Visualize the End Result

“If a man knows not which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

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— Seneca

While studying in Copenhagen during her junior term at Yale, Maya Lin lived near an area where a large cemetery, Assistens Kirkegård, was also used as a public park. Walking to and from class, she observed how death and remembrance were integrated into the daily life of the Danes, not hidden off to the side like the cemeteries she knew from her hometown in Ohio.

When she returned to Yale, she approached her architecture professor with an idea for a senior seminar to study how mortality is expressed in the structures we build for the dead. As the undergraduates immersed themselves in the study of memorial architecture, someone came across a flyer for a competition to enter the design contest for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Lin and her peers decided that was the perfect opportunity for their final project.

The Memorial

In the fall of 1980, Lin started working on her idea. She and her classmates visited Washington, D.C., during Thanksgiving break to look at the site. Standing on the lawn at Constitution Gardens, she started to visualize how the memorial would look within the landscape. She imagined cutting into the earth and polishing the names of the fallen and missing soldiers on its dark surface. And she contemplated the feelings she was trying to evoke in her work: to focus on the fallen and create a beautiful space within the landscape for the living and the dead to meet in as personal and evocative a way as possible. It was all about subtlety, not spectacle.

As she worked through the details, she would use two polished black granite walls that stretched out and descended gradually toward an apex, 10 feet below grade, where they converged at a V, acting as bookends to the war. From above, the walls would look like the earth had opened up. Visitors would descend into the memorial, passing the names of over 57,000 dead or missing veterans before returning to ground level. The names would be listed chronologically in order to capture the timeline of the war, allowing veterans and their families to revisit the time they served and find everyone they knew within a few panels, forging a deeper connection to their experience of the war.

Lin sent through her final submission in the spring of 1981, a soft pastel sketch with an essay explaining her concept in detail and how the experience would feel. There were over 1,400 submissions, including one from her professor and many other from professional architects. On the last day of class, Lin received a call from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, requesting to visit New Haven to ask her a few questions. Three officers arrived to meet Lin in her dorm room and delivered the news—she had won.

Standing her ground

After graduation, Lin moved to D.C. to oversee construction. By this point, word was out, and outrage was spreading over her and her design. How could a 21-year-old Asian-American woman who had just graduated from college without any experience of the war herself possibly design a proper memorial for the Vietnam veterans?

During meetings and press conferences, she faced a backlash for her Asian heritage and designing a memorial for a war fought in Southeast Asia. She received hate mail, personal insults, and racial slurs. People called her design “a black scare of shame,” an “open urinal,” and “something for New York intellectuals.” Critics wanted to make the memorial a white stone, move it above ground, and plant a flagpole or towering statue at its apex, rendering the walls as nothing more than a backdrop.

Lin faced these confrontations with admirable courage. She stood her ground and fought for the design she believed in. She had thought through the design decisions of the memorial in detail and how each contributed to the overall experience she was working to create.

In the end, Lin’s vision for the memorial was preserved, except for a bronze sculpture featuring three soldiers and an American flag added near the entrance. This addition was made without her input, and she didn’t learn about the compromise until she saw it on the news. Frederick Hart, the sculptor of the bronze monument, was paid more than $300,000 for his work, compared to Lin’s $20,000 prize money. At the dedication ceremony, Maya Lin’s name wasn’t mentioned once.

But time would be on her side. She had fought for a design she believed in, visualized what she was working to bring to life, and realized that vision. Within a year, people were clamoring for interviews with her. They finally understood her vision for the memorial because they could experience it themselves.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial became a sacred place. Today it’s one of the most famous monuments in the world, with over five million visitors each year.

So, what are you working toward?

Visualization is the practice of considering how you want to show up in the world. Creating meaningful work isn’t going to happen by accident. It requires thoughtfulness and channeling what you believe to be true about the world into your work. But in order to do that, you must understand what you’re working toward. You have to visualize the future state and hold onto the integrity of your ideas along the way.

The reason you must understand what you’re aiming toward is because directions in life are mutually exclusive. Certain decisions and paths preclude others. Tim Urban, author and writer behind the popular blog Wait But Why, visualizes this concept in a graphic that shows all the life paths closed to you versus those that remain open. You have made decisions in your life and work that have led you to this point. You can’t go back in time and change those.

Source: Tim Urban, @waitbutwhy on X

But there are still dozens of decision points—tributaries—ahead of you that you can use to guide yourself toward realizing the best version of yourself and your work. But you must bring your vision to the forefront and understand what you’re working toward to optimize your decision-making in this moment.

The challenge is that many of us have become decision averse. We don’t want to cross any options off the table. But eliminating options isn’t restrictive: it’s empowering. This frees us to focus and bring our best ideas to life. Decisions are how we come to define our lives and our work. And deliberate, thoughtful decisions are the most powerful currency available to help you realize your vision.

Early in my career, I wanted to be everything and, as a result, was unable to commit to anything. I wanted to be an author, entrepreneur, director, photographer, musician, and that’s just a fraction of the list. I convinced myself that I could balance dozens of unrelated goals. But progress proved impossible because I was unwilling to prioritize and had no idea what I was aiming toward.

In his book, Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman explains, “Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.”

Visualization forces us to realize that we can’t be everything. We have to understand, at our core, what we can’t live without. Then we must sacrifice and optimize decisions for what matters most.

Realizing your vision

Maya Lin faced many of these decisions in her architecture. What type of experience was she trying to create? What was she trying to say about death? How would the memorial pay its heartfelt respect to the fallen soldiers, veterans, and their families? How would she make it feel like a private, personal experience? What tradeoffs would she make with how visitors moved through the memorial? All of these decision points required a holistic understanding of the vision she was working toward to ensure all elements of the memorial worked together.

Visualization works in both the immediate and long-term. It’s helpful to visualize both your next move and your ultimate goal. What does it look like if you project ten years into the future on your current path? Is that the life you envision for yourself? What feels right? What needs to be different? The same exercise can be applied to your current work on a shorter timeframe. Do you understand and know what you’re working toward? Have you built conviction around that direction? Once you know this, you can track the optimal path and fine-tune your near-term tactics to give you the best chance at making progress against your longer-term vision.

