Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSS | Subscribe to the Podcast

Capitalism … is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. … The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. … The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

That’s a quote from Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

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

Last time I spoke about the Walls of ageism and retirement, but today I want to talk about one of the greatest Walls to the Imagination, to creativity: capitalism.

This episode is going to be at least twice the normal length I try to put out because of the nature of the subject. This battle between authenticity and this hyper-capitalist global reality we find ourselves living in effects the imagination and creativity in so many different ways. Because I will not be able to get it to be under an hour I’ve left it to be the last Wall episode before heading into Doors towards the Imagination.

Five years after working in a coffee shop on Manhattan I took another creative leap, this time with my wife, to the Black Mountains in the south of France. We created a place for people like us, whose first priority is to honor the need to create. We started La Muse to create an affordable, beautiful, inspiring and comfortable place for creators. Emphasis on the first word, affordable, especially because I’m talking about capitalism. We didn’t understand people wouldn’t come if we didn’t charge regular prices. We thought they’d come because we were offering really cheap prices. But that’s not the way we’ve been conditioned by capitalism. People didn’t come. We were told later that they thought it was a scam, too good to be true. Later, a friend who managed a Hyatt hotel explained to us how each room has to have a different price because people need to assign “value” to what they are buying. At the hotel he managed they only ever rented the presidential suite out twice a year. It was immense. It was empty the whole rest of the year. It didn’t matter, because those two bookings took care of all the fixed costs for the year for the hotel. So we raised our prices even though we wanted to keep them low so creators with no money would be able to come. And of course, creators started coming. That’s capitalism.

Like Camden Town before MTV moved in, like the East Village before it became gentrified, we moved to the Aude, the Cinderella of France. Creative people discover places before developers, because for creators living creatively is the motivation, not status, wealth. Creators are marginalized in our predominant capitalist society, often crossing paths in places they’ve discovered and nurtured before being “discovered” by those with capital. You only have to look at certain urban ZIP codes in the US with seemingly minimal potential to gentrify, and you’ll find a high concentration of artists.

We started La Muse with credit cards, nearly twenty years ago. We couldn’t find money any other way to create what we wanted to create. This is often the reality when someone starts to create something different. Where do you get the money, when most capital is oftentimes owned by an unimaginative few who were given their capital instead of creating it?

The world’s eight (yes, 8) richest billionaires control the same wealth as the poorest 50% of the planet. The world’s richest 1% are on course to control as much as two-thirds of the world’s wealth by 2030.

Here where I’m living now, America, the country has socialism for the rich, and cold, harsh capitalism for everyone else. They’re not my words. That’s Robert Reich, the Former United States Secretary of Labor. If you ask most people what socialism is here they get anxious and think you’re talking about a failed form of soviet communism. Amazon, Chevron and 58 other billion dollar companies pay no tax, even though they’re, or were, American companies.

As Noam Chomsky said:

the rich and powerful, they don’t want a capitalist system. They want to be able to run to the ‘nanny state’ as soon as they’re in trouble, and get bailed out by the taxpayer.

As Robert Reich puts it it’s “corporate welfare”. The handouts are going to GM and many other companies, not the people who need it, and “around 60% of American wealth is now inherited”. I’ll leave a link to his great short video with examples on my site:

And of course the corporate welfare happened all over again recently because of the coporate welfare due to the Corona virus and a fraction of money going to the people most in need, the American working class. If the American people fully understood how much tax money is doled out to corporations as subsidies, that socialism I mentioned earlier, or how much the tax code has been changed to help corporations, they’d storm Washington in their millions. But they don’t. Because the masters attack solidarity, run the regulators, engineer elections, keep the everyone in line by manufacturing consent and marginalizing people.

My two honor degrees in Ireland were paid for by the Irish government, actually by my local government, Meath County Council. I will be ever grateful for that. I was the eldest of 7 kids and because of being means tested I was able to get a free education, in a country which would be considered extremely poor at the time and even now compared to the states here, and yet people are expected to pay over $50,000 a year here for a degree. That’s insane. If the richest country in the world can’t pay to educate it’s people when one of the poorest can then there has to be something wrong with that system.

