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“No one can arrive from being talented alone. God gives talent, work transforms talent into genius.”

That’s a quote from Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova from the 1956 book “Pavlova: A Biography” edited by A. H. Franks in collaboration with members of the Pavlova Commemoration Committee.

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 19 of my series of episodes on creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about Enthusiasm, Passion & Madness, about looking for mentors, peers who are enthusiastic, inspired, passionate, mad! Black sheep. How they can help dissolve the Walls of lexical prisons by being enthusiastic, passionate, mad, by embracing the Imagination, moving towards it, not away from it. You may not find too many of them, but when you find one they inspire you, enthuse you with passion and positive madness, because in the end mentors are like friends. They’re there when you’re dejected and down from rejection, or whatever other Wall is stopping you from creating.

So today I want to get into this more, this idea of mentors, and how talent borrows but genius steals, and how mentors don’t have to be alive to inspire us. Their works, their creations are always there, if we only take them up to read, listen to, enjoy and get inspired from.

Influences. Who or what are your influences? When I’m down, when I can’t create, I read. Who do I read? People I love, the masters in my field. Why? Because these other writers are my greatest mentors. They effect me deeply, and when I’m effected deeply the need arises in me again, to create. They make me want to create art again.

Malcolm Gladwell has a famous book, Outliers, where he writes about how it takes the “ten-thousand-hour-rule” to begin to master your craft, your creation, that being about the amount of time it takes most of us to get good at something. Everyone sees Gladwell’s idea as innovative, new. Well, in truth, it’s been around for thousands of years.

Today, before you become a master electrician you have to become a journeyman first. The word journeyman has taken on negative affiliations today, mainly because people are unaware of what a journeyman really is, and was.

Before becoming a journeyman you become an apprentice first. This language comes from the time of the guilds, especially the Florentine guilds of the 12th century and later, but hasn’t stayed on in arts as it has in some building trades. Artists were actually part of other guilds, but the point is the idea of apprenticeship. For example, in Venice, after two years you could move on to becoming a journeyman whereas in Padua you had to do three years. Your master – basically an old school word for what we call a mentor today, begrudgingly – took you in when you were young as an apprenticeship into what they still call a shop in the trades even today. Michelangelo entered the shop, or workshop of Ghirlandaio when he was thirteen. Like all the other apprentices he was a “garzoni”, workshop boy, an apprentice, starting at the bottom, preparing panels or grinding pigments, growing his skills with the years. Then they would draw, create works, but not from life, but by copying, learning from the masters. Michelangelo would copy the paintings of Giotto in the Santa Croce church in Florence and he would have been told to go elsewhere too to copy when commissions brought their masters to other cities, especially to Rome where so many masters had left their marks.

Here in the states an electrician, machinist, carpenter, or plumber usually needs a state or local license as a journeyman or master. The license means they’ve put in their time, what Gladwell calls 10,000 hours.

So, to become a journeyman of a creative pursuit, just like an electrician, or the schools of centuries ago like the Italian shops or bodegas we have to first apprentice ourselves to what we are passionate about. We have to put in the time, until we become a journeyman, and hopefully, one day, a master.

The word journey actually comes from the French word for day, journée. To a journeyman it meant you could charge money for a day’s work. An apprentice however, usually doesn’t get paid a days wage. Instead they got lodging and food and maybe a small stipend for about seven years or so, from a master, because a journeyman wasn’t allowed to employ others. So the title “journeyman” refers to the right to charge a fee for each day’s work.

Of course journey man also meant you moved. From place to place for work. These ambulant artisans are called “compagnons” in France and since the Middle Ages they’ve been traveling all around France as the Compagnons du Devoir et du Tour de France. Their technical education means they have to take a Tour de France, apprenticing to masters to learn a trade but also being part of a community of artisans.

So, talent is nothing if you don’t put in the time, 10,000 hours as Gladwell would put it, or 7 or 8 years like an apprentice. But even after we’ve put in the time of the apprenticeship we have to become the journeyman. We have to find masters to work for, day to day, so we can master our art, all the time learning our craft from the dead masters, who’s work, creations are on the walls of churchs and buildings wherever we go, if we look.

This is not something only for artists and sculptors. The Beatles found a mentor, a master very early in their career. People say it was their business manager Brian Epstein that catapulted them into success, but this is ignoring probably their greatest mentor, George Martin. Early on, The Beatles put in the hours, apprenticing themselves to Martin but also by learning from others, or learn by doing, and journeying to Hamburg. The 4 young English men in a band who played every night in Hamburg came back not as a band, but as The Beatles. Their apprenticeship was put in over in Hamburg. It’s hard work. It takes a long time. Like Shakespeare with his plays being tested in the provinces before being put on for the King, the Beatles were tested and changed in front of an audience, night in night out, until songs like a “Hard Days Night” came out of the actual act of creating to an audience, learning on the job. In an interview on Desert Island Discs later in life George Martin said he didn’t really think much of them musically when he first met John, Ringo, Paul and George. But he still signed them to Parlophone because he taught they were funny, and that he’d just give them a chance because he could. And from there on out they had one of their great mentors. He taught them so much and added so much classical music to their songs to create completely new kinds of songs. So, a mentor can literally pull you out of obscurity and evolve your talent.

Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway had the same thing in Paris. Instead of a stage to learn on they had the salon of Gertrude Stein. Hemingway always talked about being in his room to do the work, but never mentions the community he had to get better by discussing his work, like people do in MFA programs, or Improv sessions, or workshops. When we get honest constructive feedback, we get better.