Remember: you are the architect of your own life and work. But you must understand the shape of what you’re building to create anything worthwhile. When you know what you’re working toward, you empower yourself to make tough decisions and navigate challenging tradeoffs in favor of your ultimate goal. But it will always require some sort of sacrifice. It’s your job to determine where you’re willing to make those sacrifices and which elements of your work take precedence, demanding an unyielding approach.

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Sources:

[1] Branch, Mark Alden. "Maya Lin: after the wall." Progressive Architecture, vol. 75, no. 8, Aug. 1994, pp. 60+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A15739154/GPS?u=denver&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=2d91b918.

 [2] Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

[3] Clinton, Chelsea, and Grace Lin. She Persisted: Maya Lin. Philomel Books, 2022.

[4] Lin, Maya. Boundaries. Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition, 2006.

[5] Menand, Louis. "The Reluctant Memorialist.” The New Yorker, vol. 78, no. 18, 8 July 2002. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A88605695/GPS?u=denver&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=969bd096.

[6] Mock, Freida Lee, director. Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. Ocean Releasing, 1994.

[7] "Thinking With Her Hands." Whole Earth, winter 2000, p. 72. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A68617397/GPS?u=denver&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=0aa391a1.

[8] Urban, Tim, @waitbutwhy. “We think a lot about those black lines, forgetting that it’s all still in our hands.” 5 March 2021, 10:14 AM, https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1367871165319049221?lang=en.

Rewrite the Rules

“Absorb what’s useful, discard what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”

— Bruce Lee

By 1964, Bruce Lee had started to gain a following. He had two martial arts schools in Oakland and Seattle, where he taught a modified version of wing chun, a martial art with foundations in kung fu. But he was growing skeptical of locking himself into a single martial arts discipline and weary of the loyalists who believed their style of combat was superior to everything else.

Lee started experimenting with minor changes in technique, testing new angles in his stances and movements. The changes weren’t dramatic—the classical wing chun style had been seared into his every movement since he began studying at thirteen years old in Hong Kong. But they were still changes. And the kung fu traditionalists took exception.

As Lee refined his approach, he would visit the Sun Sing Theater in San Francisco’s Chinatown, demonstrating his technique and voicing his perspective that unnecessary, performative, impractical movements hampered traditional martial arts. As Lee grew more vocal, the kung fu old guard in Chinatown grew more irritated. He was disrupting their ways, compromising the sacredness of kung fu, and someone needed to put him in his place.

Taking on the traditionalists

In the fall of 1964, Lee’s critics in San Francisco’s kung fu community issued a challenge. They proposed a fight between him and an opponent of their choosing. If their fighter won, Lee would have to stop teaching. And if Lee won, he could continue without opposition. Lee was 23 years old at the time and eager to prove them wrong.

The traditionalists selected a young, skilled kung-fu fighter, Wong Jack-Man, as their champion. In November, the delegation arrived in Oakland for the fight. The first order of business was laying down the rules. The traditionalists offered up one rule after another, but Lee pushed back. He wanted a street fight—anything goes—not a controlled, theatrical performance with an intricate scoring method. After some negotiation, the fight was on. Bruce Lee came out swinging.

After the initial exchange, Jack-Man sprinted away, attempting to exhaust Lee and leave him winded. Lee gave chase, trying to grab him from behind. The fight was a mess, a far cry from the combat routines each man had practiced in their gyms. Finally, Lee had Jack-Man on the ground. Lee stood over him, yelling in Cantonese, “Do you yield?” The fight was over in three minutes.

But after the victory, Lee didn’t feel victorious or vindicated. Something was still bothering him. In the weeks that followed, he realized that wing chun, even his modified version, hadn’t prepared him for an anything-goes scenario. Most of what he learned only prepared him for neatly defined scenarios or sparring in the gym. In the months and years that followed, Lee began to define his own martial art and philosophy—jeet kune do.

Bridging disciplines

Until this point, Lee used wing chun as his foundation and made slight adjustments. But as he developed jeet kune do, he emphasized formlessness and not getting trapped in a single style. He looked beyond standard martial arts for inspiration. From boxing, he took its footwork, jabs, bobs, weaves, and hooks; from fencing elements of range and the timing of the stop hit. He was open to anything that would prove useful in a real fight—practicality above all else.

Jeet kune do wasn’t about a specific style. The whole point was that it could take on any shape, style, or form. Techniques from seemingly disparate disciplines previously considered off-limits could be used at will. As long it was effective, kept your opponent off guard, and gave you an advantage, it was on the table. There wasn’t a single right way to fight—contrary to the teachings of many traditional martial arts practices, which forced students into a fixed pattern of movements and routines.

In the years following the fight in Oakland, Lee realized in its fullness what he had scratched the surface of. Most martial arts practices were built upon theories, clearly defined rules, and a neat set of movements. He referred to this type of performative fighting that protected both fighters as “dryland swimming.” These practices weren’t helpful in real fights and life-or-death scenarios where everything is unpredictable and self-defense matters most. The other person might fight dirty, have a weapon, or be an expert in any number of fighting styles. You won’t be able to pause the fight and enforce a neat set of rules.

Lee focused on adaptability and developing tools that applied to real-life scenarios. Forget style. Style is what had divided martial artists, restricting their growth by forcing them to adopt a “this or that” approach to combat. Lee’s approach was to use what worked and drop what didn’t. And this mindset is why many credit Lee as the father of mixed martial arts; because of his focus on using the most effective movement or technique based on the situation.

At some point in your own career, you will have to take the rules you learned, tear them up, and reimagine them. The whole point of learning frameworks is so you can break them in creative ways and create something of your own.

Questioning unwritten rules

Whatever industry we operate in has antiquated ways of doing things. Many of us become so accustomed to these unwritten rules or standard operating procedures that we stop observing them and accept them as truth. You must fight this urge to conform and preserve your ability to evaluate things from a fresh perspective. If you don’t, you’ll create work that’s derivative and halts any real progress or message you could help advance.

Purists don’t make progress because they’re removed from reality. They are so focused on how things should be that they become trapped by abstract rules, unable to perform in anything less than pristine conditions in their environments. They delude themselves into believing the best and right way has already been defined.

