I know you have thought about the “fear of failure / fear of success” syndrome.  I worked with someone this week who framed her problem as “resistance to failure.”  She doesn’t have enough clients to feel successful, she said. She needs more clients—to bring in more money—so she can pay the rent on her office—and justify doing this work at all.  She was clenching up to get rid of her fear of success.  She was in an anxious panic.

Trying to create success by struggling with resistance to failure because of being afraid of success… it sounds like such hard work!  It is even hard to keep the meanings and connections in that sentence all together in my head.

I wondered if she might have the issue turned around.  My thought is always this: doing our work, or whatever we do in any given moment, because it makes US feel good and creative and expansive… this feels so much easier, better, more fun, more generative of what is really important.

It reminds me of the now famous poem “Warning,” written by a young writer in 1961, when she was 29,  about wearing purple when she gets old.  You have probably seen this poem often.  This is the first part of it:

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

Here is a recent video of author Jenny Joseph at 80 years old, reading that poem.  http://www.laterbloomer.com/jenny-joseph

I know you are familiar with all those marketing programs whose intense emails keep  buzzing into our inboxes every day, insisting that we have to be making “six figures” to feel successful.  Having plenty of money is definitely appealing.  But as I read those emails—and I too can feel myself getting drawn into them sometimes— something always feels missing in their definition of success.

What is missing?  Here are some thoughts about “why we make stuff” from John Green, another prolific young author who wrote the book The Fault in Our Stars, now in movie theaters.  It  explores the big questions of life, love, and death, through two teens with cancer who fall in love.  I haven’t read/seen it yet, but the book awaits me on my Kindle.

He says a lot of young people write him to ask how to be a successful author.  He has some good thoughts about how and why to be creative. Maybe they can help us think about how to do what we do.

Every single day, I get emails from aspiring writers asking my advice about how to become a writer, and here is the only advice I can give:

Don’t make stuff because you want to make money — it will never make you enough money.

And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous — because you will never feel famous enough.

Make gifts for people — and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts.

Maybe they will notice how hard you worked, and maybe they won’t — and if they don’t notice, I know it’s frustrating. But, ultimately, that doesn’t change anything — because your responsibility is not to the people you’re making the gift for, but to the gift itself.

~John Green
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/14/john-green-advice-on-making/

What ultimately motivates us is love, and the desire to create something for people we care about, and the effect it will have as it ripples out from us to touch everything that we care about.

The true intent, behind anything we put our hearts into, is to give a gift.