So, until recently people used to apprentice themselves to a guild, to be mentored by a skilled artisan. In France I know a master carpenter who can draw a straight line to the centimeter, by eye. He learned this, being mentored for fifteen years until he begun, his verb, to get what he called the “sensation” of the work. He got mentored by craftsmen skilled in the art of carpentry. As he put it, it takes so many years to get good at something and even then many people don’t find success, or the sensation for it. One of his friends who he saw as one of the great master carpenters just lead what he called an unlucky life. Just because he created amazing furniture doesn’t mean people bought it, or that he was able to sell it, or that he had a supportive family. He didn’t. So he failed, even though he was the most talented carpenter he ever met. He also said to me once, sometimes people are just bad at something and it takes years for them to realize because they got it into their heads they were great.

If you were to see any of his many ateliers you’d think he was mad. He throws nothing away. It drives his wife crazy because their second little house beside the one they live in is literally stuffed with stencils, and tools going back to the middle ages that he actually still uses. The first time I went into this atelier I had to sit down I was so blown away by the sheer immensity of stuff in there, everywhere. A museum within a museum and on and on. He handled each tool as he explained its use to me as if it were a baby, gently caressing it and pointing out how it was made, not by a machine, but by a human being, what he called master artists. You can’t hide imperfections in this kind of tool he’d say. They had to be made exactly, perfectly, artfully, with sensation.

Today we’ve lost this appreciation of craft as art, that is, having to put in our time to learn. It’s become demeaned by speed and lack of respect and carelessness. People literally aren’t careful. They don’t care enough to look at how an old tool is an actual work of art in itself. My neighbor back in France would never see himself as an artist. He’d frown upon being called an artist. To him, what he created was the most natural thing in the world. This natural creative appreciation goes all the way back to the Renaissance guilds in Europe. If you didn’t get into a guild you couldn’t get paid for what you created. That simple. You had a hobby, not a metier as they say in France. Even back then competition was harsh. Some people say unions are the same thing today. I don’t agree. People in unions are not thought to think, or sorry, feel the same away about wood or electricity the way my old friend does. And it makes sense because the union is there to protect the rights of the worker not to inspire them to create. It’s economic, not creative. It became more about how quick you can produce something rather than how good you created something. Now, with technology this has reached its zenith. Guilds are good and so are unions but they need to be seen for what they really are as opposed to conflated when one is more a mentoring of creation where the other is a defense of the creator. If I were to enter into the Author’s Guild it would be akin to this, but a very much watered down version of the Renaissance version, or the mentoring my friend received. Presumably I’d have to enroll in an MFA or enter through the gates of the culturally accepted avenues for that is generally the way for writers to get what I call the rubber stamp of approval. However, even though I’m not a member of the Writers Guild, I still register all my books with them, because that’s what they’re there for, to protect the writer, to strike, to defend the payment of the writer.

So, as opposed to learning how to create in my field from a guild, which no longer functions the way a guild used to, in a concrete and effective way, I learn from a very small number of living mentors, but even more so from dead ones, from the creations they created that are still alive in books and films and especially autobiographies of people in my field. Which leads me into the other thing I wanted to talk about today.

“Talent borrows, genius steals.”

There are many attributions for this “quote”. There’s even a well-known book, “Steal like an Artist”, by Austin Kleon. The main idea, that one should copy, or imitate other creators, is an idea that goes all the way back to Aristotle and Plato. They even had a word for it “mimesis”.

I read Kleon’s book, after writing the shitty first draft of my own book. One of our writers on retreat gave it to me saying, “You need to write a book like this, John.”

So, what you’re listening to was inspired by books like Kleon’s, but also Aristotle’s “Poetics” and other books that focus on creating. But the main inspiration are the many creators I’ve met at our retreat over the years. Even though Kleon’s book wasn’t where I first learned about “Talent borrows, genius steals”, I give him credit. Why? Because it’s important to give credit. If you don’t, you’re stealing in the wrong way, plagiarizing.

So, this quote: Was it Oscar Wilde? T. S. Eliot? “The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism” has this: “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” Picasso? Stravinsky? “Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.” To tell the truth who cares? It’s the idea that’s inspiring, because it’s about inspiration, influence as inspiration.

People confuse this idea. They think you’re plagiarizing another creator when you “steal”. They see it as negative. But that’s not the point. The point is to steal the right way, to take an idea, image, and make it your own. To copy, borrow an image, idea, sample of music, is to simply imitate. There’s nothing wrong with being a copier. Just like Michelangelo in that church in Italy. Just don’t duplicate a creation and say it’s yours. No. Learn from other creators, like Michelangelo and every other creator before and after him has done.

Picasso, who supposedly said great artists steal, copied Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe”, over twenty times. Haydn taught Beethoven. Is it any wonder Beethoven’s early work sound like Haydn? Does that make Picasso a bad artist, Beethoven a bad composer? Were they plagiarists? In art courses they call it “Learning from the Masters”. You copy great works of art to see how the artist did it. Eventually you break away and find your own style.

The point is to “steal”, absorb from other creators. You have to learn from them. They will inspire you. Inspiration comes when we combine old ideas into new ones from looking at them in a different way, seeing different relationships.

This is why writers say if you want to learn how to write a book you have to read a lot of books. Musicians? Listen to a lot of music. Business people say start your own business after interning and studying others. Architects? Intern at an architecture firm.

Business people do it every day. They study the “competition”, then do what they do, but better. However, they only study the competition they’re really interested in, what they call niche markets. It’s the same with creation.