“This is the best method” or “this is how it has always been done” should set off your internal alarm. They’re a clear signal to question and challenge the status quo. The world doesn’t need another person playing it safe, afraid to go against the grain. The world needs you. And the best way you can put yourself across is by combining your disciplines, interests, and observations in a way that’s unique to you and speaks to a truth you’ve identified about the world. Even if it challenges deeply held conventions in your craft or society. Go ahead, piss some people off. It will be good for them.

When Jordan Peele made the jump to directing horror films after completing the fifth successful season of his comedy series Key & Peele, people were shocked. At first glance, comedy and horror seem to exist on opposite sides of the spectrum. But there are more similarities for Peele once you get beneath the surface. Both appeal to outsiders. Both are a means of facing our fears. The only difference is in tone. Comedy is an attempt to laugh off our fears. While horror is an attempt to master our fears by looking straight at them.

But Peele was frustrated with horror films. They were too formulaic, predictable, and revealed their cards too early, leaving little room to challenge audiences as the story unfolded. Just as Peele studied sketch comedy, learned the rules, then pushed the limits, he took the same approach in horror to challenge the confines of the genre. He was determined to reengineer the whole thing to add more depth, make the genre more accessible, and tell better stories.

Peele’s roots in comedy helped him to become a master at observation and right-sizing risks. He pushed audiences to stretch alongside him, working to understand something from someone else’s point of view—the ultimate power of storytelling. Horror was a similar way to provoke. And adapting the genre to his approach allowed him to create something new.

Just as Bruce Lee learned the craft, techniques, and discipline of wing chun, then created something of his own to improve and bridge the divide in martial arts. Peele learned the rules and combined his own experiences in a way that allowed him to push the threshold of what was typical of horror films.

Advancing your craft

With your own experiences and observations, you can push the dial further than you think. You just have to trust your perspective and break the rules when they no longer serve what you’re attempting to create.

Whether art, business, film, music, science, or technology, there are techniques, approaches, and mental models—things we believe to be true—that we will look back on in ten years and laugh about. To be part of progress, you must learn to break the rules and challenge what’s accepted without question—especially what people disguise as “best practices.”

If you want to advance the conversation, you have to stretch beyond what’s comfortable. Challenge yourself to combine ideas in new ways or test a new approach. Apply it to your life. Apply it to your discipline. By synthesizing ideas and personal observations in your own way and giving the world a fresh take, you create work that more strongly resonates with you and your audience.

If you intend to go through life as a consumer, forget this lesson. But if you want to create and leave your mark on the world, you must find ways to advance your craft and the conversation—no matter how small your first steps might appear. This is how you transcend from an operator to a trailblazer, inspiring others to create and see the world in a new way.

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Sources:

1. Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee

2. Be Water, My Friend, Shannon Lee

3. The Life Philosophy of Bruce Lee, The Art of Manliness

4. How Bruce Lee Worked, Stuff You Should Know

Seek Meaning Over Influence

“If you care too much about being praised, in the end you will not accomplish anything serious…Let the judgments of others be the consequence of your deeds, not their purpose.”

— Leo Tolstoy

Six months after reaching space aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor, Mae Jemison announced her resignation from NASA. Her childhood dream was fulfilled. And while she wasn’t done with space exploration, she wanted to apply her knowledge, skills, and experience in new ways that would have otherwise been limited by the specialized training of the astronaut corps at NASA.

Many people considered her foolish to leave NASA—why walk away from the pinnacle of human exploration? But she trusted herself and knew it was time to focus on the next thing she found meaning in. This wasn’t the first time she made a decision that challenged the status quo in favor of an opportunity that was meaningful to her.

At 20 years old, after graduating from Stanford with a Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering and Afro-American Studies, Jemison enrolled in medical school at Cornell. In between semesters, she traveled and found a real sense of purpose in providing primary medical care in developing countries. These experiences taught her more about herself and helped her feel more connected to the world. She immediately knew she wanted a deeper experience in this environment after finishing medical school.

Going against the grain

But the expectation at Cornell—an elite medical school—was that their graduates pursue a prestigious residency after graduation. Jemison simply wasn’t interested. She planned to complete a brief one-year internship at the Los Angeles County/University of Southern California Medical Center. She would then return to work in the developing world to help in whatever capacity she could.

The deans at Cornell weren’t thrilled about her plan. One afternoon, they called Jemison in for a meeting and asked her to reconsider. She explained her reasoning, but they interrupted and claimed she was making a mistake. They outlined the consequences—she would fall behind her peers over the next decade and feel less accomplished. She followed her decision anyway.

After completing her internship, Jemison joined the Peace Corps as a Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia. She was responsible for the health of all Peace Corps volunteers, staff members, and embassy personnel. She acted as a primary care physician and managed a medical office, laboratory, and pharmacy.

While in West Africa, she navigated environments with insufficient equipment, medication, and supplies. But she honed her resourcefulness, pulling knowledge across different disciplines to navigate challenging situations.

Early in her tenure, one of the Peace Corps volunteers became sick with what Jemison thought could be meningitis with life-threatening complications. She worked to stabilize his condition through the night. But his condition worsened, and she knew she had to act.

Jemison called the U.S. Embassy to secure a military medical evacuation. They questioned whether she had the authority to give that type of order. She calmly explained the situation and that she didn’t need anyone’s permission. The Embassy conceded. By the time Jemison and the volunteer reached the Air Force hospital in Germany, Jemison had been up for 56 hours. But she had saved his life.

These types of experiences would prove invaluable and set her apart when, on her return to the U.S. in 1987, when she applied to NASA’s astronaut training program. Out of 2,000 applicants, Jemison was one of the fifteen accepted.

Almost ten years from the day that the deans at Cornell told her that she was setting herself back in her career by taking a non-traditional approach and that she would regret it, Jemison was orbiting Earth as the first black woman in space.

What type of person are you?

Rather than prioritizing influence or prestige, Jemison was operating from a different place. She was focused on who she was and what she found meaning in. It wasn’t a position that she wanted to define her life. It was the type of person she was.

