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Melissa Dinwiddie | Create the Impossible™ | Innovation Keynote Speaker & Consultant

Empower your team to innovate on demand. Melissa Dinwiddie helps tech leaders Create the Impossible™ through playful, interactive workshops and keynotes. Unlock breakthrough creativity today.

Confessions of a Technophobic Pseudo-Techie

Are you a technophobe? Do the letters HTML make you cringe and want to run screaming in the other direction?

If so, I sympathize wholeheartedly. I’m a member of the technophobe tribe myself. Or if not technophobic, at least shall we say that Geek is not my native tongue. Not by a long shot.

Oh, I’ve learned to use a lot of technologies that started off feeling completely unattainable, but it was always out of necessity, and there was much hair-pulling and gnashing of teeth involved.

False belief: you’re either born understanding technology, or you’re doomed to never understand it

I don’t know about you, but I find myself defaulting to the irrational belief that if I don’t automatically understand all of this technological stuff, or if I didn’t get in “on the ground floor” when everybody was a newbie, it is surely out of my reach forever. It feels like I’ve lost the race and might as well just give up.

But then years ago I had an “aha” light bulb moment.

I was about to go through a divorce, and it was quite obvious that my existing business model (in which everything I created was completely by hand — you know, like with pens and brushes and ink and paper and paint and stuff) was not going to pay my bills. It was clear I needed a new set of marketable skills, and since I was already an artist and designer, the obvious direction was computer graphics. But of course I didn’t know any of the tools: Photoshop, Illustrator, web design, they all seemed impossibly out of reach.

I will confess that there was a moment of utter defeated terror. I was that unconfident about my ability to function in this brave new world of technology.

Only then did it suddenly occur to me (because it had to) that the skills that felt so out of my reach were actually things I could learn.

I mean, duh, right? But seriously, at the time this was a huge revelation!

Yes, Virginia, you can learn this stuff!

I immediately signed up for a metric ton of classes through UC Berkeley Extension. (Yes, I know classes don’t actually have physical weight, but my brain was so overloaded with information it felt like they did.) The specter of hunger or homelessness is a big motivator, and I dove into this computer graphics thing with a vengeance. Some of it was easier than I expected (InDesign made complete sense to me and came very easily, so did compositing in Photoshop), some of it the stuff of nightmares (beginning web design almost killed me, and color correction in Photoshop did not sync with my neurons in the slightest). But when it was hard, I just kept plowing through.

Over the years I learned what I needed to know in order to get the job done, and I have to say it has been hugely empowering to be able to do stuff on my own that I’d previously had to rely on others to do for me. Among other things, I learned to:

  • create my own website
  • scan my artwork myself and do all the fiddling in Photoshop to prepare it for printing
  • print my artwork in house, rather than having to outsource it
  • create my own WordPress blog, and style it in Thesis (and now working on Headway [yes, that’s an affiliate link — watch for a review after I’ve had more time to play with it, but so far I’m pretty damned impressed])

Once I had a bit of a foundation, adding to it was still challenging, but less painful than the initial climb up the learning curve. As I needed to do more things (and of course when the inevitable upgrade could be put off no longer — argh!), I’d steel myself for another learning curve and start trudging up the hill.

Yes, frequently with hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing, but little by little I’d make the ascent.

The unexpected benefit of being a non-techie

Now I realize that I’ve accumulated a valuable set of skills, not only for making my stuff, but also for sharing what I’ve learned with others! In fact, being a bit of a technophobe by nature actually gives me a distinct advantage in this regard: I know what it’s like to feel intimidated by technology, I know what it’s like to get utterly unhelpful “help” from corners that don’t know how to break things down for someone like me! And because I’m a good teacher — and I speak plain English, not Geek — this is an additional skill I can draw on to share what I know in a way that will ease the path for others.

Coolness!

And you know what’s especially cool? Because this technology stuff isn’t utterly opaque to me anymore, when I face a new learning curve the challenge can actually be (gasp!) kind of fun!

Who’da thunk it?

