Fight Your Inner Lizard!

March 20, 2019

Today try and punch a hole in whatever barrier is separating you from the 'glowing heart things'. Fight your inner lizard brain. It's the voice screaming "Danger Will Robinson!!" It may be hurting you more than helping you. The lizard brain cares what everyone else thinks, because status in the tribe is essential to its survival. Look around! Appreciate the beautiful realities of the world, of nature, of people, and of yourself! It's there - all around you - even in the chaos.

Steven Pressfield, author of "Do the Work" said, "Resistance is an active, intelligent, protean, malign, force — tireless, relentless and inextinguishable — whose sole object is to stop us from becoming our best selves and from achieving our higher goals.”

Seth Godin said, "“At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.” Art is not a gene or a specific talent. Art is an attitude, culturally driven and available to anyone who chooses to adopt it. Art isn’t something sold in a gallery or performed on a stage. Art is the unique work of a human being, work that touches another. If you’ve announced that you have no talent (in anything!), then you’re hiding.

More Godin quotes to inspire and help you start punching through! (I'm preaching to the choir here!)

~ "Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.”

~ "It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human."

~ “If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.”

~ “Soon is not as good as now.”

~ “If failure is not an option, then neither is success.”

~ “I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance.”

~ "The lizard brain is the reason you're afraid, the reason you don't do all the art you can, the reason you don't ship when you can. The lizard brain is the source of the resistance.”

~ “Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (painting, writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.”

Go! Make something happen!