Now I want to mention Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power, a documentary interview with Noam Chomsky. I’ve always loved Chomsky, and it’s a pity he isn’t as accepted in the states the way he should be, when other inspired academics like say Joseph Campbell are. But then Campbell is much more acceptable to the mainstream media and welcomed more by American popular culture because he doesn’t skewer the media on it’s manipulation of the truth. People who own those companies obviously don’t want us to even know Chomsky’s name.

Anyway, Chomsky explains in his classic detached fashion and in the most logical way what the corporate class has done to the United States: created widespread income inequality, and a huge diminishment of democracy. In detail and with wonderful examples he argues his case of rich versus poor, powerful versus powerless, oligarchy versus democracy.

Chomsky explains how the “masters of mankind” – that’s a quote from Adam Smith by the way, the so called “Father of Capitalism”. So Chomsky explains how the masters of mankind have basically dismantled any real remaining opportunity for an immigrant to come to the U.S. and fulfill the American Dream like Chomsky’s parents did, where they can become socially mobile, get a job and build a middle-class house with a car in the driveway and the kids going to school to get a good education, quote:

for most of the population, the majority, real incomes have almost stagnated for over thirty years. The middle class in that sense, that unique American sense, is under severe attack. A significant part of the American Dream is class mobility: You’re born poor, you work hard, you get rich. The idea that it is possible for everyone to get a decent job, buy a home, get a car, have their children go to school . . . It’s all collapsed.

He outlines ten “principles” to show exactly what the few at the top have been up to, practicing what Adam Smith called the “vile maxim of the masters of mankind” which is “All for ourselves, and none for other people”. The “masters” do not like democracy, because it gives power to the people, so they reduce democracy, shape ideology, redesign the economy, shift the Burden, of financial problems, that is, to the masses. They attack solidarity, run the regulators, engineer elections, that is buy them, and keep the rabble in line, by manufacturing consent and marginalizing the population.

I suppose the only word there not used as much in American English is solidarity. It’s used a lot in France though, but what Chomsky means is having empathy for other people, caring for them, what an Irish politician once said, the tide that lifts all ships. We’re all in this together. And of course the rabble he talks about is the coordinated multiple decades long effort by corporations to destroy the labor movement.

Power has become so concentrated that banks ‘too big to fail,’ have become what some economists called ‘too big to jail.’” Enron was crammed full of ingeniously creative lawyers and accountants, military torturers, bomb and missile makers, to say nothing of ponzi scheme inventors, who all, no doubt, also feel very good about what they have created –until they are exposed, that is , and are sent to the Big House where they belong, if at all. Kurt Vonnegut refers to these individuals as PPs in his book A Man Without a Country. Better to let Vonnegut speak in this great section from his book:

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: “C-Students from Yale.”George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot . . .PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . .So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reasons that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

Vonnegut wrote that passage nearly a decade and a half ago. I can only imagine what he’d have to say about the present administration of Donald Trump.

Of course, most of the X, Y, Millenial and Z generations are aware of what Chomsky has to say, that 1% of 1% of the population own most of the assets of the planet. That the 1% of 1% want to keep it that way. Last thing they want to do is share that wealth. The boomer generation and older generation for the most part are quite cynical about this. I’ve had people I love tell me that the only choice we have is either capitalism or socialism. They are incapable of even imagining a distinction between socialism and democracy as concepts and capitalism as something divorced from ways of government. Their viewpoint is that you’re either a capitalist or a socialist. This binary way of thinking has been created by the 1% of 1%.

If you don’t like documentaries, there’s also the book version of Chomsky’s documentary, which goes into the concepts more fully, but still in a very clear and simple way. There’s simply no arguing with the logic of either. It’s simply facts he presents, how it’s all engineered.

The problem here is that it’s not simply an American problem. Capitalism is a planetary problem. My experience growing up in Ireland, living in France, and visiting many other European countries is that the same structures exist everywhere. The social classes are hidden in different ways but if we analyze them a little we see that they are regurgitations of the same structures because people who own multinational corporations don’t have borders when it comes to getting taxed, or veted.

In Spain, France, Italy, Portugal or Greece it’s simply not enough today to have a full time job and not be poor. Many salaries are about 1000 Euros and others think they’re doing well when they’ve 1500 Euros per month, but this barely pays for rent, schooling, all your fixed costs, never mind having anything extra to save to invest or spend on a holiday. We were always taught to believe the poor were street beggars but now it’s people with full time work.