What’s your niche? Historical novels set in first century Rome? Read the competition. Soon, you’ll know your whole niche world. You then feel a part of that world. Put the amphitheater on your office wall, a centurion’s uniform, the list of emperors. Read the wonderful Marcus Aurelius every day. That world then becomes as real as the one we’re living in today. The fun is in the hunt for that world.

When I was a kid I used to copy out poems from books when I thought I wanted to be a poet. Try it. If you want to write a business plan you copy the business plans of others. Again, you don’t build a house without a plan. You can, but you’re probably going to end up with a few walls or windows in the wrong place.

Look at all the painters in museums copying the masters. There’s a reason they’re there. You have to find out how they did it. The best way to do that? Copy. Soon enough the copying will disappear and you will appear, your creation will appear. When you were sitting in a classroom they made you copy the letters off the blackboard.

As I said before, Shakespeare only wrote his first play after acting, directing, and managing a theater for over ten years. He learned by doing, like every musician and school kid since. As Emerson once wrote of Shakespeare: “Genius borrows nobly.” He said Shakespeare was more original than the originals he copied. “He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.”

Who you copy is your decision. It’s easy. Who do you love? Now, what thing have they created, what book, business? Study it, copy it. Repeat it for other creators you love in the field you love.

You become what the Muses called “possessed”, by the new possession you’ve stolen, to create new work, new creations. Take inspiration from everywhere. Bits and pieces of things you see in magazines, books, online, stuff in the street. Put it all together to create your own work. Or be like Truffaut with Hitchcock. Interview your idols if you can, or other creators in your field. Learn from them. Cameron Crowe did the same. He interviewed the great Billy Wilder.

Be curious. Again, as curious as a child. At first it may be confusing, but with time it will make more and more sense. Don’t trust me, trust the masters who went before us.

We didn’t become retreat directors in a foreign country after doing a three year course in the hospitality business. I had no skills. I had no idea what it all meant. I, we, just did it. We renovated, marketed, hosted, created it all by doing. We got out of our comfort zone. Your skills have to get better to get to a new level of competency in what you want to do. Are you stretching yourself?

There’s an old Roman proverb that goes something like this: “If a man were able to see his whole life he’d never live it.” If I’d known how difficult it was going to be to create a retreat I would never have started it in the first place. I would probably have decided to keep working at “Vanity Fair”.

You always have to be challenging your skill-set. If you don’t know how to do something, learn. How do you learn? Copy, read, steal from the masters. Get their skills, to the best of your ability.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a Russian ballerina, but like last time, I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

Don’t show your teeth until you can bite.

Ná nocht d’fhiacla go bhféadair an greim do bhreith.

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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Much Madness is divinest Sense —
To a discerning Eye —
Much Sense — the starkest Madness —
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail —
Assent — and you are sane —
Demur — you’re straightway dangerous —
And handled with a Chain —

That’s a quote from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

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 18 of my series of episodes on creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about the Dancer and the Dance, about doing what you love, and today I want to talk about enthusiasm, passion and madness, because passion and madness are often seen as Walls away from Imagination and creativity when in fact they are really Doors towards it, towards creativity and Imagination.

For example, I write because of something greater than myself, what I see as this kind of passionate, enthusiastic madness inside of me. The word enthusiasm actually means “the god inside” from the Greek, “entheos,” or “en-theo”. So writing is this passionate, enthusiastic madness that comes from the god inside me. Why else would I keep secreting myself into a room on my own, away from my family and friends and fun? It has to be a kind of madness, and a passion — a suffering. This is what the latin word “passio”, where passion comes from, means, to suffer.

I used to always see this as a negative, some kind of illness, affliction, that I was unable to simply be content, to watch TV, to play outside in the snow more, like other Dads and husbands and friends. Until one day, walking through the woods, I had an epiphany — it’s okay. It’s okay to be passionate, enthusiastic, mad. Indeed, it was then that I realized that all the people I’ve ever loved have been passionate, enthusiastic people, people who are a little mad, but in a good way. Now, I see enthusiasm as a word connected to the joyful expression of creation, the fun, like a child playing enthusiastically in the sand, or a Picasso turning a rusty saddle and handlebars into a “Bull’s Head”.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates says there are four types of enthusiasm or “holy madness” — prophecy, the mystic rites, poetry and science, and the madness of love. So, when we’re enthusiastic we are experiencing inspiration, something sacred, mystical, poetic, prophetic. And how enthusiastic we become depends on how inspired we are. The point is that we understand that there’s something powerful coming from inside us that needs to express itself, Imagination, a passionate and enthusiastic madness. Carl Jung, in his Red Book, talks about this. He writes this:

Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life… Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.

So, what I get from that is that whatever your intuition (your in-teaching) excites, whatever excites you, from inside you, it is a form of madness, a mad enthusiasm, which is positive, healthy. The role of the imagination is to create from this healthy madness, meanings from the meaningless, to discover connections that could look obvious but were before somehow amorphous, because the Imagination begins with intuition, not thinking, the mind, intellect.

I don’t trust the mind, but I do trust that excitement, that mad enthusiasm, and I try to follow it into creation, irrespective of how mad other people see it to be. Anyway, positive madness, especially in this other form of technological and mechanized world of 24/7 madness, is not just necessary, but imperative.

