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Living A Creative Life with Melissa Dinwiddie
Happiness, Self-fulfillment, Creativity, Productivity, Practical Inspiration, Mentoring, Life Design for Creatives and Multi-Passionate People
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(Astonishingly, this is the first 3×5 to have tea spilled on it. It, and my iMac wireless keyboard, both survived the deluge, thank goodness, though the 3×5 gained a little… character.)
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Here’s one from the archives, which felt ripe for a revisit. Originally published on January 3, 2013, the principles here are timeless. Enjoy! -xoMelissa
Ah, 1994. That was the summer I “tried to be a writer.”
I was newly married, with lots of time on my hands, having recently acquired a “useless” academic masters degree, only to decide that the dream of going on for a PhD had lost its luster.
With my planned-out career path in a shambles, I felt utterly adrift. “What do I do now?” I wondered.
Writing seemed an obvious answer.
After all, I’d been writing my whole life — what else did one do as a Liberal Arts major in college and grad school but write? Why not turn it into a career?
Strangely, though, when I actually needed it, my gift for assembling words together seemed to have left me. [Read more…]
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I originally published this post on November 17, 2011. It still gets lots of traffic, even buried down in my blog feed, so periodically I pull it out again. While I’m away at Jazz Camp, gorging on one of my many passions, while temporarily ignoring the others, it felt like a good time to repost.
If you’ve ever struggled with having “too many” passions and interests, if you’ve ever been labeled “ADD” or a “dilettante” or a “flake,” because you’ve done so many different things (and you like it, dammit), this one is for you.
Enjoy! xoMelissa
I don’t know how old I was when I first learned the name Leonardo Da Vinci, but from that moment on I dreamed of being a Renaissance person.
I don’t remember taking steps to become a Renaissance person; I only remember the longing. And the feeling of utter impossiblity.
The younger Melissa just kept trudging forward with her life, going to school, following her nose. And feeling somehow… inadequate that she wasn’t the Renaissance person she longed to be.
You probably know where this is headed.
I was, of course, a Renaissance person all along. In my childhood, teens and 20s, the truth is I simply didn’t have the experience to know what my passions were. And that yes, I was hard-wired to have a lot of them.
Looking back, I can see the first inklings of the strength of my bliss-diverse, polypassionate disposition when I was a dance student at the Juilliard School in New York.
A few years before that, when I discovered dance, I fell instantly in love with it. For awhile I devoted myself to it almost entirely. It just seemed what I had to do. Partly, perhaps, because we live in a culture that lauds specialists rather than generalists. And largely, no doubt, because classical dance is a very demanding taskmaster, requiring hours of commitment on a daily basis, which simply doesn’t allow much time for anything else.
But one day at Juilliard, one of the modern dance teachers decided to lecture us on the need to focus on dance exclusively, if you want to succeed at it. He proudly shared that he never had any other interests, and he left no doubt that this was the right way—the only way—for a serious dancer to be.
I looked around the room and saw my classmates nodding their heads in passionate agreement.
I, on the other hand, was burning with a different kind of passion. I was outraged. Livid. The utter notion that I would have to give up, say, my interest in the Humanities (I was the only dancer in my Juilliard class who actually went consistently to the academic classes—and liked them), or drawing, or anything else for that matter, made me so angry I wanted to spit.
That should have been my first clue.
Yet although I spent the next dozen or so years pursuing a range of different interests (even my bachelors and masters degrees were both interdisciplinary majors, for goodness sake!), though it should have been obvious that I’m hard-wired to be bliss-diverse, I always had the nagging feeling that there was something wrong with me.
On the one hand, I longed to be a Renaissance person… but couldn’t identify myself as such. On the other hand, I simply couldn’t limit myself to a solitary focus… and beat myself up for it.
In my 30s, thankfully, my self-concept started to shift. I finally began to “get it” that maybe I was designed for multiple interests. It was clear I would never be happy sticking with one area of focus, and rather than fight this, I began to accept it, embrace it and work with it.