Jemison found meaning in creativity, exploration, and being helpful. She found meaning in engineering, art, dance, medicine, exploring space, exploring other countries, and exploring new ideas. Above all, she wanted to help and make a difference in the world through the skills and interests that defined her. She channeled this into her work and the opportunities she pursued at each step.

If you focus on work that matters to you and discover significance in yourself, you put yourself in a position to build something that strikes a deeper chord with others.

Influence wasn’t Jemison’s end goal. She approached it with indifference and chalked it up as nice to have but non-essential. Instead, she focused on her character, investing her time in what she found meaningful. She sought meaning over influence at each step of her life.

The desire for influence, like the desire to belong, is human nature. Many people allow this to dictate the course of their lives, often unconsciously. But acting deliberately and purposefully requires a deeper sense of awareness.

If influence acts as your guiding principle, you dull your sense of authenticity and compromise the quality of your work. How effective can your work be if you sacrifice your integrity and sense of meaning along the way?

People gravitate toward those who have discovered a sense of meaning in their work. It just hits differently.

Start with meaning

By focusing on meaning first, there’s a greater chance your life and work will resonate and make a measurable difference in the world. And even if it doesn’t, it remains valuable because it meant something to you. There’s a fundamental beauty in that.

Influence is far more likely to follow if you build something you believe in. And irrelevance is all but guaranteed if you continue to wander the path of least resistance, looking for a quick hit of attention or praise.

Your work must resonate with you before you can expect it to resonate with anyone else. You must fight like hell to ensure your work feels true before you release anything of your own into the wild.

Meaning starts with something that’s all your own. By prioritizing meaning over influence, you build the courage to speak from a place that resonates with you rather than following what other people have deemed important.

It’s a dangerous game to tie your sense of meaning and self-worth to external conditions. You introduce dependencies that can drop you into a state of anxiety, envy, or despair without warning. You allow yourself to be pulled along at the whims of others.

Regardless of the expectations or paths others had followed, Jemison made decisions that optimized for meaning over influence. She trusted her internal compass over any sort of fleeting recognition, status, or prestige.

After NASA, Jemison launched her own company. One of her first projects was to create an international science camp—The Earth We Share—that promoted critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Jemison also started teaching environmental studies at Dartmouth. Eventually, this led her to found 100 Year Starship, an initiative to establish capabilities for human interstellar travel within the next 100 years.

It’s a rare thing in this world to seek significance in yourself and build the courage to create something that resonates with you.

Seek meaning first, and authenticity and influence will follow.

Seek influence first, and you’ll risk losing yourself along the way.

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Sources:

1. Black History Bootcamp, Day 21, Mae Jemison

2. We Regret to Inform You: Rejecting Dr. Mae Jemison

3. StarTalk Radio: A Conversation with Dr. Mae Jemison

4. Jon Talks With Dr. Mae Jemison: The First Black Woman in Space

5. Find Where the Wind Goes, 2nd edition by Dr. Mae Jemison

6. Shooting Star: Former Astronaut Mae Jemison Brings her Message Down to Earth

Run Your Own Race

“What is my job on the planet? What is it that needs doing, that I know something about, that probably won’t happen unless I take responsibility for it?”

— Buckminster Fuller

In the mid-1990s, whether you were an investor or entrepreneur, everyone in technology was flocking to internet startups. Companies like eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo were gearing up for monstrous initial public offerings. It was a frenzy.

Meanwhile, Tony Fadell went to work for Philips building consumer electronics and handheld computing devices. Everyone told him he was out of his mind. Philips was a dinosaur. The Internet was where all the innovation was happening and fortunes were being made. No one needed another handheld device. But while everyone else chased lucrative internet startups, Fadell continued building hardware. 

Prior to Philips, Fadell spent five years working at General Magic—a failed company that lives on in the lore of Silicon Valley because of its alumni who went on to play pivotal roles at Adobe, Android, Apple, Google, and Nest, among others. 

At General Magic, the team worked to create a mobile computing device for personal communications and entertainment. It was released as the Sony Magic Link and had a phone, touchscreen, email, apps, games, a way to buy plane tickets, and animated emojis. The problem was that the technology wasn’t reliable and it was built for an audience that didn’t yet exist. 

The product was clunky—its processors weren’t fast enough, the touch screens weren’t great, and the battery life was too short. The team at General Magic built almost everything from scratch which was incredibly time consuming and expensive. And in 1995, the Internet was still in its infancy—email had yet to reach widespread adoption. The device became an exercise in innovation to impress other engineers at the company. The team failed to start with a problem that real people experienced and could relate to. They were ten years too early.

As the product floundered, Fadell created a plan to pivot away from making a communications and entertainment device for the general public, instead focusing exclusively on businesspeople. He pitched the idea to Philips since they were already a partner, making semiconductors and processing parts for General Magic.

Explore a different angle

Fadell held to his conviction that there was room for something amazing between desktop computers and cell phones. After pitching the mobile computing device for businesspeople on the go, he joined Philips full-time and got to work. It remained a niche market, but they successfully launched the Philips Velo in 1997 and the Philips Nino in 1998.

In 1999, after a successful run at Philips, Fadell left to start his own company. His vision at Fuse Systems was to build a better digital music player. People were starting to ship MP3 players but they were all clunky and difficult to use. And Fadell was tired of hauling around his collection of CDs everywhere he went. 

Again, he was cautioned by peers that he was continuing to compound his own mistakes by remaining in consumer electronics while the next big wave in tech passed him by. In 1999, internet startups were reaching their pinnacle of hysteria. Fadell continued to stick with personal electronics because that’s what he loved and that’s what he wanted to learn—bridging hardware and software, atoms and electrons.

The dot-com bubble finally burst in 2000—markets crashed and venture capital funding dried up with it. Fadell pitched his company to 80 different VCs and was rejected by every single one. Risk off. No one was interested in investing—even if it wasn’t internet related.

The team at Fuse was barely hanging on when Fadell received a call from Apple in late 2000. Apple had recently purchased iTunes and the application was starting to take off. Steve Jobs wanted iTunes to work with MP3 players and realized Apple needed its own device.

Jobs asked Fadell to join Apple as a consultant on an initiative to create a digital music device, codenamed Project Dulcimer. Fadell agreed, hoping he could use that money to continue paying his team or parlay it into a buyout for Fuse. 