I don’t mean some kind of Dionysian carnivalesque letting go, getting stoned out of your mind, or heading to the nearest bar. No, not hysteria, but ecstasy, the way the ancient Greeks meant it, to literally stand outside yourself, to remove yourself elsewhere, “ek” meaning “out”, and “stasis” meaning to stand. To stand out. To free yourself from the “normal”. It means embracing the unconscious you, consciously. To rationally “see” your emotions, the inner vision, with your eyes. To stop allowing iPhones, computers and whatever other devices creating Walls from getting you in touch with, or opening doors to the world inside you.

And what is inside you, besides organs and fluids? I call it Spirit. You could call it nothing. Again, you might call it the unconscious, the Mind, the soul. I call it Spirit, because it literally comes out of the word inspiration, “in spirito”. I’ll talk about this a lot more in a later episode, but for now what I mean is that Spirit speaks from another part of us than the mind. The battle, the Wall, is to let go of the mind, so we can listen to the quiet inspirational voice of “madness” in the mind, to get inspired. Each creator has to get “out of their wits”, to quote Plato, out of their minds, to create.

Inspiration, getting out of our wits, getting irrational, is where all great creations come from. So, let the computer, or whatever device, be a tool to extend your irrational ideas, impulses, words inside you out into the world, not to “protect” you from your inner world.

In a letter written in Arles to his brother, Theo, in 1888 Vincent van Gogh had this to say:

Ah, my dear brother, sometimes I know so clearly what I want. In life and in painting too, I can easily do without the dear Lord, but I can’t, suffering as I do, do without something greater than myself, which is my life, the power to create.

And if frustrated in this power physically, we try to create thoughts instead of children; in that way, we’re part of humanity all the same. And in a painting I’d like to say something consoling, like a piece of music. I’d like to paint men or women with that ‘je ne sais quoi’ of the eternal, of which the halo used to be the symbol, and which we try to achieve through the radiance itself, through the vibrancy of our colorations.

There is a lot in these two paragraphs. Some would call it crazy mad. I call it inspired madness, positive madness. A creator expressing his Spirit through his creations and the creations expressing spirit through him. But above all it’s his mad enthusiasm, his passion, his “suffering”, to do something greater than himself which is what gives him “the power to create”.

When you hit a Wall, know you will keep going. Passion will get you through. You will suffer through the Wall. Passion will dissolve it. Madness will dissolve it. Enthusiasm will dissolve it. Inspiration will dissolve it. It is a passion and enthusiasm for what Plato called form, or forms, to trans-form the world inside, into a new form, outside. The beauty of sunflowers into a painting, like van Gogh, the “elegance” of mathematics into a theory of Relativity, like Einstein.

Out of the chaos of passion comes the passion transformed into a creation, “trans” coming from the latin meaning “on the other side of”. The creator’s passion, by inspiration, moves beauty or elegance onto the other side, from their inner world to this outer world of objects.

You suffer through each Wall. In fact, Walls can be exciting as they give you problems to overcome which fuels your inspiration even more. Unlike the modern interpretation of passion, which usually means something romantic, passion is the drive to do what you love. Allow your passion for doing what you love to empower you to forget the modern passion for “addictions”.

Certain creators take pains to create in ways that their work can be easily understood, accessible to someone on the train into work, or bored on a beach, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to have someone be absorbed, made ecstatic by your creation, like the passion in a van Gogh painting or a Michelangelo sculpture or your favorite writer or artist or musician?

Technique and talent are important, but passion, madness and enthusiasm are fundamental.

If you start using words like inspiration, madness, enthusiasm, Spirit, people either don’t respond, or change the subject by using lexical prisons like “Oh, that’s interesting”. This demeans conversation into statement only, and dissolves your passion into flatness. How can we ever arrive at a new positive thesis, a new creation, passionately, when the response is not a response but a flat Wall?

Look for mentors, peers who use enthusiastic, inspired, passionate, mad! They’re probably black sheep like you. They don’t allow lexical prisons to be another Wall against creation. They dissolve the Walls of lexical prisons by being enthusiastic, passionate, mad, by embracing the Imagination, moving towards it, not away from it. You may not find too many of them, but when you find one they inspire you, enthuse you with passion and positive madness, because in the end mentors are like friends, like books, I’d rather have one great one than a library of bad ones.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an American poet, but like last time, I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

The eye must drain what pains the heart.

Or, Tears must drain what pains the heart.

In Irish words are arranged differently than English so that when we say we’re sad in Irish the literal translation means “sadness is on me” but in English English that’d be a detached “I am sorry”. The same goes with this proverb. There is more emotion, and a cleansing of the suffering heart through tears.

An rud a ghoilleas ar an gcroí caithfidh an t-súil é a shileas.

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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Dancing is very like poetry. It’s like poetic lyricism, sometimes, it’s like the rawness of dramatic poetry, it’s like the terror — or it can be like a terrible revelation of meaning. Because when you light on a word it strikes you to your heart.

That’s a quote from the American dancer and choreographer Martha Graham in the 1985 New York Times interview “Martha Graham Reflects on Her Art and a Life in Dance” (31 March 1985); found in the book The New York Times Guide to the Arts of the 20th Century.

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 17 of my series of episodes on Imagination creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about Rejection and Failure. Today I’m going to talk about the Dancer and the Dance and doing what you love.

W. B. Yeats asks this question in one of his poems: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

About ten years ago, a Nigerian dancer came to La Muse. She made me think more about Yeats’ idea. When you saw this woman dance you thought, this is what she is, a dancer. She’s in the dance, she becomes the dance, and the dance becomes her. She’s free.

But when you ask her about her life you find out she’s a medical doctor. She also writes poems. She calls the dances she creates “dance poems”, and the poems she writes “dance poems”. When she’s poetic, she’s dancing, and when she’s writing she’s dancing. She’s free — you can see the freedom when she dances, you can feel the freedom from the words she writes.