At the same time, my mom and my friends started referring to me on their own as a “Renaissance Woman.”
Having that outside perspective helped me see my (sometimes annoying) propensity to want to do seemingly everything as a positive feature. I was also entirely tickled and delighted that the great longing of my youth had, in fact, actually come true! My family and friends were proof: I was, after all, a Renaissance person!
I may not have the talent or historical staying power of a Leonardo, but that is entirely irrelevant. The fact is, I’m a Passion Pluralite. Bliss-diverse. Multi-passionate. What Barbara Sher, author of Refuse to Choose (among many other books), calls a Scanner, and Margaret Lobenstine calls The Renaissance Soul in her book of the same name.
Being bliss-diverse can be enormously rewarding, but also presents some significant challenges. How does one balance and juggle all those various passions???
For a long time I had no real strategy. I tried to do everything I was interested in all the time, which is, of course, impossible. I took on too much, and yet nothing I took on got the level of attention I wanted to devote to it.
This left me wrung out, and continually frustrated.
I remember a moment in my (ahem) late 30s (yes, I’m embarrassed to admit it took that long) when I had the revelation that maybe I could try limiting my focus to just a couple of things at a time.
That didn’t mean, I clearly acknowledged to myself, that I was dropping any of the other things forever. Just that I wasn’t going to try to do everything at once.
As it turned out, focusing on just a couple of things didn’t feel like enough to me, so I expanded it out to three. Or four… And ultimately came up with a model that has worked quite well for me ever since. What I now refer to as:
If you’ve ever cooked a full meal (Thanksgiving dinner, anyone?), you know that there are only a certain number of tasks that you can keep track of at any one time.
The typical stove has four, maybe five burners, but rarely more than that, and there’s a good reason for this. A stove with, say, 20 or 100 burners would be impossible for one person to manage. Imagine that poor cook running around like a madman!
But four or five is feasible for any one meal.
You can have soup simmering and pasta boiling on back burners, while you occasionally stir the sauteeing mushrooms and focus on the omelette on the front burners.
When the pasta’s al dente and ready to serve, you shift your focus from the mushrooms and eggs to drain that pot over the sink. Then it’s time to put the fillings in the omelette and flip it closed.
You get the picture. Of course at any given moment you can only give your full attention to one pot or saucepan, but a skilled cook can keep four burners going at once quite handily, shifting pots from front to back burners as necessary.
There may be many more dishes in this particular meal (dessert [or several!], appetizers, salad), but those ingredients stay in the fridge until the cook has some free attention and is ready to deal with them. One of the pots on the stove goes in the fridge, and the ingredients for the chocolate mousse come out for mixing up.
The urgency and frustration I felt for so long dropped away when I realized that I get to do it all, just not all at once.
Barbara Sher describes no fewer than nine different general types of Scanners in her book, Refuse to Choose, some of the sequential variety (moving from one passion to the next over time), and some of the cyclical variety (following more than one Bliss at all times).
Personally, I’m a bit of a blend of both. Like the type Sher calls the “Serial Master,” I get tremendous satisfaction from the pursuit of mastery, and tend to gravitate toward new challenges after climbing the learning curve to my satisfaction. But unlike the Serial Master I also tend to keep my passions in the rotation rather than dropping them completely to move onto something entirely new.
In that way I’m more like the type Sher calls the “Sybil,” preferring to keep a full stovetop of passions at all times, and rotating pots when it feels right. Which seems, for what it’s worth, to typically be every 3-9 months or so.
In 2011, for example, starting on February 1 that year, I made my visual art a big focus. I initiated my 15 Minutes a Day standard for playing in the Creative Sandbox, started my ArtSpark newsletter, and in that year I made over 150 finished pieces, making it n the most prolific period or art-making in my life!
In fact, at the end of 2011 I produced a book of 100 my ArtSpark artworks, which you can preview in this nifty widget (or click here to view it larger).
