vinci paint and repaint and repaint his masterpiece until he’s dead. We can’t see all the pieces of paper Shakespeare threw away as he rewrote scenes, again and again.

So, be gentle with yourself. Nothing is ever completely figured out at the beginning. Everything changes. It’s a process. Instead of pursuing perfection go after excellence instead. Like the Aristotlean thinking I quoted at the beginning. Excellence is an art won by training and habituation… these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. So try to get better at what you love creating.

By doing, again and again and again, the gifts of talent, originality and genius come naturally, organically in the next act of the Imagination.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a Greek philosopher by way of an American one, but as usual I’m going to end the episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

There is no wise man without fault.

Ní bhíonn saoi gan locht.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work.

That’s a quote from French writer Émile Zola, and I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well with this crazy Corona virus.

This is Episode 9 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about black sheep and difference but today I want to talk about a few Walls that build on each other, genius, talent and originality. In a later episode I’ll talk more about talent, but today I want to talk about these three ideas in an inter-connected way.

“I don’t know if I’m talented enough. I don’t know if I have a gift.”

Christ. The amount of times I’ve heard that one. Even from established creators in their fields. The mind/ego loves this I’m not talented I’m not original I’m not a genius crap. Again more Walls it throws in front of your creation.

In school I was convinced too, convinced I was talented at nothing. I was thrown out of classes, except a few like English. I never got good grades at English when I was younger, but when I was fifteen I wrote a story for a competition a bank held in connection with schools. I mentioned this before when I talked in an earlier episode about family. Anyway, I got third prize. My immediate reaction: they must have made a mistake. The usual imposter syndrome Wall. Then I went up to get my prize. Coming back down I still couldn’t accept it as reality. It was only when a friend started to say well done that I realized, there was no mistake. And that’s when the maybes started slipping in. Maybe I’m alright at writing essays, not school ones, but ones I like writing? I secretly started writing bad poems.

Everyone’s talented at something. Everyone’s gifted, original, at something. Again, artists and writers don’t own creativity. They don’t own Imagination. Some of us think visually, others through sound, others again through movement. However, what makes the difference is some people persist, keep doing that something, whether it’s writing code, novels, movies or painting canvases.

The fear of not being original, of being laughed at, of creating something awful, has crept into the heart of every creator since we first started putting hand prints on the walls of caves or telling stories around open fires, in the same caves.

Fact: Nobody’s original. This podcast is not original. I’m sure there are many like it. “Hamlet”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth” are not original. They were all plays before Shakespeare ever wrote his versions. Take up Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations”. Look up Churchill. Nearly every famous quote attributed to the man can be found somewhere else, said a little differently, by someone else, usually by someone who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. Look at the footnotes to his quotes.

Mozart in one of his letters says he never aims for originality. Mark Twain, also in a letter, to Hellen Keller, said all ideas come from other “sources” and that we color them differently because of our moral and mental character. He wrote that every great orator re-interprets centuries and the thousands who went before them when they write a speech, like Churchill with the ancients.

Steve Jobs, in a “Wired” interview in 1996, talked about this. He said creation is “connecting things” by creators with “very diverse experiences”, but that most people cut themselves off from these experiences by not being curious.

We all create from the past, what went before us, those sources Twain wrote about. Past is prologue. When I finished the first draft of my Create book I started reading other books on the same wavelength. Why? To see what I’d forgotten to talk about. To inspire me to add and take out things that made no sense. It’s a good thing to be curious. Instead of something to be frightened by we should embrace it, embrace new experiences, books, ideas.

Why? Because nobody has read everything, and every human being has a different way of expressing their “it”, because everybody is different. And new creations nearly always come from breaking with the past, by changing the way something used to be done, to form something new, a new individual clarity. Like Picasso said,

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”

Einstein once said he had no real talent, just that he was passionate about being curious, like a child, and that the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational one a faithful servant, where we have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. At the same time he also supposedly said genius is one percent talent and ninety-nine percent hard work.

This is one of the key things I’ve seen over the years: the people who keep doing the work and evolve with their work, succeed. I’ll get into work more in a later episode, but when I say succeed I don’t just mean from a capitalist perspective. Creators who keep doing the work feel they succeed because they get better at what they love creating. The work makes them better at the work. They don’t let anyone or any amount of frustration stop them. When they see they’re comparing themselves to other people then they know they’re not in their work, but creating a Wall. They know talent is identifying their own talent and then getting into the work, for a lifetime.

You can be talented and never create a body of work. How many creative writing professors, art professors, CEOs have I met who told me the most successful people they ever met, the most creative people, were persistent, dogged hard workers.

The blank page no longer becomes frightening. You’re not the first to look at it. Find historical friends in your creative field. Then look for connections in other fields that inspire you. Oftentimes originality comes from seeing original combinations others never have. But be selective. Only stuff you really love, stuff your soul loves.

A friend of mine sees talent, originality and genius as gifts. She sees a painting as a gift, waiting to be born, not herself, not her being talented, original. Michelangelo liberated his creations from Carrara marble. He never saw what he did as creation, but more as gifts from the stone, gifts he had to set free. The mind/ego disappears and the creation, the gift comes through the creator. In a sense, it wasn’t Michelangelo who created “David”, but “David” who reveals himself to Michelangelo. The talent and originality come out of the creation. I see my books the same way.

Whatever it is you create, they’re all there, waiting, gifts. But, you have to be open to them. You have to switch off the self-sabotage of talent and originality and genius long enough to allow them to present themselves, a lot of the time in bits and pieces.

As I said in a previous episode, Rodin would make thousands of sketches of a model moving before deciding on the pose, “the” moment to sculpt. As with Michelangelo, the sculpture is held within the stone. Just like the chair is in the tree, the painting in the field, what the impressionists called the motif. We, the creators, have to discover these gifts. They’re out there waiting for us to discover them. As Henry Miller once said, everything is out there already, and as intermediaries we have to make use of what’s in the air.

One of the greatest Walls that moves us away from accessing these gifts is this one:

“Oh, I’m not a genius, like Mozart, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Rodin.”

Modern society has adopted genius as a noun for an individual. Certain creators are inspired to have many moments of genius, one after another. Mozart had many. Einstein too, although he said he arrived at Relativity by steps, work.

However, Einstein wasn’t a “genius” when it came to his social life. You only have to look at how he treated his wife as an employee or how he treated his sons. He’s not alone. Many famous scientists have had unhealthy personal behavior. Nobody’s a perfect genius.

Mozart was terrible with his money. They say it led him into an early grave. Is Warren Buffet a genius because he made so much money? Could he come up with the theory of Relativity or compose a symphony at the age of eight? What’s the criteria?

But again, what do these creators have in common? Work. They were, are, all passionate about what they love. They’re obsessed by what they love. But then someone says Warren Buffet only does a couple of hours of work a day, but what does he spend the rest of his time doing? Reading journals, financial statements, reports, newspapers, books. To some that seems like a lot of extra work. Not to him. He loves it.

There are no geniuses, only moments of genius. And genius comes with hard work, every day. Every so called “genius” worked consistently, and got better with each new creation they created. The word itself comes from the Latin verb “to bring into being, create, produce”. It’s not the person but what comes into being, the creation itself, the act of creation, which is genius. The ancient Romans saw it another way, that everyone has their own genius, even whole communities, but that genius is a guide. We create the conditions for it to bring creations, gifts, into reality.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a wonderful French novelist and activist and I’m going to end on another Irish proverb. This one literally means:

Deep is the hole of doubt. And of course this is relevant because genius, talent and originality can be deep dark holes when we let them be. So he hole of doubt is deep.

Is doimhain é poll an amhrais.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.