“I have no free time.” I’ve a friend that hates that sentence. He says that’s your mind, not you. The “I” in that sentence is your mind, your ego, but you are not your mind/ego. You are you.

“Free time” is a mind construct — as is time itself. We “choose” what to do with the time we have in a day, a life. “Freedom” comes in knowing we are choosing. I have no “free time”. Yes, life is full of distractions but we have to create freedom. We have to create time. To do this we create disciplines, rituals, and show up to work.

When you are free you create your own new systems, whether it’s an organic garden, a community of writers or workers, a new political movement. This form of creation frees you from economic, dogmatic restrictions. It is truly counter-cultural.

Yes, accepting freedom into your life can lead to anxiety. As Kierkegaard said, freedom can lead to dizziness. But it’s natural. So embrace the dizziness, the excitement of it. Better to be excited about change than frightened by it. It’s a step further towards creative freedom. Accept “dizziness” as a natural part of creative freedom. We are free, free to create.

When I write, like the dancer with her dancing, I get lost in the writing. I am literally in the writing. I become the writing. Time disappears. All of a sudden, three hours have passed, and I realize I haven’t eaten.

Every creator I’ve ever met, on retreats, friends, enjoys this feeling: to get lost in the work. The act of creation, becomes a joyful, euphoric, meditative experience. This feeling feeds into everything you do in your life. It makes you feel good because you satisfied an important need, to get lost in creation. It changes the way you think, or how you were taught to think when you’re creating something. When you’re in it, you’re different, because you’re focused, because life around you recedes when you’re in the flow of creation.

You don’t have to be a dancer to dance. Just like you don’t have to be a golf pro to love playing golf. Why? Because it’s an act. You golf. You dance. In that moment you’re the golfer, the dancer. You become the creation when you’re creating, when you dance, when you hit the ball down the fairway, when you’re “in it” you become part of that action. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about this in his book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”; you enter what he calls “the flow state”. You are lost to the dance, and it’s a joyful feeling.

You don’t have to be the best to get lost in the dance, in “flow”. We go against our natures when we reject the dancer, reject flow, and when we go against our natures, well, we’re not being true to ourselves, or the natural, joyful act of being alive.

And the best way to get into a flow state of creation – Do what you love!

I talked a bit about this before in the second episode when I talk about my experience managing the Good Mixer in the London of the Brit Pop 90s, how all those creators coming in taught me the lesson, do what you love, irrespective if whether you get rich or famous, because doing what you love, creating what you love makes you happy, and lets fun an joy into your life.

Yes, a lot of people don’t and can’t do what they love, all the time. Because of access, to culture, to money, to education, to so many things, we’re not all given the same opportunities. Johann Hari, in his book Lost Connections, and in an interview talks about this, referring to research about how people feel about their work done by the opinion poll company, Gallup. They found only 13% of us like our jobs most of the time. 63% “sleep work” we don’t like it, we don’t hate it, we just kind of tolerate it. Then there’s 24% of us who hate and fear our jobs. Pretty enlightening stuff, no? That means 87% of people don’t like the thing they’re doing most each week. And of course, depending on where you are, depdngin on how capitalistic or authoritarian the society this is only cutting into more and more of a person’s day.

OK. Yes, this is a fact. But, yes there’s a but, if we think creatively we can create windows through these walls, and create the time to invest in doing what we love, what we love to create. Yes, not all of us can start cooperatives and create meaningful fulfilling work for whatever reason or reasons. But we can create windows into the things we love. We can start small and be consistent, focused about being consistent no matter how many times you ego tries to sabotage your efforts to tell you you’re wasting your time etc.

When we started off La Muse we had no conventional business approach. No business plan. We just kept making mistakes. You keep smiling, even when you’re kicked to the ground, again. To smile is to create. It frees you from somber, bleak realities.

Know why you are doing what you want to do. Then thinking disappears. Creating takes over. Time disappears, because you’re doing what you love.

When I ran the retreat I’d be in my office for four or five hours not realizing it’s half an hour past dinner time. One of my boys or my daughter knocks on my door. It’s only then that I realize fours hours have gone by. It felt like minutes. I was in the moment, alive, lost in the process, disconnected from time.

The opposite is true too. If you’re doing something you don’t love, then four or five hours feels like twice that time. If you love taking cars apart, if it makes you joyful, then you’re creating. It matters to you. It may not matter to other people so much, but it matters to them if you come back into the house joyful.

What do you love? What do you enjoy? “Enjoy” is what gives you joy, literally, what creates joy ‘in’ you. If you enjoy doing something then that’s probably your form of creation, your field.What brings you joy? Why? Because if you love what you do, you don’t care how much you’re getting paid. When you’re in it, when you’re creating what you love, you’re alive, completely alive. You can’t buy that. That’s joy, that’s fun, that’s real purpose. So many people lack purpose in life then medicate themselves, because they’re not doing what they love. When you discover what you love, it’s an epiphany, a joy.

Neil deGrasse Tyson was once asked what it means to be brilliant, to be visionary. He responded by saying he was just doing what he loves. He said if everyone did what they loved then everyone would be visionary, brilliant. The man doesn’t understand the word vacation because what he does is already a vacation.

What are your dreams? Work from there. Write them down. Research them. Start off messy. Be explorative. How did others turn the same kinds of dreams into realities, creations? Who influenced them? Who inspired them?

