There’s a good chance that your life’s work is holding you back
Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.
From an early age you’ve been indoctrinated into a society that values things above people.
We are what we own, or so you’ve been told.
They all told you that you wanted the two-car garage. They told you to fill one side with stuff you couldn’t fit inside your house. Indeed, one quarter of all Americans have a two-car garage in this condition.
The stuff just sits there. You walk by it, and wish that it would disappear. Secretly you wish someone would burn your two-car garage down, so you won’t have to make the decision to get rid of that clutter.
We find so many ways to keep us from reaching our potential. Stuff is just one of those ways. We don’t want to deal with the harsh reality of our lives, the fact that we haven’t really done anything important.
So we refocuse all of our attention on the endless burden of resorting our stamp collection.
A friend of mine, the brooklyn hip-hop artist D.O.V. of Verbal Graffiti, repeatedly loses his life work every couple of years. In 2003 his house burned down. In 2009 his laptop was stolen from his living room without a trace, containing years of un-backed-up recordings.
The loss is always devastating to him. He tells himself that this is the end of his career and he’ll never make another beat again.
But this wasn’t the case, there was no devastating repercussions. Six months after the loss of his computer he had a new album on the streets.
The beats weren’t on his computer, they were in him. By clearing away all the years of junk on his computer–all of the beats that never had any potential, but he continued to mess with,–he was able to free himself to create a new album.
A clean slate can be a powerful drive to create.
What if you were able to harness this ability for a lifetime?
–
D.O.V. is DJing a dance party in Bushwick Brooklyn on Saturday (tomorrow, Jan 23. 2010 10pm-4am) night. If any readers are in Brooklyn, the details are here. I’ll be there and I’d love to meet you.
