The Power of Creativity \(Book 1\): Learning How to Build Lasting Habits, Face Your Fears and Change Your Life pdfdrive com

Creative Takeaways
Start a side project today and give yourself permission to fail.
Is your main gig turning your hair grey? Take out an old idea, dust it
off and play with it a while.

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8
GO TO WAR AGAINST YOUR FEARS
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of
failure.”
– Paulo Coelho
I
T
WASN
’
T
SUPPOSED
to be like this.
When  you  aspired  to  become  an  artist,  you  imagined  publishing  work  that
gets better with age and your peers telling each other, “Now there’s talent!”
Instead, when you try to create, you feel paralysed.
You don’t know if your big idea will survive, and every moment you spend
breathing life into it is a struggle.
What  you  eventually  create  takes  longer  than  you  planned,  and  it  fills  you
with disappointment.
Here’s what happened to me:
When I started writing in public for the first time, I worried how people close
to me would react.
What would my friends say if I mined our confidence for a story?
What would my mother think if I wrote about sex?
Will people think I’m odd if I describe how I get up at dawn to write and that
I sometimes prefer being alone in a small room with a big idea to the company

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of others?
I felt like an imposter.
I  thought,  “Who  are  you  to  call  yourself  a  writer?  Get  out  of  here  before  I
call the police!”
My fears held me back from being honest on the blank page because I was
worried about what other people would think.
These  selfish  fears  held  me  back  from  my  best  mistakes,  from  unexpected
opportunities and from becoming a better writer.
I  should  have  written  about  the  party  where  I  drank  too  much  and
embarrassed myself, the time I got fired and what happened next.
I should have shown my warts because that’s the job. I should have known I
was facing one of the common fears everyone with a big idea faces.