As conversations developed, Fadell joined Apple full-time in January 2001 and brought over his team from Fuse. Jobs signed off on the concept for the device proposed by Fadell and his team in March. And the first iPod was shipped in November.

Fadell led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the soon-to-be iPhone. 

While people thought he was a fool to stick with hardware and personal electronics for a decade across five companies, by the time Apple called him to make the iPod, he knew exactly how to do it. Every job he held had given him a different vantage point on the same problem. He built a more complete view of the challenge and knew with precision what to work backward from. 

In retrospect, Fadell’s decision to stick with personal electronics seems obvious. But to hang in there for a decade while everyone around you is clamoring after the next big thing—internet startups—and constantly in your ear about missing out while they make nauseating amounts of money is no small feat. That takes serious discipline and trust in yourself. 

Chase problems you care about solving, not trends

Fadell was never optimizing for money. His primary focus was aligning to problems he wanted to learn more about and a space he was passionate about driving forward. That meant building devices and working at the intersection of hardware and software. It’s what he loved doing and that was enough justification for him. 

The most difficult challenge we face in life is to avoid getting pulled into races we aren’t willing to run. It’s why we end up chasing trends or grow insatiable in our quest for more. We’re perpetually consumed with a bigger title, a larger paycheck, the next milestone in life. We don’t want to miss out on anything. But this comes at the cost of sacrificing ourselves along the way. 

Oftentimes we allow ourselves to be carried away by the herd because it gives us a convenient excuse to cling to throughout life. By not committing to our own personal direction, we tell ourselves what could have been. “If I wanted to, I could have written a book, built my own company, led this team.” But you didn’t. The fear of actually dedicating yourself to becoming, grinding it out, and putting your ass on the line left you cowering in fear. So you chased after everyone else. 

To combat this, you must determine what is your own. You must slow down to clarify what you’re after, hone in on the problems you want to spend your time thinking about, and ignore everything else that gets in the way.

If you allow yourself to get caught up in the status quo—what everyone else around you is doing—it’s easy to end up in a dead-end career. You trap yourself into solving problems you don’t find meaning in and in doing so, diminish the impact you could have otherwise had. 

You’re not going to make a dent in this world or create anything meaningful by jumping ship every two years and chasing the next big thing. If you’re deeply interested in a problem and care about solving it, you have to stick with it, regardless of who thinks it matters. Over a long enough time horizon things will work out in your favor.

Staying true to yourself will be the hardest, loneliest thing you will ever do. You’re going to be standing in the wilderness wondering what you’re doing while other people get rich and seem to have it all together. But authenticity is about playing the long game—what can you sustain indefinitely? What were you meant to bring to life? That’s where your best work is born from. 

And while those same people who got rich overnight lose it just as fast and get written off as one-hit wonders, you will have slowly built an empire. Because you ran your own race. 

Ready yourself to face distractions

You’re still going to receive calls that entice you—opportunities to make more money, follow your friends, work on something trendy. But these are distractions that will only pull you away from the work you find real meaning in. That’s why you must determine what you’re after and hold to that with all your might. 

You must be able to navigate these distractions without losing yourself along the way. Do you have the willpower to stand up for yourself? Are you prepared to do the hard thing and turn down opportunities that don’t align with where you want to go? Do you have the endurance to stick with a problem you care about while everyone else jumps ship and tells you it’s a waste of time?

In 1973, Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar Animation Studios, visited Disney to pitch a new computer rendering technology for animation. Disney laughed him off and instead tried to tempt him into a job designing theme parks with the Imagineering team. Holy shit, what a cool job. Since childhood, Catmull had been fascinated with Disney. But he turned it down without hesitation. He knew it was a diversion. He wanted to animate. And he trusted that. 

Life will throw everything it can at you—attempting to distract or tempt you along the way. That’s the test you must face. When things get tough are you going to give up on the work you care about? When the easy money or the comfortable job comes knocking are you going to sell out on your own priorities? Or are you going to stand steadfast in what matters most to you—the work you are meant to do?

If authenticity is what you’re after, you have to find and stick with what you believe in. You have to trust yourself enough to run your own race. And if you do, it’s just a matter of time before you come out ahead. 

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Sources:

1. Build by Tony Fadell

2. General Magic by Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude

3. Masters of Scale with Tony Fadell

4. The Tim Ferriss Show: On Building the iPod, iPhone, Nest, and a Life of Curiosity

5. Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

9 Tactics to Help You Create More, Consume Less

When it comes to remarkable leaders, artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs, each individual has their own set of principles. But there is one underlying strategy that remains constant, revealing itself in different shades across each person–creating more and consuming less.

It’s through the work you put out into the world and the way you live your life that you build a sense of meaning. Smart creatives understand this in a deep way. By creating more, you claim a larger part of yourself.

Strategies like this help build energy, establish your identity, and inform the tactics you put in place. While it takes shape in different mediums, the overall strategy is to create more and consume less. It’s the mental framework which informs smaller decisions throughout the day.

Tactics are the individual pieces that comprise the larger whole. They differ in that they require an initial investment up front. It’s what you dedicate time and energy to on a daily basis to reinforce your strategy.

Author and habit expert, James Clear, explains habits as the individual votes you cast each day for a certain identity. The same concept applies here. Tactics are the individual votes you cast each day for a certain strategy. If your strategy is to create more and consume less, you need tactics to help encourage both.

1) Make it difficult to do the easy thing (consuming)

Adding resistance can be a powerful tactic. You want to make it harder to mindlessly consume. If you struggle with Netflix, unplug the television or sign out of your account after each use. If you struggle with social media, change your passwords at the start of each week and sign out of your accounts so you can’t easily access them.

It’s amazing how impactful it can be to move things out of plain sight. Whatever’s undermining your creative energy, add more resistance so you can redirect that towards something you find greater meaning in.

2) Make it easier to do the difficult thing (creating)

This is about environment design. Building something from nothing is difficult enough as is, don’t make it any harder on yourself. Prioritize time and space for your craft to reach a deeper level of focus and creativity.