You create your life. It’s the greatest creation. If you stay in the same lifestyle and are dissatisfied, it’s probably because you feel stuck. Nobody has it easy. It’s hard to create a life. It takes a lot of focus.

But, you have a choice to create the life you want, by creating what you love. You construct the house of your life around what you love, from the foundation up. Walls are no good without a foundation. Windows are useless without the walls to put them in. If you don’t get the basic tools to create what you love then how will you ever put in a beautiful bay window with a view of the forest?

How are you going to get a computer to write that novel? How are you going to buy the land to build the foundations of what will eventually be your end goal, a finished house you will live in?

A wall appears: “But I’m only starting out?” We’re all only starting out. This is my first non-fiction book. I’m an amateur too.

The word “amateur” is French. It means someone who loves something. I love encouraging people to create because I’ve been talking about it to people for nearly two decades. I love talking about it.

Be an amateur, it takes a lot of pressure off. We’re all amateurs, because if you really love what you’re creating then you’ll always be falling in love with it again and again, always being curious about how it works.

Will I get everything I want to into this book? No. Why? Nothing’s perfect and there’s always more to learn, more to love about my field.

It doesn’t matter what you create. If it makes you joyful, then it’s worth doing. To most everyone else it’s about the finished book, painting, building, car. To you, it’s about the process, the fun of doing it. It doesn’t matter if other people care about what you create. What matters is that you care about what you create.

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

You’ll never plough a field turning it over in your mind.

Ní dhéanfaidh smaoineamh an treabhadh duit.

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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I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

That’s a quote from Sylvia Plath in her posthumously published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, and 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 16 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

In the last episode I talked about Doors towards the Imagination and creativity and how to start and understand the journey out of the Cave into the Platonic confusion and acclimatization of creating.

Today I’m going to talk about the Walls of rejection and failure, and how to transform them into opportunities, into Doors towards the Imagination and creativity.

I want to start today by talking about a young English poet who came to La Muse many years ago. To those of you who are new to the podcast La Muse is the writers and artists retreat I co-founded and ran for nearly twenty years in southern France with my wife Kerry, welcoming creators from every continent and of every creative bent.

Anyway, this young English poet had just finished university and sent some of his poems to “The New Yorker”, a place notorious for not responding. They responded to him, giving him a page of basically encouraging criticisms of his work. What did he do? He didn’t send out another poem until he got to La Muse. Why? He thought his poems were bad because they’d been “rejected”.

He didn’t realize that the rejection he received was an actual acceptance of his work. The majority of people only get a few lines in a form response from “The New Yorker”. Not an actual human writing back to encourage you. We explained this to him. He started sending out his poems again, everywhere. If he had not come on retreat and talked to other creators he would have given up.

Every time I get a rejection, I meditate. I take time to sit, doing nothing, to think about what I’m working on now. Not the creation that was rejected. By doing this I become aware of my thoughts, then my emotions, and realize my presumed failure is in actual fact my own mind making me feel bad, as opposed to asking the question: What can I learn from this rejection? This is turning a Wall into a Door, instead of feeling shame, or getting down I fail forward, lean into the failure, and see what I can learn from it, from the rejection. Doors open. It’s a path of turning a negative into a positive by changing the way our mind receives information. What can I do better next time? How can I fix this character, this chapter, to make the book better? Am I what people say about me and my work, or am I going to keep creating?

Rejection can come in many forms. No sales, no shows, no publication, no representation, bad reviews, not getting the part, the job. The psychodrama starts, and all the walls appear. The solution: resilience, perseverance, and an open mind. You have to remember why you create, because you love doing it, because it’s a need.

Mentors, peers encourage you when these losses come. The writer Judith Viorst talks about this in her book “Necessary Losses”. Basically, she says when we lose something we also gain something. Yes, she talks about death and divorce and big tragedies, but it also applies to the regular occurrence of rejection.

Rejection is not a bad thing. It can actually be a really healthy and positive part of the process of the Imagination. The more you fail the better you can get. The idea that quality comes from thin air is a myth. The more you create, quantity, the more mistakes you make, the better you get at creating, if you are willing to learn from your mistakes.

Look at any major creator. They always failed at first, but they kept going until they finally had a breakthrough. And a lot of the time they didn’t even realize they were having a breakthrough until after the fact. Thomas Edison failed to invent the light bulb, for a long time, but he never admitted failure. He said he’d just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.

Also, rejection could simply mean you have not found the right setting or person to employ, buy, or produce your kind of creation. If you get criticism, does any of it actually help? If it does, then rejection can be a huge opportunity.

If someone doesn’t like your stuff, then get them to be specific about what it is they don’t like. Be responsible. Respond to what the person says, instead of reacting. Where are they coming from, what’s their basis? Ask them for examples of how your creation could be more workable. They are not criticizing you. They are criticizing the work.

We have to learn to detach ourselves from the work and not take it personally. Even if you’ve put your heart into your creation it still needs to be set apart from you. It’s like raising a child. At some stage you have to let the child go out into the world. As much as you love them, there will be others that don’t, irrespective of how wonderful your child is to you. It will hurt, but we can’t allow that hurt to stop us creating.

Here’s Ursula K. Le Guin in a piece called “Book Reviews” in her book Words are my Matter:

The New York/East Coast literary scene is so inward-looking and provincial that I’ve always been glad not to be a part of it; but when I lived in London I was positively terrified by the intensity of British literary cliques, the viciousness of competition, the degree of savagery permitted.

