The Creative Life — with Jim Kroft

I walked into work yesterday seized by an urge to create — very specifically, to make a YouTube video. But sitting on my agenda were three thousand photos waiting from last week’s AI Symposium in Berlin.

And yet, something was stirring, and the longer I tried to repress it, the more I felt it trying to bubble out of me.

Now with it came a second voice. The one that wants to control. The one echoing what we’re told everywhere: be intentional. Be strategic. Find your audience.

And yet, and yet!

Sometimes, don’t you feel like the fun is being sucked out of life?

That everyone’s trying to sell you something, instruct you, or take you on another damn “transformational journey”?

And I realised that all of this internet jargon, this ranting and raving to make yourself more value was suffocating the very thing that makes me spark, that makes me want create, that drove me into the darkened dungeon and euphoric highs that not only made me a creative, but also make life worth living.

So let me ask you —

Why don’t you follow the mood where it wants to take you?

You have no idea of the vibrancy of your own spirit until it collides with life in its rawest state.

Yes I get the call to intentionality.

Yes, I get the competitive advantage it give you to know your audience, find your niche, narrow yourself down.

But with all that, you also have to find out who you are.

And if you give up the primacy of experience itself, that blade of being that thrusts you into unexpected avenues and makes you say, I’m rejecting responsibility today because the godhead is trying to speak through me, then why do anything at all?

I just want to encourage you to trust yourself, and especially your heart as it pulls you forward.

Sure, sometimes you’ll feel the buzz and you’ll hit a dead end. That’s okay too. But if you repress that kinetic energy, that pulse of life as it’s attempting to breathe through you, you’ll only ever create something over intentionalised, something lifeless, damn, something deadened.

And you are not dead. You are living. You have the flash of the firefly beating in your heart and and a whole universe to contemplate, tackle, turn over and to ask questions from.

So please, when you feel the pulse, follow where the blood takes you to the furthest edge of your capillaries.

Because here’s what I realised that day: I was caught between two worlds. The world of the head — tactical, strategic, always angling for something from the outside. And the world of the heart — that part of the spirit that wants to dissolve the walls between self and world, and create from unmediated experience.

I realised that this part of me wants to give, and give only. And I saw that what has kept me going in the creative arts for so long is that I’ve never obsessed on outcomes alone, but kept concentrating on what makes me feel alive, how I can help, and the ways I might bring something to the world that I too often feel to be missing.

What is that part of you — I know that you feel it, I know that it’s stirring in your chest, you’re only watching this because you feel that zest, that animus, that potential that is yours and yours alone.

Sometimes, all you have to do to get over the negativity, the blocks and the self-doubt, is to have the courage to get out of your own way.

So for God’s sake, take a chance today and stop putting yourself aside.

Go where the mood takes you.