For years, my place for creativity at home–where I would sit down to write–was a couch that faced the television in my living room. And to further compound the problem, I wasn’t attempting this during quieter hours of the day. It was while people were coming and going, stopping to watch Netflix, sitting down for a meal. There were incessant distractions.

But this past year, I carved out physical space dedicated to writing. I converted one of our bedrooms to a writing studio/library and it’s made a significant difference. I also started writing first thing in the morning while my mind is fresh and I have two quiet hours before work.

Dedicating time and space where you can focus without interruption on your craft will allow you to grow exponentially faster. It’s the first step towards taking yourself and your art seriously.

Make it easier to do the right thing. This doesn’t mean sitting around waiting for ideal conditions or until you’re completely prepared, otherwise you’ll be waiting forever. It means setting yourself up for success through the things you can control in your immediate environment.

3) Pair positive reinforcements

Four years ago, when I first started taking writing seriously, I paired my writing sessions with my favorite coffee shop in Nashville. I walked over in the evenings after work to sit down and write. It’s something I looked forward to every day because of the atmosphere, the music I would listen to and, of course, the caffeine. This reinforcement helped me rediscover writing as a creative outlet.

Now I automatically associate these cues with my creative process. Coffee, coffee shops, and ambient music are shortcuts that jump me into a state of relaxed concentration that I need to do my best writing.

4) Allow yourself to get stuck

At the first sign of boredom or discomfort, most of us instinctively search for distractions and outlets for immediate gratification. And we do so without even recognizing it.

Until recently, the moment I slowed down or felt stuck in my own writing, I coped by jumping between tabs in Chrome–checking email, looking up restaurants for dinner, scrolling through Twitter.

The secret is to allow yourself to get stuck and sit with something. Once I gave myself permission to sit there without looking away, my resilience and creativity improved immediately.

Momentum is easier to come by when you don’t look away at the first challenging moment. Bouncing between distractions won’t result in some magical insight. Give yourself permission to get stuck.

“Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process. The pain is a kind of challenge your mind presents–will you learn how to focus and move past the boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction.”

— Robert Greene

For writers: Tools aren’t everything but they can be helpful. I’ve found Ulysses to be one of the best investments I’ve made ($5/month). It helps facilitate each of these first four tactics. Its typewriter mode is fullscreen which makes it easier to focus, harder to jump between distractions (web, email, text messages), and the daily goals feature helps create a strong positive reinforcement.

5) Create a distraction-free phone

For most of us, myself included, our phones are our number one source of distraction. Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky outline the tactic that is a distraction-free phone in their book Focus. It’s one of the most influential tactics I’ve found in the past year. There are three main components:

1. Delete infinity-pools apps (social media) from your phone

2. Delete email accounts from your phone

3. Delete/disable the web browser on your phone

These might sound extreme, but let me explain. Last year I took step one, deleting infinity-pools apps (sources of never-ending streams of content). But the energy I wasted on social media was replaced by checking email, random websites, and Googling everything that crossed my mind.

It was only after I took steps two and three, despite my initial reservations, that I saw a measurable difference in my focus and creativity. There’s now far less clutter and distraction in my day-to-day. As a result, the clarity of my thoughts has improved and I have more opportunities to create.

I recognize this might strike terror in you. But test it out for a week and see how it goes. I no longer reach for my phone as a crutch in moments of boredom. And it taught me how many meaningless things cross my mind and how few emails (zero) require an immediate response.

6) Keep a journal instead

If you cut the time spent on your phone in half and replaced that with journaling, you’d improve your balance between creating and consuming within a matter of days. I leave a journal sitting on the table of whichever room I’m in at home. I jot down ideas as they come to me, intentions in the morning, reflections in the evening, beginnings of articles, and whatever else captures my curiosity.

The act of writing on paper allows you to explore concepts and draw connections in ways that you can’t on a screen. Your ideas take on a different dimension. Not to mention the fact that it eliminates the threat of distractions you face on a phone, tablet, or computer.

But the biggest advantage of journaling is that it helps build awareness. By reflecting, you gain insight into your own behaviors and tendencies, rather than wandering through life on autopilot. If you want to create more and consume less, you have to start by recognizing what you’re doing well and where there’s room to improve.

7) Use art as inspiration

This is not to say that you shouldn’t appreciate other people’s work. But you should use it as inspiration to create something of your own. Actively engage in the things you’re watching, reading, listening to, and consuming. Try to engage, form connections, and draw insights of your own. (Check out my book notes on 70+ titles for an example of how I approach this while reading.)

Use books, films, documentaries, paintings, research, and keynotes as inspiration to create more. If you’re a writer, weave one of the connections you made into your next article. If you’re an entrepreneur, adapt one of the stories to your current project and share it with your team to build stronger engagement.

The goal is to create an active mental landscape that’s alive with hundreds of connections. It directly benefits your creativity and craft when you’re able to combine ideas across disciplines in new and interesting ways.

8) Start small

Don’t go off the deep end and commit to twelve hours of creating each day. You’ll burn yourself out before you ever get started and make it difficult to recover. Instead, begin from a more sustainable place.

If you want to write more music, start with fifteen minutes each day then build from there. That’s how you create momentum. Develop habits that are sustainable and allow them to grow steadily over time.

Remind yourself that growth is nonlinear. Don’t expect immediate results. People tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in the short-term and underestimate what they can accomplish over the course of years. The power of small, calculated decisions and tactics grows exponentially over time. Start small and let compound interest run its course.

9) Find a medium that resonates with you

While every remarkable mind shares some sense of this strategy to create more and consume less, the medium varies. For J.K. Rowling it’s writing, Jay-Z it’s music, Scott Belsky it’s design and technology, Alexander von Humboldt it was exploration and science, Leonardo da Vinci it was art and engineering.

If you need a better starting place, consider the medium that resonates with you. Robert Greene, author of The Laws of Human Nature, suggests reflecting on three areas to help with this:

1. Inclinations in your earliest years–moments of fascination with certain subject, objects, or activities.

2. Moments when certain tasks or activities felt natural to you.

3. Particular forms of intelligence your brain is wired for.

The key is determining what’s meaningful to you and not absorbing what’s important to someone else as your own. Otherwise, you’ll miss the mark.