There are closed doors in every industry, but it doesn’t mean you have to have a closed mind, or worse, a closed heart. Yes, it helps to know people. Yes, it helps to be a prodigy. But does it really matter as long as what you are creating is making you joyful? If it makes you joyful, it will eventually make others joyful too. It’s infectious.

Yes, it’s frustrating to work in a vacuum and get no capital “success”. Sad casualties, such as John Kennedy Toole’s “Confederacy of Dunces” come to mind, his novel being published eleven years after his suicide.

Closed industries don’t have to stop our creations. If anything we should see rejection as an impetus to continue being creative. Getting published, produced, exhibited, being awarded a trophy, a degree, a prize, a decoration does not equal success.

Yet, we go out into the world, reaching for these carrots dangled in front of us. But why? Do we have to pursue happiness? Can’t we just be happy? Can’t we just write the novel and enjoy the process? Can’t we just paint the painting, run the race, hold the office? Why allow others to create our success? The answer: we don’t have to.

We do what we love and keep creating because success is a choice. I chose to write a novel every couple of years. Some of them might be failures. Some of them are okay and some of them I’m proud of. But that is not how I judge my books’ successes. I judge their success by how much they changed me. By how much they made me accept the process, the imagining of them, the writing, the editing, and the knowledge of what I’ve learned from doing each one being beneficial to the next one I will eventually write when I feel inspired to do so again. That’s how I experience success.

Success is what makes you happy right now. The process of writing, running, designing, inventing, is success, not pursuing, the publication, award ceremony or decoration.

Most creators do not get recognition or rewards in their own lifetimes or afterwards. Most are little known. Oscars, National Book Awards, seed money. This is not why we create. We create because we love what we do. If we are awarded recognition, financial gain, it’s a “bonus” not the goal in creating. We don’t create for external reward.

At one stage in her career Katharine Hepburn stopped getting acting roles. She was considered box office poison, but she loved acting in movies. Did she take the rejection and give up, or did she become mindful, aware?

She was acting in a play, “The Philadelphia Story”. What did she do? She got creative. She used it for her screen comeback. She bought the film rights to it, and went on to produce and star in the movie version. It was Hepburn’s first big hit after several flops. She empowered herself by being mindful of the rejections and changed her position to create a new opportunity for her Imagination. One door closed to her, she opened another one.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak became two of the most well-known names in computers but it wasn’t before products such as Twiggy, LISA and Apple II eventually failed. Hewlett Packard rejected Wozniak five times before he created the personal computer and founded Apple with Jobs.

Each failure can be an opportunity to learn what is failing, but can also be an opportunity to embrace new ideas. Wozniak advises not to expect your first projects to be successful, but to do it for yourself, for the challenge, for the fun.

Even Samuel Beckett had something positive, well, encouraging to say on the topic of failure: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Beckett was dogged in re-working his writing.

The more you “fail”, the better you get at creating something different. We learn from our mistakes. Take rejection mindfully, and carry on regardless, with focus and awareness. Opinions are like mouths, everyone’s got one. It doesn’t necessarily mean what comes out of them is the truth.

So, the best way to handle rejection? Move onto the next project, creation. You’re now a free agent. Your agent should be trying to sell your book now, your building, your idea. You don’t have time to worry about it not selling because you’re already moving forward with the next creation. It’s what you do. Write. Build. Create again.

The Wall of rejection, and all the other walls, remind me of the children’s book “We’re Going on A Bear Hunt”. I used to read it every night to our kids. You can’t go over it, you can’t go under it, you can’t go around it, you have to go through it. Literally and figuratively.

And the only way through it? Again, keep creating. Keep creating new work and let the wall fall of its own accord, by beginning again. The work gets you through the frustration, the thoughts, emotions, into new inspiration. Any time I ever have a problem with a chapter, when I’m stuck, I begin another chapter. I begin again, somewhere else. I bring my awareness to another part of the story, the novel, the play.

The Cohen bothers do the same. They’ll start a script, get bored half way through, go direct something, start a new screenplay, get bored with it, then return to a previous one. They’re always starting again. Rejection, they don’t have time for it. They’re too busy doing the work.

Starbucks does the same thing. They come out with new ideas before they perfect them. They make them better as time goes on. They adapt. They start again. They know new ideas will not be perfect, but they can get better with time and innovation.

Every time I do another episode of this podcast I feel like I’m failing a little less than the last time. I’m not afraid to fail anymore. Why? Because I know failing is just part of the process. Does it stop me from putting out episodes? No. Because I know I’ll get better the next time. Every time I learn something new. Yes, not everyone is not going to love what I’m saying, but who cares? As I said in episode 8, we’re all different, and so are out listeners and readers. To many this podcast is a failure for many different reasons. But will I stop? No. Why? Because, like a novel, it’s a marathon, you have to pace yourself and just keep going until the finish line. Some may think you’re time was bad, others good, and then others again amazing. But you. What do you think, feel? To me, I finished. I set out a goal and followed through and learned through the process. I learned by doing, by embracing failure.

No work is ever going to be perfect, but no work will be created if you create a wall of perfection, rejection, procrastination. By starting again, creating again, you will get inspired again. So embrace failure. Don’t be afraid of it. Failure’s how we learn. See it as a Door toward imagining new creations. Every creator fails. Critics criticize, and yes creators fail, but creators also create something new. Be a critic, after the creative process. It’s called the editing stage. Authenticity lies there. You create an authentic work out of failure by conquering failure, by conquering the fear of failure, by simply accepting it is something that is part of the creative process. Create. Don’t compare yourself to others when you’re in it, creating. Comparison destroys the imagination, destroys creativity. So have heart. Be fearless. Risk. Invite failure, because failure is absolutely essential. Don’t let gatekeepers and your inner critic think you are a failure. If you’re not failing, well then you’re not getting better. And some day, when you least expect it, something you create will be beautiful to others, even if you think it fails in so many way.