How this fits in with Living A Creative Life

An important part of living the life I really, really want is connecting with people to help them live the lives they really, really want. That may include putting your special thing out in the world — and online — where you can share its unique wonderfulness. For many creatives, artists and solopreneurs, a website or blog is part of the vision, but the steps to creating your own website feel way too daunting. And getting a professionally designed site can be crazy expensive! Plus when you want to make changes to it you’ve got to shell out more money to have someone else do it for you.

That’s where I can come in.

I’m using the lessons in the Empire Building Kit [affiliate link], the $100 Business Forum, Marketing School and Dave Navarro’s Launch Coach workshops [affiliate link] to brainstorm exactly what I will offer, and Question the Rules [affiliate link] for ideas and inspiration. It won’t be “full-scale, totally customized from-the-ground-up web design,” but it will include a range of services, and it will give clients a website that they can easily maintain and edit themselves, without knowing a lick of code.

I know it will include a DIY version, for people like me, who want to learn to do stuff themselves, as well as an “I do it all for you” version, and probably a premium “I create your site, write your copy and design your header” version. I know I will offer a video tutorial and probably an e-workbook. And I know that the first small group of customers will get it for a ridiculously low price.

How low? Like $13 for the first person who signs up for the most basic “I do it for you” version.

Yeah, you read that right — a fully-functional multi-page WordPress website + blog that you can edit yourself for thirteen dollars! And $26 for the 2nd sign-upper, $39 for the 3rd, etc. The first few may even get a free telephone consultation as part of the deal. The exact details are still in process. I’ll keep you posted.

So my first thing is coming together, little by little.

Watch this space!

—

If you, or somebody you know, is interested in being a guinea pig in my super-inexpensive insta-website charter group, sign up below and you’ll be notified before I launch, so you’ll get first crack at the crazy-inexpensivest pricing.

(Yes, I know “inexpensivest” is not a word. It just came out of my fingers as I was typing and I liked it, so it stayed. It’s now a word. So there.)

PS – I include mentions of affiliate links, where applicable, because it’s important to me to be transparent on this blog. I only sign up as an affiliate for products that I can recommend with a confidence. Are all of the products I recommend 100% phenomenal with nothing to complain about? No. They wouldn’t all necessarily get an A+ (though some would). But they are all good products that I have gotten a lot of value out of. I always recommend reading reviews — mine (as I post them!) and others — before you buy, and don’t buy anything unless it sounds like a good fit for you. If you do buy something through one of my links, I’ll make some money, and I’ll be eternally grateful to you. And if you don’t buy through one of my links, I’ll never know, so don’t lose sleep over it.

Happiness vs. Greatness (and 6 reasons why you might want to choose the former)

I don’t know that there was ever a time I didn’t want, desperately, to be great at something. I’ve always been a woman of many passions, and there are many things I do well, but that never felt like enough.

I wanted to be a genius.

I wanted to be off-the-charts amazing.

I wanted to be the best.

Face it, I wanted to be like Mozart. But instead I always felt like Salieri in the play and film Amadeus.

I called it my “Mozart Complex.”

Why did it feel so important to be a genius? I’m still not entirely sure, but underneath it all I guess I thought it would make me happy.

The problem, of course, is that there are some flaws in this thinking. Let’s take a look at a few:

1. Genius/greatness does not necessarily lead to happiness

For starters, Mozart died young and impoverished, buried in a pauper’s grave. Although there’s no way to know for sure, I don’t get the feeling that he was very happy at the time he died.

And of course history shows us a whole bevy of other “greats” who led pretty miserable lives, drank themselves to death, committed suicide, etc.

Then there are the amazing savants who can do things like calculate multiple sums to five decimal places in their heads (ie, genius), but can’t carry on a conversation with another human being. That never seemed like a desirable way to be.

That’s not to say that greatness causes misery — there are plenty of examples of people who achieved greatness at one thing or another, and also lived happy lives. (See, for example, the life story of the sculptor Alexander Calder, who achieved phenomenal success with his art and lived a long, happy life.)

But it isn’t greatness in and of itself that leads to happiness.

2. Who’s “the best” is frequently hard to determine

How do you even tell if someone is “the best” at something? Unless you’re an Olympic runner, or your thing is something truly quantifiable, how do you know if you’re the best at it?