This is perhaps the most difficult skill of all–sorting through the noise and determining your own sense of authenticity. This requires years of exploration and reflection to determine for yourself. But it’s the only way to sustain a creative mindset and find meaning in your work.

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As a rule of thumb, it’s better to lean towards the mentality of a strategist than a tactician. Those who have the patience to expand their perspective of time and the endurance to play the long game put themselves at a significant advantage. There are multiple paths and hundreds of tactics you can use you reach the end goal.

These tactics are meant to help you find your own starting place. Use them to create momentum and discover what works best for you. Experiment and remain flexible. There’s no correct path or proper sequence of decisions. What matters is that the overall strategy to create more and consume less is held in constant focus.

The Philosophy of Remarkable Minds

Each of us has the capacity to face difficult work. In many ways, this defines life. The struggle to create something of our own is where we find meaning.

Our modern era of comfort and convenience can be a double-edged sword. It’s allowed us to eliminate the daily struggle for survival and afforded us the privilege of having this discussion. But when taken to an extreme, it leads to a deep anxiety and restlessness. Emptiness can be a fiercer foe than hardship.

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.”

— Sebastian Junger

It’s easy to sit by as a passive consumer and allow someone else to assume the risk. On a surface level, it might even appear that you’re reaping all the benefits. But if you fail to establish a creative outlet where you can build something of your own, you sacrifice your primary source of meaning along with it.

It’s through the work you put out into the world and the way you live that you instill your life with a sense of meaning. By creating more and consuming less you claim a larger part of yourself.

Those who have lived remarkable lives hold this philosophy in constant focus.

Into the Venezuelan Jungle

When Alexander von Humboldt was born in 1769 to a family of wealthy Prussian aristocrats, by all standards of the day, he had it made. His father was an army officer and advisor to King Friedrich Wilhelm II, and his mother was the daughter of a rich manufacturer. If he wanted a comfortable existence, all he had to do was sit back and stay the course.

But despite these advantages, he was anxious and unhappy for most of his early years. His adventurous spirit was never satisfied by the confines of a classroom or the promise of a lucrative career as a civil servant. His dream was to explore the natural world.

As a child, Humboldt was fascinated with the journals of Captain James Cook and his accounts of distant countries and cultures. Humboldt wandered the Berlin countryside to recreate adventures of his own, stuffing his pockets full of plants, rocks, and insects, earning the nickname ‘the little apothecary.’

But after his father died at the age of nine, his financial dependence on his emotionally distant mother allowed her to dictate much of the early, unfulfilling course of his life. Despite his objections, she demanded that he work his way up the ranks of the Prussian administration.

Humboldt found creative ways to channel his deep interest in science, geology, and languages at different universities and academies along the way. He poured over the work of various artists, botanists, explorers, and thinkers. And while each provided inspiration, it was not enough to fill the void he faced for the first twenty-seven years of his life.

Humboldt was torn between the expectations of his family and his insatiable desire to set sail, experience the world firsthand, and contribute something of his own to the scientific community. He lacked an outlet to discover and create in a way that resonated with him. Without this, an emptiness continued to build.

It was only after his mother’s death in 1796 that he felt in control of his own destiny. Longing to escape his tiny corner of the world, he began planning a voyage to South America.

At age thirty, Humboldt set off on the expedition which altered the course of his life. He would explore treacherous landscapes that no scientist had set foot in before. The driving force was his desire to piecing together a more cohesive understanding of the natural world. Most scientists of his day were focused on isolated disciplines. Humboldt was interested in bridging the divide and the interconnected whole.

After arriving in Venezuela, Humboldt trekked for two months across the tropical grasslands of Los Llanos, facing temperatures near 120 degrees Fahrenheit. He followed this with seventy-five days of grueling river travel down the Orinoco, covering 1400 miles to reach the Casiquiare canal–a natural tributary between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers. Along the way, he faced torrential rains, incessant mosquitos, the occasional jaguar, and bouts with fevers and dysentery.

This would seem disheartening to most, but Humboldt came alive with boundless energy and enthusiasm during these explorations. No matter the conditions, he insisted on measuring the height of mountains, determining longitude and latitude, taking temperatures of the air and water, making astronomical observations, collecting new species of plants, and documenting it all with detailed notes. Each new environment brought him closer to understanding how the natural world fit together.

The pinnacle of his experience in South America came during a 2,500-mile journey from Cartagena to Lima to explore the Andean Mountains. During this trip, he attempted to summit Chimborazo, an inactive volcano standing at 21,000 feet.

At 15,600 feet, the porters refused to go on. But Humboldt continued his ascent, fighting through freezing conditions, deep fields of snow, and altitude sickness. Without fail, every few hundred feet he stopped and fumbled with freezing hands to set up his instruments to measure temperature, humidity, altitude, and boiling points. He reached 19,286 feet–a world record at the time–before he was forced to turn around due to impassable conditions.

This experience inspired Humboldt to sketch ‘Naturgemälde,’ a depiction of Chimborazo’s cross sections with the distribution of vegetation, temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure according to altitude. Humboldt showed for the first time that nature was a global force with corresponding climate zones across continents. And he presented it in an unprecedented infographic style, allowing those without a scientific background to understand the concept.

Naturgemälde – Alexander von Humboldt’s first depiction of nature as an interconnected whole

Upon his return to Europe, Humboldt’s exploration of South America inspired him to write thousands of letters, essays, publications, and lectures. By making connections and framing nature as a unified whole, his work revolutionized the way we view the natural world. As an interesting aside, he was also the first to observe and describe human-induced climate change.

Humboldt inspired generations of scientists and writers including Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. But his greatest contribution was making science more accessible and exciting to a broader audience.

In Berlin, his series of free lectures packed music and university halls with royal family, students, servants, women, and children. He took his audience on a journey that ignited their imagination–combining exact observation with painterly descriptions. He brought distant landscapes to life through poetry, geology, and astronomy, bridging the divide between art and science.

Humboldt continued exploration into his sixties with a 10,000 mile, six-month journey through Russia. He was invigorated by each expedition, showing the same youthful energy and endurance that he had thirty years earlier. He shared his learnings in publications and letters up until his final moments when he died in 1859 at the age of eighty-nine.

