In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?*
Oliver Burkeman

It’s not that your personality itself becomes stable but rather that your routine environments and social roles lock you into habitual patterns.**
Ben Hardy

To stop short of me being me and you being you would be irresponsible.
Though the likelihood is that this is what will happen to some degree.

In a West African culture, a new born baby’s spirit is asked by elders:

Why have you come? What is the gift you have come to bring?^

It is imperative that that we bring into the world that which only we can,
Towards this we might take Ben Hardy’s implied advice
and shake up our environments:
Reading something different,
Meeting new people,
Attending different events,
Beginning something new.

*From Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**From Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
^From Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts’ The Hero’s Journey.

Never mind searching for who you are. Search for the person you aspire to be.*
Richard Brault

‘Missing man’ joins search party looking for himself.**
BBC News

You may be waiting a long time to be inspired.
On the other hand, you can aspire to something right now and go to:

It’s true that how we spend our days is how we end up spending our lives. We can deliberately choose to spend them wisely.^

The missing man hadn’t realised the search party he had joined was looking for him,
Until they began calling his name.
Then he replied: “I am here.”

Aspire to follow your heart:

Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.^^

*Quoted in Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
**Headline quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: My year in 101 quotes;
^From Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: Always, Sometimes, Never;
^^Carlos Castaneda.

As soon as we mechanize, measure and perfect something, it becomes far less interesting. … As we get better at industrialism, the variability of imperfection becomes even more fascinating. Imperfect and proud of it.*
Seth Godin

If I wait whilst seeking perfection, I could be waiting a long time,
But if I begin, in some imperfect way,
There opens the possibility of improvement –
And for quirkiness.
Something sadly lacking in our standardised world.

*From Seth Godin’s blog: Craft and imperfection.

Knowledge of the self is as important as knowledge of the external world.*
Ken Robinson

*From Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds.

By not making a clear decision for yourself beforehand, you’ve deferred the decision-making process to some future moment when you’re forced to decide.*
Ben Hardy

*From Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent.

The call to the creative life is a call to dignity, to a life of vulnerability and adventure and the call to a life that exquisite excitement and indeed ecstasy will often visit.*
John O’Donohue

Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens the wits of another.**

When it comes to unleashing creativity, whether art or artisanship, location is everything.

Testing and discovering what it is we really want to bring into the world is a place:

Discovering the right medium is often a tidal movement in the creative life of an individual. … Creativity can be inhibited by the wrong medium.^

When things become clearer, we may see possibilities where we are,
Or we may need to move:

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we begin from.^^

Finding the right people to sharpen our creativity is another place,
And who knows?
We might find another place,
Of creating something together that will outlast us:

many of us have a shot at creating experiences and projects whose effects can continue long after we are gone*^.

Here’s somewhere to begin.
identify three energising “locations” by keeping track of what you’re doing when you feel great energy in your body.
Add the why, who and when to your notes.

Do this for a few weeks and then aggregate the contents of your notes to identify larger areas of activity.
Name these and then identify the three that have the most energy for you.

Abstract activities from these to explore and play with.

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Proverbs 27:17;
^From Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds;
^^T. S. Eliot, quoted in Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
*^Victoria Labalme, from gapingvoid’s blog: Risk Forward: Legacy, Satisfaction and Greatness.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are.*
Steven Covey

we see the world, not as it is, but through a veil of perceptions**
Ken Robinson

These two quotes lined up to sound a serious caution.

Add another and the warning deepens:

We thinks we tell stories, but often stories tell us.^

Out from his writing experiences Robert McKee clarifies:

We realise our toughest task in life is self-analysis as we try to fathom our humanity and bring peace to the wars within.^^

John O’Donohue holds out hope for those who enter McKee’s space of self-reflection within a world we only see through our personal paradigms:

The imagination has a deep sense of irony. It is wide awake to the limitation of its own suggestions and showings.*^

It is hard work, to be sure,
For the business of keeping as open as we are able for as long as we can takes a lot of energy –
Literally.
Our brains are burning calories and it is natural to try and conserve energy,
So we find shortcuts and build our worldviews.
Yet, whilst we may never break free from these stories telling us,
We can still alter them at a deeper level.

The writer who is also an artist Austin Kleon offers some direction when he writes:

The diary is the heart of my practice, the place where most of my work is made or at least first conceived.^*

A journal is a great place to be more open, curious, inquiring and imaginative,
But to make sure that this becomes more than your little worlds in ink and paper,
Invite along some people you don’t know to share from their worlds.

Here are mine from this morning,
Including some who have become “journaling friends”:
Kassia St Clair, Seth Godin, Bessel van der Kolk, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Rob Walker, Margareta Magnusson, as well as those I’ve quoted.

*Quoted in Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
**From Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds;
^Rebecca Solnit, quote in Bernadette Jiwa’s What Great Storytellers Know;
^^From Robert McKee‘s newsletter: The Thrill of a Thriller;
*^From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^*From Austin Kleon’s blog: A walkthrough of my diary.

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.*
Joseph Campbell

We’re always connected,
To work, to the world, to endless streams of stories.

Where is the place or time to disconnect
so that we might connect with ourselves
in silence and solitude?

A place and a time is best of all,
but where this is difficult, one or the other is more than enough.
If we find this too difficult or unpleasant a thought we must ask ourselves why.

The place of purpose is an infinite thing,
meant to be enjoined playfully,
Towards a revivification of imagination,
A sensorium of Soul through the fullness of our days:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.**

It is something urgent,
Whether we have our place and time,
Or simply a place or a time.

Reconnecting with our purpose –
Or passion or calling or vocation or element or bliss –
There are many names:

Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.^

*Quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: The bliss station;
**William Butler Yeats, quoted in Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts’ The Hero’s Journey;
^Joseph Campbell, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: The bliss station.

Noticing is about letting yourself out into the world,
Rather than siphoning the world into you
In order to transmute it into words.
Verlyn Klinkenborg

Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.**
Rachel Carsons

Some want the world,
Or some larger piece of it.
Better for the world to have us entirely,
That a larger world form inside us,
A world we might share:

As Rilke says, ‘Hier su sein ist so viel – To be here is immense.’ Nowhere does the silence of the infinite lean so intensely as around the arm of a newly born infant. Once we arrive, we enter into the inheritance of everything that has preceded us; we become heirs to the world.^

*From Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
**Rachel Carsons, quoted in Maria Popova’s Figuring;
^From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus.

Trauma is at the core of who are are as people. If we transform it, we can become unstoppable in what we’re trying to accomplish. If we don’t transform our trauma, then our lives become its by-produce.*
Ben Hardy

Trauma is our common experience.

Turn towards it and there is the possibility of transformation,
Turn away and it will likely ever haunt us.

Turn towards and we begin to free our imaginations:

We use imagination not to escape from reality but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between and an apprehension of the real.**

We collect our treasures held in common with others.
Our commonplaces, though, promise uniqueness:

Each one is unique to its creator’s particular interest but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by their compiler’s responses.^

From such common things, placed together
In new ways, emerges a uniqueness:

I don’t think of it as art – I just make things I like bigger, assuming that if I like them some other people might too. Some do, some don’t, and that’s alright too.^^

When we find each other, as I think we must,
then we create a communitas of possibility for others.
We all need help:

“Scenius”: a whole scene of people who are supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, speaking ideas, and contributing ideas.*^

We need what only you can bring.
You are a once in a lifetime possibility:

There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.^*

*From Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
**From Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good;
^From Wikipedia: A Commonplace Book;
Corita Kent, from Austin Kleon’s blog: Corita Day;
*^Brian Eno; From Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work;
^*Martha Graham, from Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds.