When you are cock-blocked!
I find it hard to be creative when I get cock-blocked by life, whether that is a vomiting baby at 2am or a punch to the nose from teenage hooligans or a worldwide pandemic.
There is no easy answer to this juggle (or struggle) of a creative life, but the irony is that having babies has educated me on how to achieve my creative goals whilst still be an active and reliable father.
The magic answer to solve life’s cock-blocking is “baby steps.”
A child learns to walk by taking baby steps. It rolls, stretches, wriggles, crawls, hovers, surfs, waddles, walks, and then runs. It constantly bumps things, hits things, succeeds and fails but keeps taking baby steps towards the goal of being able to take actual steps and walk.
How does this help one build a creative career = momentum!
Momentum is a beautiful way of describing a snowball the size of a tennis ball rolling down a hill, and as it rolls it gains size by picking up stuff, becoming bigger and bigger, which makes it roll faster and faster down the hill. In fact, it can get so big and so fast that it is completely out of control.
A filmmaker does a similar process – idea, pitch, develop, revise, write, brainstorm, research, network, pitch, and pitch again, plan, create, produce, edit and woah – a film is birthed. And even if that film goes nowhere except an old dusty DVD case or a few hits on YouTube, what has been gained is momentum for the filmmaker’s career.
The motion of the snowball, you rolled it and now it is like a semitrailer barrelling down a highway, where nothing can stop it. This is your creative career if you just take baby steps to start that snowball.
A lot of the time things get in my way from making things happen quickly, but I can count on baby steps to get my projects off the ground and hurtling towards my goals.
Earl Nightingale says “Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might as well put that passing to the best possible use.”
What I believe from that quote is five years from now, you will be five years older, your kids will be too, society will be, everyone will be older. So, you might as well start rolling that snowball now of the things you genuinely want to make.
Dream big, colossal, massive goals and in my case film projects. I have feature film scripts that I want to make into full fledging big screen theatrical releases. If I want that I need to start now, with that little snowball, and send it down the mountain.
And what do I do once I have dreamed big?
Start today and take those baby steps, because the sooner you start something, the quicker the momentum happens.