Where 2011 was a year of making art, 2012 and 2013 were/have been much more about writing. Sometimes I feel a little “false guilt” that I’m not making more art, but as I shared in Your Big, Bold, Creative Life Academy session this week, in the module around overcoming overwhelm and freeing up time, the sensation of guilt frequently has nothing to do with actual guilt.
Have I committed an offense against anyone by writing more and making less art? Um, that would be a no. I sent an almost-daily newsletter of my ArtSparks out for several months of 2011 and 2012, and the subscribers to the ArtSpark newsletter might have been disappointed when I put the newsletter on hiatus. But their desires to continue receiving the newsletter are not more important than my needs to take care of myself, and put my time and energy where my priorities lie.
As a bliss-diverse Creative, the most important thing is to follow your Bliss(es), not do what you’ve always done to please everyone else. That is a sure recipe for burnout!
So I do my best to practice what I preach. The ArtSpark will come back from vacation if and when the time is right. Or not.
All in good time. There’s only so much room on my stove, after all. But you can be sure I’ll keep you apprised of what I’m brewing up.
(Make sure not to miss one juicy morsel—sign up on my mailing list in the form at the upper right.)
Are you a Passion Pluralite? Do you have a multitude of interests and sometimes have a hard time juggling them? Tell me if my Stovetop model resonates for you at all, and what other models you’ve found helpful.
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Back on May 1st I started an experiment, called Finishing Blitz.
Buoyed by the phenomenal success of the Great ClutterBust, in which a whole gang of creatives banded together to tackle our individual clutter problems, I decided to apply the same structure to accomplishing another herculean task: writing my book.
Like the Great ClutterBust, Finishing Blitz, would leverage the accountability of a supportive community.
Like the Great ClutterBust, I would host work sessions where anyone could join me for a pre-determined block of time.
This time, though, instead of rallying together specifically to bust our clutter, we would rally together to work on any goal we wanted. And instead of two or three work sessions a week, I would host daily work sessions. And I would finish a “lousy first draft” of my book!
We ran for six weeks, from May 1 through June 11.
So how did it go? Let’s do a post-mortem!
Here are a few of the things I accomplished, thanks to Finishing Blitz:
You’ll notice (ahem) that I did not finish the book.
I did not even come close to finishing.
In fact, if I were to judge myself on the basis of how much of my original goal I accomplished, I’m afraid I wouldn’t get higher than a D-….
However, if I were to judge on the basis of how Finishing Blitz improved my life, I’d give it an A++++++!
As I wrote here and here, committing myself to a daily creative work session was the real gift of this past six weeks. Instead of making me feel chained and constrained, it made me feel free!
Those three hours in the morning became my Date with My Art, something I found myself looking forward to with giddy anticipation.
Amazing.
This was absolutely the biggest gift of Finishing Blitz for me: baking in a daily creative practice.
For the first few days I spent the bulk of each three-hour work session working on my book. It wasn’t always easy — I hit up against all manner of blocks — but I kept reminding myself that a block is not a block to creativity; pushing through the block is the creativity! (Click to tweet this!)
Here’s a secret that only initiates know: putting effort into something is really satisfying! Way more than avoidance, or eating bon bons on the couch in front of the TV. Even on days when I wasn’t super pleased with my writing, the fact that I was making the effort felt so great.
I was on a roll!
And then I changed course.
Yes, about two weeks in, I made the tough decision to change tack.
One of the biggest questions we creators face is where to focus our energies. So often (especially for passion pluralites!!!) we want to do everything, and we want to do it all now. It’s easy to spread ourselves too thin.
Or we find ourselves spending energy on one thing, when we’d be better off in the long run spending that energy on something else entirely.
Oh, it’s hard! Especially when you’ve made a commitment — a public commitment, no less — to work on one thing to completion!
This is where my Golden Formula comes in so handy:
Self-awareness + self-compassion = the key to everything good.
See, for a long time I’ve agonized over where to focus my writing energies: writing more guest blog posts, or writing the book, or…? With some self-awareness, I realized that, while it felt great to focus so much daily attention on my book, in the larger scheme of growing my business, my audience, and my reach, it probably didn’t make sense. A book is probably not going to grow my audience; in fact, given the current state of the publishing industry, an author needs to have an audience before launching a book!