Even if you win an Olympic gold medal, say, or a chess match, there’s always the possibility that someone else who didn’t compete that day might have beat you had they been there. And there’s no guarantee you’re going to win next time!

3. Who’s “the best” is often highly subjective anyway

If your thing is something creative, determining a “best” is pretty much impossible.

Take opera singers, for example: just because Pavarotti (or whoever) rocks your world, doesn’t mean he’ll make even the slightest impact on mine.

Take painters: Picasso is lauded the world over, but there are plenty of other artists that I personally like better!

Take writers: I think Jasper Fforde is the absolute bees knees of humorous novelists and I worship at his altar, but I have friends who couldn’t get through one of his books if you paid them.

4. If your happiness depends on being “the best,” what happens when you fall?

Let’s pretend you’re that imaginary Olympic gold medalist. What happens when, the next time there’s a race, you don’t win the gold? If your happiness is dependent on being “the best,” that’s really going to suck for you. You’re pretty much going to be doomed to eventual unhappiness, because the reality is you’re not going to keep winning gold forever.

5. Genius/greatness is externally determined

The thing is, people whom the world declares as “great” don’t always see themselves that way. This hit home for me personally when I was eating lunch with a calligraphy hero of mine, John Stevens. The man is amazing. It’s like he emerged from the womb with a pen in his hand. Genius, truly. I wish I had a fraction of his skill!

And yet, he reminded me that there may be people who see me that way.

Huh.

John Stevens probably doesn’t consider himself a genius, or great. He just does his thing, and works very hard at it. He may have no idea that others have bestowed these titles on him, so they really have no bearing on his feelings about his work.

And think about this: if your happiness is dependent on being labeled as great, and if you wait for some external authority to bestow that label upon you, you’re giving power over your happiness to someone outside of yourself.

Never a good idea.

6. Genius/greatness is a moving target at best

If greatness is your aim, it’s likely that the better you get at your thing, the better you’ll want to get. As soon as you reach one level, your eyes are already set on the level beyond that.

I’ve experienced this with every creative pursuit I’ve taken on. The better I got at calligraphy, dance, singing, etc, the better able I was at seeing where my work fell short of the Platonic ideal I was aiming for.

Greatness is, then, forever out of reach, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

So if greatness isn’t the key to happiness, what then?

I’d be lying if I told you I had no desire for greatness anymore. I still want to get really good at the things I love doing. But the key to (mostly) losing my Mozart Complex has been to figure out what really brings me happiness, and chase after that.

First off, I’ve figured out that the only thing I’ll ever truly be “the best” at is being me. So I might as well be the most fully-expressed me that I can. For me that means following several Blisses, not just one.

I realized that focusing singlemindedly on one thing has never made me happy, so I’ve learned to embrace my multi-passionate personality. I’ve learned that I need to follow what’s calling to me the loudest right now. I’ve learned, also, that the pursuit of mastery makes me happier than the actual achievement of it.

Yes, this means I’ll probably never achieve “the best” status in any of my passions, but I’ve (pretty much) come to terms with that.

Ultimately, I’ve decided that I’d rather be happy than great.

So what do YOU think? Do you think you have to choose between happiness and greatness, and if so, which would you choose?

xo, Melissa <3
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

Don’t just follow your bliss, do it and own it!

So here’s a funny thing: years ago, before I was a Renaissance Woman Multi-Passionate Creative Entrepreneur, before I even knew there was such a thing, back when I was lost and casting about desperately for something to be when I grew up, I decided to be a writer.

The only problem was I didn’t spend much time actually writing.

I thought a lot about writing. I read a lot about writing. But I didn’t actually write much.

Except in my journal (where I actually wrote a ton), and that didn’t “count.”

I was stuck in a box that said that writers either write fiction (my goal at the time) or magazine or newspaper articles. Personal essays, or sales copy, or blog posts? The first two just weren’t on my radar, and the last didn’t exist yet!

So I tried, half-heartedly to write fiction, but couldn’t seem to come up with any worthy ideas. And because I was young and impatient, it didn’t occur to me that writing might be a skill that could be developed over time.

As a result, I felt like an untalented loser who would never amount to anything.

