3 things to kill before they kill your creativity
Death doesn’t exactly make for uplifting bumper stickers or catchy memes. Much less does it lend itself to a subject like creativity. Especially if you’re looking to write a bestseller.
So it’s more than a little unusual that death runs like an undercurrent not only through Ryan Holiday’s most recent book, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts, but through his larger body as well. (As proof, you can buy a “memento” of your demise on his website, The Daily Stoic.)
Yet somehow, sell is precisely what Holiday does.
Over the last five years, his books have moved over 500,000 copies, in more than 25 languages, and “sales are accelerating.” What’s more, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. His creative agency, Brass Check, advises clients like Google, James Altucher, Neil Strauss, and Tony Robbins
So, why this morbid fascination?
Because death — killing three things in and about ourselves — lies at the core of long-term creativity and success.
1. Kill your excuses
Unlikely as it sounds, Holiday’s roadmap to perennial selling begins with a third century BC philosophy known as “Stoicism.” As Holiday told me:
“The essence of Stoicism begins with making the distinction between what we control and what we don’t control. This seemingly small thing is actually an enormous form of power and direction,” he said. “The Stoic doesn’t look out at the world and try to change it; they try to change themselves — to orient themselves to be the best person they can in that world.”
Far from the stone-faced killjoy it’s often presented as, Stoicism has a long and illustrious history in entrepreneurship. From the ancient Roman conqueror Marcus Aurelius, to statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin, right through to Shay Carl whose Maker Studios was acquired by Disney for half a billion dollars.
In true Stoic fashion, when Tim Ferriss asked Carl in Tools of Titans what phrase he’d immortalize on a billboard, Carl responded: “YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!”
For Holiday, Stoicism means taking responsibility for life, rather than letting life dictate the terms:
“When I was at American Apparel, it was often chaos. As a marketer, what that creates in you is a sense that the job is in the response. As in, ‘Ok, this happened and what are we going to do with this? What can we do with this tiny bit of space and tight deadline? How can we turn our small budget to an advantage?’” he said. “On a personal level, ‘If this person is going to be up in my business, trying to attack me, what can I learn from the situation? What skill can I use this as an opportunity to practice?’”
“It’s always a question of: What are you going to do about it?” he added.
Abdicating our responsibility is tempting. More so when the challenges of life are genuinely unfair.
However, to adopt a fixed or victim mindset robs us of the very power we need to face those challenges. Great art has always used pain and injustice as fuel, not just in the creative process … but to thrive.
2. Kill your ego
For anyone familiar with Holiday, this point will come as no surprise. Holiday’s fourth book — Ego is the Enemy — focused on this imperative.
Still, it’s a subject Perennial Seller returns to because ego — the hardwired desire to pursueour passions, satiate our desires, and ultimately serve ourselves — is death if we want to sell to more than an audience of one.
In the book, Holiday explains, “When I work on a project — with clients, but particularly with my own writing — I start by acknowledging a blunt but important truth: Nobody cares about what I have made. Humility is clearer-eyed than ego — and that’s important because humility always works harder than ego.”
In the case of creatives, this can seem profoundly counterintuitive. After all, art is self-expression, right? Yes … and no:
“Successful creative work by definition requires satisfying an audience. Onanism is not a good artistic strategy. No one wants to buy that. If you don't know what’s going on in the lives or heads of other people, it is extraordinarily hard to make something that helps them or they enjoy.”
“The same is true for passion. Just because you're excited about it doesn't mean other people are. I felt I had to write a book about Stoicism — that was my calling. But I didn't write it in a way to please myself. I sat down and thought long and hard about how to best translate something I was passionate about into something that would benefit other people.”
Killing your ego and abandoning the self-centered drive to create for me, doesn’t mean selling out. Far from it. As Jeff Goins explains in Real Artists Don't Starve, “You can make money making art, and you don’t have to sell out to do it.”
The real issue—as Goins, Holiday, and countless artists have insisted throughout time—is to fight ego with the relentless question, “To whom am I adding value?”
3. Kill your timeline
Relieving ourselves of ego’s burden doesn’t mean that creative work isn’t a deeply fulfilling, satisfying, and rewarding endeavor. Certainly, it is.
Just not in the manner or on the timeline we normally expect.
“The creative process,” Holiday noted, “is all sacrifice. If the creative process is only fun, I suspect you’re not pushing yourself or pushing deep into material that challenges you.”
“It’s funny one of the knocks I have gotten has been for popularizing Stoicism, but people don’t understand that the decision to write about and talk about this thing that I love and that fascinates me was not without sacrifice,” he said.
“I can tell you, no one in New York publishing was particularly excited about a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. A close friend predicted The Obstacle is the Way would sell 5,000 copies and be a huge mistake. But it was the book I wanted to write. Scratch that, I had to write it — which is really the only reason to tackle any creative project. Because you can’t not,” he said.
Even more vital than sacrifice, however, is another mortal thread. One that takes us right back to where we began:
“There’s a Napoleon line I learned from Robert Greene, ‘Space I can recover; time. never.’ Of course, Seneca would say that it’s not that we don’t have a lot of time, it’s that we waste it,” Holiday said. “Creators spend far too muchtime talking about what they will do and actually doing little of it. You could die tomorrow, man, are you going to be glad to put off working on your masterpiece for a day?”
To kill your timeline isn’t about throwing out your schedule. Instead, it means adopting a new orientation towards time itself, one that lives beneath the reality that time is limited … so don’t waste it talking about work. Get to work.
Death, creativity, and selling
The greatest obstacle to making work that last does not lie outside us. It does not depend on getting the right lucky breaks, cultivating the right relationships, or sidestepping the right pitfalls.
All of that matters, but the greatest obstacle lies within. Namely, our excuses, our egos, and our timelines.
At the risk of closing on a cliché, perhaps Steve Jobs — another man influenced by Stoicismand the desire to make something that outlasts life — put it best:
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose,” he said. “You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
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