Look to other creators to inspire you when you’re down. Read the writer you’re into most. Not Shakespeare, but someone on the same level you feel you could attain. Confidence comes back when you engage with those aspirational people. Comparing yourself to Picasso or Shakespeare will make you think you’re a failure. Look to creators you think you’d have a great conversation with.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from the wonderful Sylvia Plath but here’s another Irish proverb. This one means:
However long the day, the evening will come.

Dá fhada an lá tagann an tráthnóna.

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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If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

That’s a quote from William Blake’s 1793 poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

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 15 of my series of episodes on Imagination creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about capitalism and creativity. Today I’m going to talk about Doors and the Cave. As I’ve said in nearly every episode I see Doors as a metaphor towards Imagination and creativity, opposite to what I’ve called Walls, which I see as a metaphor that leads us away from the Imagination.

In the last episode I talked at length about capitalism, without getting into what I see as a creative answer to it. Well, I see Doors as the answer to Capitalism, as they open in the direction of positivity, of opening up, of growth, of inspiration, of human amelioration, of Imagination. And as I said also mentioned in episode 5 on Imagination and creativity, the ‘creativity’ of merchant bankers is not a Door, but a Wall. Their ‘creativity’ is easily defined: it’s greed.

The Door of Imagination is a potential which we all possess. It can be opened in a vast array of human activities – anything from traditional art and craft work (writing, painting, composing and so on) to sports and leisure activities (baseball or establishing a garden) or in other less obvious cultural forms (flower arrangement, say, or tea ceremonies).

At best, this is what a Door symbolizes, an opening to positive creation and imagination, an opening through every Wall, away from the illusionary security of fear, into aesthetic, ritualistic and symbolic creation. The key to the door is the Imagination, not the creativity of greed on Wall Street. Yes, Wall Street. A street of Walls. You become a creative insider on that street. You become a creative outside when you walk through the door of the Imagination with its many paths and streets.

In literature, Doors are everywhere. In the arts. Allegorical. And metaphorical. They signify change, openings.

Getting back to the Blake quote I opened with,

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

But the text, the words, are so insightful. How we’re all in search of the infinite, if we could only clean the Doors of perception instead of closing them so that all we see are the chinks of light through the cracks in our cavern.

Plato called Blake’s cavern the Cave, another wonderful metaphor which I’m going to get into in a minute.

The point though for both is that the Door turns into a Wall a barrier to the light. If we don’t go out the Door of the cavern then we’re left in darkness to look through the narrow chinks, like Plato’s prisoners who only see the shadows of reality on the Cave wall.

I had a classics lecturer who loved Plato. Any chance he got he’d bring Plato up. And his favorite? The allegory of the Cave. He’d enthusaistically lecture about a hundred of us at eleven o’clock in the morning, hungover — us, not him:

“Plato has the character, Socrates, tell the story of some people chained to the wall of a cave since birth. They face a blank wall. They watch shadows on the wall, from stuff passing in front of a fire behind them. They give names to these shadows. The shadows become the prisoners’ reality. An escapee comes to realize, by the light, that the shadows are not reality. He can understand a different reality, rather than the fabricated one the prisoners still believe. But when he goes back to tell them his revelation, they don’t believe him. In fact, they think he’s crazy!”

At this point some of the other students woke up because the old man had started shouting.

“Why?” he shouted, excited. “Because they know no other reality than the shadows! Socrates says the philosopher is like one of the prisoners who frees himself from the Cave. He also says the other prisoners will kill anyone who attempts to drag them out of the Cave. Isn’t that an amazing allegory, gentlemen?”

Some of the students had fallen asleep again. I was wide awake. Why? Because this allegory fascinated me, as it still does today. We’re all prisoners to our own perceived reality — one that is influenced, even constructed and manipulated, by society — PR firms, corporations, government bodies. We not only see a “shadow play” reality; we ourselves are shadows. The Walls of the Cave which inhibit us from creating our own reality are figurative, but very literal too.

Creation is when an individual, a creator decides to change their reality, and that of their field, and walks out the Door of the Cave, the cavern. They have a life changing experience, which then becomes life-changing for the rest of us.

Is this not what some call the purpose of life, to offer an expression of a field to the rest of the world after investigating it from a personal perspective as deeply, internally, as we can, and then to share it with others? If a creator discovers a deeper nature amidst all the pressures of society then they can express their field of creation in the best of forms. These creators assimilate as much as they can from their field, physics, art, business, and they get so good at it, they enlarge it. They become Socrates’ escaped philosopher — an inspired, imaginative creator. The creator imagines a new reality, creates a new reality, by leaving the darkness of the cave, by walking through the door, to create.

You too can escape, but nobody can drag you out. It’s like the old adage, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. It’s not easy. Some people in certain parts of the world will still actually try to kill you if you try to escape. In the end though, we have to get up and walk out into the light ourselves, as the other prisoners do later on in “The Republic”.

It’s difficult. You’ll be blinded when you first step out the Door into the light, when you open your perception. You’ll be confused, but it’s simply part of the process. With time, your “senses” get used to the new impressions, images. You get used to the new world you have created by walking out the Door.

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

God never closed one door without opening another.

Níor dhún Dia doras riamh nár oscail Sé ceann eile.

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.