In Greece, this insane inequality led to the collapse of the system and the rise of a new left in the party Syriza. Capitalism not only wrecks democracy, as former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Faroukakis says, but it also wrecks the democracy of creativity, the democracy of access and confidence in what we create. Entrenched systems are not what they appear to be. The idea that not everyone has access to creation has been heightened by capitalistic governments, because representative democracy itself has never actually existed, even in ancient Greek times.

Yanis Faroukakis left government because the institutions, oligarchic, not democratic, in his country, under the pressure of an authoritarian German led European Union told him he had no choice. Even with a mandate from the Greek people not to do austerity his compatriots in his party were co-opted into going against him and supporting the EU. Inevitably, as Faroukakis has said, these powerful leaders were not powerful at all. They were there to simply do the bidding of the system, and the system we all live under is capitalism, not representative democracy because when someone uses those two words they’re really saying that extreme centrist neo-liberal politics of division – there’s that word again, divide and conquer, like I mentioned in the first episode of the podcast – and what does this division do? Creates a constantly fighting binary world where real democracy is taken away with attrition, gradually whittling away Imagination and inspiration for “investors” at the expense of the many.

We give power to the oligarchy, the 1% of 1% when we agree they are the ones with the power. We take that power back when we say we have the right to create the reality we live in. That reality becomes manifest as soon as we wake up and realize that the old paradigm is no longer an agreement we accept. Nobody can tell you to accept an agreement you never agreed upon.

Creation needs to be more democratic. There needs to be more access, but this goes against capitalism. But how can we democratize creativity, so everyone has equal access?

Gandhi was told he had no power to create a new India. As he put it, he became the change he wanted to see in the world. He created it. Martin Luther King was told he had no power to create a different reality than the one he was living in. He created one anyway.

The idea that money is how we define ourselves is not only bizarre, but only benefits the few who want power over us, the many. If you were a person living on another planet and you landed on Earth you’d be shocked by this reality. You can imagine some of the questions,

“Why are all these people starving when these people have too much food?”

“Your Earth has more than enough resources for everyone on the planet to eat and be housed well?”

“The Earth is the Earth, how can you buy it with paper you created from the earth?”

And yet we continue, enslaved by other men’s systems, as William Blake put it. We’re conditioned from an early age to accept this reality. We’re “educated” throughout our schooling to embrace this paradigm. We’re taught money is the end goal, and that success is only reflected when we’ve amassed vast amounts of it.

At one retreat nine years ago we sat on the terrace with our resident writers and artists when one man, an Englishman living in Italy for twenty-five years, took a deep sigh of relief and interrupted the flow of conversation.

“Can I just say what a huge relief it is to finally, for once, be in a group of new people and not have to explain why I would remain a waiter for 25 years just to keep writing my novel, without ever having published a word! I am SO relieved!”

We all clapped, laughed and cheered. The book he was working on at La Muse got published the next year.

Creation has been replaced by consumption. We consume instead of creating. Replacement therapy. But therapy is supposed to be beneficial to the individual, not destructive, addictive. We buy too much. We call it “retail therapy”, thinking this a funny phrase, when actually it’s a symptom of the problem. Instead of creating clothes for ourselves, instead of crocheting, stitching, mending, we buy clothes made by underpaid workers working long hours in foreign countries. We buy these peoples’ creations and soon lose interest in them and throw them away only to replace them with more.

Creation has been replaced by addictions, by spending. We buy too many clothes, drugs, alcohol, sex, objects, devices. You only have to look at reality shows to see how we hoard. People like Marie Kondō come along and show us how addicted we’ve become by simply asking, does what you’ve bought “spark joy”? If not, then why is it in your closet? For most people this is a revelation. How could I have had so much stuff? Why is something so simple such and epiphany? Again, because the capitalism is so pervasive.

We’ve become addicted instead of expressive. And that’s exactly how capitalism works. Don’t grow your own food, buy it. Don’t mend an old car, buy a new one. Don’t take care of your health, buy pills to get rid of the symptoms of your physical pain. Don’t make your own clothes like your grandmother used to, buy more. And don’t express yourself through art, do it by what you wear, what you buy.