Meh.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I started putting my energies elsewhere, “procrastinating” by doing art projects, in fact. Apparently, I wasn’t meant to be a writer (I thought); clearly I was supposed to be an artist. A calligrapher, in fact, which seemed especially fitting: I started out wanting to write beautifully, and instead learned how to do beautiful writing. Or something like that.

Fifteen years later, it’s all come full circle. I’ve been writing for my businesses for the past decade and a half, I’ve penned articles here and there, and I never stopped writing in my journal (which does “count,” of course).

And now, thanks to my blogs, I write (and publish!) on an almost daily basis. Plus I actually make money as a writer from my copywriting business.

Go figure.

The lesson here? (Because of course there is one!) Don’t let anyone, especially yourself, put you in a box or tell you what you can or cannot do or be!

If you write, you’re a writer, by golly.

If you make art, you’re an artist.

If you make music, you’re a musician.

If you do a whole bunch of stuff (like me), maybe you’re a Multi-Passionate Creative Artrepreneur! Or whatever.

You get to figure out your own title. I don’t care if you make money from it or not (though making money is always nice). You get to own it, and refine it over time, and polish up your multi-faceted self identity until it sparkles and shines!

Of course there’s one catch: you can’t just think about it, you’ve got to actually do the thing in order to call yourself a thing-doer.

It doesn’t matter if you do it in public or in private. It doesn’t matter if nobody ever sees the fruits of your labors. You still get to own it. You still get to call yourself whatever title you want.

So don’t just think about the thing you want to do or be (and I know you want it!) Get out there (or in there) and do it!

You owe it to yourself.

Me, I’m going to go write another blog post.

Fear, trust and baby steps (the perfect headstand not required)

Last Tuesday Giselle made me promise to come to her Jivamukti yoga class this week. With the new month comes a new focus-of-the-month (love that about Jivamukti!) and she knew this month’s focus would be good for me.

She didn’t spill the beans about what the focus would be, but it wasn’t a big surprise when I sat in virasana today (propped on block and blanket, since my knees really don’t like this posture), eyes closed, and listened to her opening talk.

Which was all about fear.

Ah, yes, now I understand why she wanted me to be there.

Fear of falling (and busting my sorry ass)

Last week I confessed after class to my great fear of inversions in the middle of the room, away from the safety of the wall. I burst into tears when I almost fell out of a headstand last week.

Guess what we’ll be focusing on this month? That’s right: inversions. Forearm balance, handstand, headstand. Any posture that brings up fear.

Giselle demonstrated how easy it is to fall out of a forearm balance and land on your feet. How easy it is to fall and not get hurt.

And still, I played chicken.

Oh, I kicked my legs up, I did the “assignments,” but even though I know I can do forearm balance and handstand against a wall, even though I’ve actually achieved balance for moments at a time without touching the wall (just moments, but still!), I couldn’t quite get myself to kick up hard enough to shoot for that same balance in the middle of the room.

I knew I was chickening out, and I still chickened out.

So what’s going on here?

Lack of trust

Well, there’s the excuse that I’ve got an old shoulder injury that’s acting up (which is true), and I don’t want to aggravate it (also true). But that’s just an excuse.

The reality is that yes, I’m afraid. I’m afraid I’ll really hurt myself.

Because underneath it all, I don’t quite trust myself.

I don’t trust that I’ll get all the way up and not fall backwards, and (even more important) I don’t trust that I’ll be able to pull off that falling-out-in-a-safe-way trick.

Taking myself where I am

I could have beat myself up about my chicken-ness, but instead I chose just to notice what was going on inside and let it be.

I know that the way to conquer my fear of inversions is to do them. I know that the way to learn to trust myself that I’ll be able to fall out in a safe way is to try falling out. I know this.

And I also know that right now, I’m not quite ready.

And you know what? That’s actually okay.

So I’ll coddle myself for awhile. And maybe I’ll ask Giselle to spot me, or maybe I’ll “cheat” and keep using the wall until I build up a bit more confidence. And maybe by the end of this month I’ll make some progress.

Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll do inversions against the wall for the rest of my life. (And would that be such a bad thing?)

