Give Up on Being Famous

If you are alive on planet earth right now and under the age of seventy, then you are by definition part of the first generation to grow up swimming in the culture of personality, sucking down the myth that the true measure of art is how it rates/ranks/sells. But really, that’s just a temporary and fake measure, invented by whoever has managed to be the big fish in whatever shallow pool you’ve convinced yourself your swimming in. If you knew someone who enjoyed swimming but did nothing but practice diving hour after hour in case they one day happened to be getting a number rank by an Olympic judge, you’d think they were nuts. But that’s exactly what you are doing when you calibrate your creative process in the hopes that you become one of the 0.0000000000001% of people on planet earth who get a 10.0 on the big pop culture scoreboard, based on some arbitrary, artificial ranking system.

If you swim in the big pool, the pool that exists without “pop culture”, the really deep pool, you realize that no one really notices what you’re doing anyways and you suddenly become free to practice doing underwater backflips without worrying about anyone laughing at you or giving you the bronze instead of the gold. Let’s break it down: the little pool is the non-existent world of commercial/critical success you’ve imagined and that you have so much less control over than you would ever believe (hint; there are no big breaks, or overnight successes).

The big pool is the universe, which has an uncanny knack for supporting creative people who trust their own instincts enough to dive in the deep end. Grab any magazine or turn on e! and ask yourself – why are these people on the cover or on TV? Who made the rules? Are they better at what they do, work harder, know somebody, did something special? In some cases, talent rises, but in others, there’s a mysterious swirl of accidents that you could never replicate, so don’t bother trying.

Extra credit: Write a 50 word letter to the universe telling it what scares you most about the parts of it that you can’t see. Dear Universe, I’m a little nervous about diving in because there might be rocks under the water…maybe I’m not as good as I think….maybe I’m better than I imagined….

Unless you’re goal is literally to become famous for being famous – and that’s both a dumb goal and nearly impossible to accomplish without the right last name – give up on being famous, and just deal with doing the work and getting over your fears. Trying to become famous is a euphemism for avoiding doing the work of creating/marketing/selling, because you are afraid.