A society that denies creation transfers negative ideas onto the “individual” when individualism is an illusion if we consider the fact we are social beings. It projects subliminal negative associations on creation, because being a creator means thinking outside the norms, rules and regulations. To encourage people to help each other create goes against elitism, capitalism, and “rugged individualism” because they are about competition and sociopathic economics. Most contemporary societies are based on this principal because governments are for the most part “owned” by multi-national corporations through donors. Success under this worldview depends on taking advantage of those around you, to get more, not to help others. All for me and who cares about anyone else. This myth of the successful businessman as some kind of deity is just that, a myth. We’re all god. What about the successful plumber, successful teacher, successful musician, successful mother?

And don’t get me wrong. I met lots of smart and ‘creative’ business people as residents at La Muse. Not all business people are sociopaths or PPs as Vonnegut put it. But when those business people and succesful entrepreneurs came to La Muse they weren’t there to write ‘creative’ business plans or think up new schemes for defrauding their clients – they were there precisely to get away from all of that, to try and discover or tap into something authentically creative.

Also, you could be jealous of the “successful” group in your field which is attached to one of the primary tenets of capitalism, competition. I used to look at the bios of other writers judging my own “success” compared to theirs, which is ridiculous, as the only value we should have is internal, not external, comparing ourselves to others.

This inner conflict about “success” (acclaim, critical, financial), does not mean I cannot be critical of capitalism whilst seeming to admire those who have “made it”. I admire their focus, hard work, tenacity. I think it’s important to hold two conflicting truths at the same time, what F. Scott Fitzgerald talked about at the beginning of “The Crack-Up”, how a good mind should be able to hold two opposing ideas in their mind at the same time, yet still be able to function, how things can be hopeless yet we can be determined to create a different reality anyway.

Being able to see both sides of an argument is contradictory and difficult. Again, I honor the “success” of people in their fields, but at the same time I do not respect the way capitalism forces assumptions onto successful people because they are “successful”. Just because one is successful doesn’t mean one human being is better than another.

We are drunk on this idea of success as capital and we have to change it. Instead of success = value, we have to understand this:

SUCCESS = DOING WHAT YOU LOVE

Your value is not in your house, your car, your body parts. It’s about the value you place on living from doing what you love, your internal sense of value. Most of the residents who go to La Muse aren’t making money full time from their art. A lot of them have “day jobs”, but they look forward to spending time away from that capitalistic world to create. Many of them don’t shop, go out to movies, restaurants, so that they can save to get away to create what they love.

The most joyful creators I’ve ever met have been people with the least material affluence. Why are they joyful? Acceptance, and doing what they love out of love, not money. They are joyful because they see creating itself as success.

As creators our goal can’t be money. We need to be busy getting inspired, creating. The whole business part of creation is to be considered when we actually finish creating something.

There are other forms of capital too. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote about cultural capital (education). He basically said a creator’s natural talent and work ethic is effected by how much money their parents, relations, etc., have. His question was how can we create when we’re always poor, and how can we understand certain creations when we don’t have the cultural capital to understand them?

We all “suffer for our art” when we come from socio-economic backgrounds that can’t support our efforts to create. Some people inherit wealth. Some “get lucky” early on. Others, after a long career doing something else, start to create what they love. But the most important thing to remember is perseverance, which is a lot easier when you’re doing what you love.

“Competition” can destroy your inspiration, your work ethic, your focus. Watch Miloš Forman’s “Amadeus”. Salieri basically destroyed himself by comparing his work to Mozart. The artist combinations of Freud and Bacon, Manet and Degas, Matisse and Picasso, de Kooning and Pollock, were often destructively competitive, even if some would say this competition helped them develop as creators.

If you don’t win prizes, don’t earn lots of money, you are a failure. A Sunday artist. A poor poet. A “dabbler”. Recognition is not judged in the value, the wonder of your creation or the process, but in whether it has won sanctioned recognition in prizes, a competition (there’s that word again), fellowships, venture capital, reviews, a TV spot.

The fact that each creation can be so different from another never enters into this worldview. Different people like different things. Seriously, how can found objects, and say collage be compared to a huge landscape of cows in a field? It’s like comparing a tiny factory in New Guinea to a Wall Street firm. You can’t judge one compared to another. Comparison and competition in creation can only lead to despair.