The truth is, although I think being able to do handstands and forearm balance in the middle of the room would be smokin’ cool, it honestly doesn’t matter to me whether I achieve that or not.

What I do care about, though, is growth, and busting past limits. Although I’d love to be Smokin’ Cool Yoga Girl, yoga is just a petri dish for change in my larger world.

I want to push past my limits in yoga, because I have a very strong suspicion that it will help me push past my limits in the rest of my life.

My commitment: baby steps

So my goal is not to achieve a perfectly balanced handstand or forearm balance away from the wall this month. I don’t actually care about that.

But I do care about making progress. I do care about moving forward and learning to trust myself. I do care about proving to myself that I can do things that feel hard. So my goal is to try to go just a bit further than I’ve gone in the past.

Maybe that means kicking all the way up into a handstand in the middle of the room, just so I can try falling out of it. Or maybe that means doing a handstand at the wall (even if Giselle chastises me). Just one tiny bit beyond my current comfort zone is all it takes to make forward progress.

Baby steps.

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On Headstands and Broken Hearts

Because ever since I read Susan Jeffers‘ book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, I’ve used that term as a mantra, the following:

—

In Giselle’s jivamukti yoga class this morning: time for headstands. I look around the room, and notice that, of those doing headstands, nobody is using the wall.

Okay. I’ve gone up into headstand many times without the wall, I know I can do it, but… it still scares me every time.

Committed to conquering this irrational terror, I set myself up, and slowly raise my legs, watching my reddening face in the mirror.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

I could tell I wasn’t entirely straight, wasn’t balanced on my center, since it still required too much effort, but fear of toppling over backwards kept me from straightening any further, even though I’ve done it before. I stayed up for 11 breaths or so — in fear the whole time — then slowly lowered my legs and rested in child’s pose.

While I’m dealing with this fear of balancing upside down, this is my M.O: go up, come down, go up again. So pretty soon up again I went.

But this time I tried something new: going up one leg at a time. I wobbled slightly off balance, and for a split-second it felt like I was going to crash backwards onto the floor.

This time the fear brought me back down immediately, along with a flood of tears.

Well, actually, because I didn’t want to upset anyone (since people frequently get confused and think tears are the hurt, instead of the healing from the hurt, and then I feel like I have to take care of them when what I want to do is take care of me), it was more a quiet stream than a flood.

But it felt good to cry. To acknowledge my fear and let the feelings out.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

And there were more feelings under the surface than just the fear of falling out of a headstand. I’d woken up this morning to a dream that upset me, a dream in which someone who betrayed me in real life was betraying me again, but in a somewhat different, only-making-sense-in-dreams way that I couldn’t quite articulate upon awakening.

It left me feeling hollow and out of sorts, like the hurt was fresh again, like I’d just had the rug pulled out from under me.

So here I was in yoga, now in savasana at the end of class, my mind unable to still itself.

I thought about how open-hearted I’d been with the person who hurt me, and remembered how during that relationship, backbends — heart-opening postures — suddenly became so much more open and available to me. And I realized how afraid I am to go there again, to open my heart only to have it broken into a zillion jagged pieces.

And I also realized that no matter how afraid I am, I want to open my heart again, and I will not let the fear stop me. It may take time, and that’s okay, but I know eventually I’m going to march back into the lion’s den, because I can’t imagine living any other way.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

And I thought about the things I’m trying to achieve in my life, the life I want to create, the businesses I want to grow, and how terrified I am that I will never achieve them, create them, grow them, that I’ll always be just a wannabe. But I’m not going to let that fear stop me either.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

So I’ll keep trying my headstands. I may use the wall as a crutch for the rest of my life, may still be in terror going upside down as an old retiree, but I’ll bet you that I’ll get better at it, and more confident, little by little.

And I’ll keep going after the open-hearted relationships I want in my life. My heart may have lots of stitching and scars, but as my friend Cosy Sheridan sings in Anthymn, “a heart without some stitching is hard to find.”

And I’ll keep trudging after the life I really, really want, despite feeling lost sometimes, and hopeless sometimes, and terrified much of the time.

I’m just going to keep feeling that damn fear and doing it anyway.

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