It crystallized for me in a session with my business coach that if I’m going to dive heavily into writing, there is other writing that would get me more “return on investment” right now than my book — guest posting on blogs with larger platforms than my own, for example, which has proven to be the most reliable source of new subscribers to my insiders’ newsletter and other mailing lists.
Still, I had made a public commitment!
So I asked myself, am I considering shifting energy away from my book out of fear or self-doubt? Or is this a truly sensible decision born of my deepest wisdom?
With deep self-compassion, and a somewhat heavy heart, I made the tough decision to shift the bulk of my work session time to other writing, while still “touching the [book] project,” as Jen Louden would say, a little bit every day.
Rather than beating myself up for “failing” at my commitment, I self-compassionately acknowledged that my initial goal was there to assist me, and if another goal would assist me better, then I got to change the goal.
Meanwhile, in the middle of Finishing Blitz I went off to my Create & Incubate Retreat, and reconnected with the joy of painting. I’d fallen out of my daily painting practice, and although I was now writing every day, I was reminded (yay self-awareness!) of how much happier I am when I’m also painting regularly, even just a little bit.
So I adjusted my three-hour work session once again.
Initially I had spent close to three hours working on my book; then I switched to spending maybe fifteen to thirty minutes on the book and the rest of the time working on blog posts. Now I was putting some of that morning work session time toward painting. Sometimes I’d paint first thing; sometimes I’d write first thing.
And painting more felt great!
But writing less felt not-so great…
What I noticed was that whichever choice I made, there were costs and payoffs.
Whatever I started with, it was hard to pull myself away part-way through. And when I did successfully switch focus to something else, along with the satisfaction of touching three different goals (the book, blog posts, painting) came the frustration of not giving any one of these goals as much attention as I really wanted.
Sigh… It’s simply an existential problem. I have no answer, except for the lifelong answer of using my Golden Formula to continually tweak and adjust as I go. Which I will continue to do.
And then Finishing Blitz ended and I fell off the wagon.
Whether because I needed a break, or out of sheer rebelliousness, once I was no longer accountable to anyone to show up at 9:00am, guess what: I didn’t.
I confess I allowed circumstance (“I have so much to do!” “I’m so tired..” “I’m so busy!”) to get in the way, and allowed my beautiful, new, “fully baked-in” creative practice to slide.
But remember, the most important practice is just getting back on the wagon! And doing so with self-compassion. (Click to tweet!)
My Golden Formula came to the rescue again. Everyone stumbles. Beating yourself up doesn’t ever help, but self-awareness and self-compassion do!
Self-awareness tells me that I feel happier and my life goes better when I’m consistent about dedicating my morning hours to creating. And self-awareness also tells me that I am about 5,000 times more likely to stick with my commitment when I am accountable to someone outside of myself.
With those two information points, and the self-compassion to lovingly give myself what I need, I decided to start a pilot program — a secret society and laboratory where grads of Living A Creative Life programs rally together to support each other in achieving our goals. In addition to a private Facebook group, accountability boards, regular rally calls, and optional one-on-ones with me, members get access to my daily morning work sessions.
We use the Golden Formula to tweak and adjust our goals and the tactics we use to make them happen. And we’ll continually tweak and adjust the program to suit the needs of the members!
(Want in on something like this? Hang tight — a few months from now, after the pilot program is over, you may get your chance…)
Guess what? Today I was at my computer at 9:00am sharp!
And guess what? I’m about to fall off the wagon again in a big way, but this time intentionally: tomorrow I leave for Jazz Camp West for nine days! The only writing I’ll be doing is my daily 3×5 (though no posting and no 3x5x365 newsletter until I get home), and I won’t be painting at all — instead I’ll be making music all day long. I can’t wait!
After all, a balanced life includes periods of extreme imbalance. (Click to tweet!)
Starting July 1st, though, it’s back on the wagon.
Onward, ho!
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