Competition generates, thrives on anger and bitterness. They’re making more money than us, me. They’re getting more recognition than us, me. But anger and bitterness don’t inspire good work. They might get you started on something, but if it becomes too obsessive it destroys innovation, curiosity, inspiration, creation.

Consumption and production. Producer and consumer. We have to adapt the consumer producer model, and empower the creator creative model. If you do the work, the reward will be in the doing. Focus on the joy of the process of creation, right now. We have in our heart what it is to be happy, right now. We need to keep our eyes on our own work, our own creation, not compete with others, or look for validation from a culture that only pays off for a tiny elite.

Jacques Brel was once asked about a beautiful song he wrote and he responded, “Yes, it’s belle, beautiful, now.” When asked why he said that he explained that it was only accepted as beautiful when it became famous, when it made money. Before that, he said, it was a bad song to the majority of critics. When people started buying his music, when he started making money, then he was successful, but not before. Each song is successful, depending on how much money it has made. Brel said nothing about the song changed. He said it was beautiful, before and after it became a success. Also, Brel is another example of a creator who didn’t just do music. He was also a successful actor. He appeared in 10 movies. But he didn’t stop there either. He directed two films too, and would have directed many more if he hadn’t died at the age of 49.

Capitalism knows no limits in it’s destruction of ethical creative ways of living. Even babies, one of the ultimate creative processes a human being can engage in, has been commodified. How can this be? How can we capitalize on on of the most creative acts in life? Where is the spirit, the human being in all this? I’m just asking questions here, hard questions. Isn’t surrogacy exploiting women, in the most part presumably poor or marginalized women who are paid to have children? This is contract capitalism. A baby has become a thing, an object, not a created being. Where’s the line between buying and selling children? Does all creation have to be capitalized upon?

So, how do we stop mourning the wrongdoings of these few “masters” Chomsky describes, and start reenacting the parts of our infrastructures that were healthy and productive in the past? Yes, by becoming active, but also by being creative, irrespective of the conditions we’ve been obliged to live under. At the end of his documentary, and his book Chomsky recalls his friend Howard Zinn’s reflection:

what matters most are the countless small deeds of unknown people who lay the basis for the significant events that enter history.

If you haven’t read his wonderful book “A People’s History of the United States”, you should, because it’s full of stories of people laying a basis for significant events to enter into history. And again, there’s the quote attributed to Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Like, Chomsky and Zinn I’m an optimist. I trust the arc of history to be bending toward justice, even amidst all this capitalistic injustice, but an individual politician or some public intellectual is not going to change things. Movements move things. It’s what the word means. My movement is creative. To create is to create a real popular movement. We need a creative uprising, not elected officials of art and writing and sculpture. The Civil Rights movement did this. Labor solidarity and unrest in this country did that. Even the the Occupy movement tried to do it. Black Lives Matters is trying to do it right now. They were/are creative movements. They react against the capitalistic culture of class, step outside, literally, into the streets of our consciousness and create a new dream, as Martin Luther King said in his famous speech. Each one of us can become apart of a creative movement, if we fight against this idea of powerlessness capitalism wants us to feel. Behind apathy is a great potential to create.

At the beginning of this podcast I quoted the wonderful Stephane Hessel in the second episode:

To create is to resist; to resist is to create.

To create is to resist. To resist is to create. When we create we resist the capitalist modus operandi of society, we resist what we are told we are, what we are supposed to be, what we ought to be, and become who we are. By resisting we are being creative beings, one of the most powerful things there is.

Ursula K. Le Guin talks about resistance too. At the end of her well known short speech “Freedom”, when accepting the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014 (which can be found in video online or in her wonderful book Words Are My Matter) she had this to say :

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changes by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words… the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

So, understand capitalism for what it is, the greatest wall there is to the imagination and leading a creative life. Accept it, and then resist it, by creating, and so glean the beautiful reward of freedom.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an Austrian economist and as usual, I’m going to end with an Irish proverb, one which rhymes in both English and Irish. This one literally translates as:

Better health than wealth.

Is fearr an tsláinte ná na táinte.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSS | Subscribe to the Podcast

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSS | Subscribe to the Podcast

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSS | Subscribe to the Podcast

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSS | Subscribe to the Podcast

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.