The Struggle to Create

Humboldt could have settled into his early existence, lived a comfortable life, and allowed others to assume the risk in their own research and exploration. But this shallow life wasn’t enough for him. Instead, he set out with an insatiable curiosity to better understand the natural world and contribute what he learned along the way.

His adventures were his outlet for creativity, discovery, and meaning. There’s nothing easy about a 2,500-mile trek through the Andes. But the struggle to study and create something that resonated with him at a deeper level brought him to life. Without this, he would have never found his own sense of authenticity and fulfillment.

Creativity is about finding something worth struggling for.

We live in a unique time. Most of us, like Humboldt, could coast through life without facing any significant hardship if we so chose. That’s a wonderful thing. But it collapses into its opposite when we allow our entire lives to be dictated by comfort and immediate gratification. We must not forget the importance of meaning, which is found through the struggle to create something of our own.

Spending the evening watching four episodes of your favorite show on Netflix or scrolling through Instagram might be the path of least resistance, but it’s mostly empty. There’s little opportunity to create meaning of your own. More often than not it’s a distraction that pulls you away from the things that actually matter.

Your unique identifiers are the work you put out into the world and the way you live your life. These are what add depth to your voice. Not the things you consume–fashion, film, food, music, research, sports, technology.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t appreciate other people’s original work. But you should use it as inspiration. It should serve as a catalyst for you to create more and find alignment in your own sense of authenticity. It’s the height of selfishness to expect other people to create meaningful work for your personal benefit without contributing anything of your own.

Creating begins with making yourself an essential part of the process. Not standing by as a passive consumer and allowing someone else to take the risk.

But don’t let anyone fool you, creating is challenging, uncomfortable, and a slow grind. There’s no way around it. That’s why most people fail to sustain the habit. You have to trust your capacity to suffer. But it’s where all the upside is found.

Endurance, Imagination, and Depth

When you prioritize creating something of your own, you give yourself more opportunities for peak experiences and claim a larger part of yourself–just as Humboldt did at the age of twenty-seven when he shifted the course of his life. This is infinitely more satisfying than the temporary highs of a consumer.

By creating more and consuming less, you add an unusual depth to your voice that draws people in. Your creative outlet is where you are able to channel the questions and struggles you’ve faced into something that offers profound insight. And that’s what life is all about.

Whether you forgo a life of privilege to trek through the Venezuelan jungle or you set aside Instagram so you can focus on your art, science, startup, or relationship with the person right in front of you, what matters is that you provide yourself an opportunity to create.

Those who make a measurable difference in the world are inspired to contribute something of their own. Instead of taking the easy route–opting for comfort and immediate gratification–they push themselves further into the unknown.

Human nature has given us remarkable endurance to face difficult work and the imagination to build something from nothing. It’s through this struggle to create that we instill our lives with a sense of meaning.

To find your sense of authenticity and fulfillment, you must fight to create more.

*If you want to learn more about Alexander von Humboldt, check out The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf. It’s a tremendous read and the source of many details in this article.

Authenticity Is Your Now

Authenticity is not a fixed point on a map. It’s fluid, much like your identity, and shifts over the course of your life.

It’s easier to trick yourself into believing the feel-good advice that your voice comes from a sudden revelation. You just have to wait for that moment. And once you’ve found it, the entire picture comes into focus and remains that way for life.

But authenticity is found through fragments. It evolves over time. It’s a moving target that falls out of focus and can be lost to the chaos of life.

Authenticity is less about identifying a singular purpose and voice that should define your entire life. It’s about finding and trusting your voice today. In other words, embracing the impermanence of your identity, knowing that it can and will change.

How you live your life–your interests, principles, and priorities–will evolve over time. As you grow, you’ll add depth to your voice. If you remain the same for too long, that’s when you know you’ve stopped learning or are clinging to an expired version of yourself.

It’s easy to get caught up in the expectations you hold for yourself or that others project upon you– who you should be, where you have been. If you fuel these doubts, you can opt out of the unknown and find comfort in your plateau. But you won’t grow through the familiar, and you won’t find alignment.

Your sense of authenticity–your now–is something that’s all your own. It’s discovered, developed, and deepened, by the obstacles you face, the uncertainties you navigate, and the inspiration you find along the way.

If you want to create something that matters–to both yourself and others–you have to create from where you currently are in your life. That’s how you build momentum and depth. Trust yourself.

It’s the difference between artists and entrepreneurs who get lucky once and those who sustain success over decades. If you cling to what got you there in the first place, you’ll fail to evolve and render yourself irrelevant.

Artists who reinvent themselves fight for projects that allow them to grow, stretch their abilities, and discover new things. In doing so, they create from a place that resonates with them at a single point in time.

Over the course of years, a series of single brush strokes reveals an evolving sense of authenticity.

Bob Dylan, one of history’s great songwriters, has reinvented himself time and time again throughout his career. He’s altered his voice and bridged various genres, beginning in folk, shifting towards rock, and experimenting with country and Christian albums along the way.

Five decades later we can step back and admire his trajectory–how he’s pushed himself to grow, defy expectations, and channel that into his art. Time makes this seem inevitable, as if all he had to do was fall in line with destiny. But that fails to take into account the years of criticism, outrage, and uncertainty Dylan faced.

Authenticity–creating from who you are today, despite expectations tearing you in different directions–is not for the faint of heart.

Dylan threw the folk community into a fit of rage when he “went electric.” He could have stuck with what was working and fallen in line with their expectations, but validation was never his primary motivation. He sought meaning over influence at each step of his career. As a result, he achieved exactly that–lifelong influence.

Dylan resonates with people because his songwriting tracks his own development as a human being. His songs reflect who he was–his observations, experiences, and imagination–and who he refused to be at each point in time. Dylan’s career is a master class in embracing the impermanence of identity and authenticity. The fragments of himself that he brought to life shows he understands this in a deep way.

“There were a lot of better singers and better musicians around these places but there wasn’t anybody close in nature to what I was doing. Folk songs were the way I explored the universe...”

— Bob Dylan

There’s no single template for finding your voice as it exists today. It’s different for each person. Legendary director, Steven Spielberg, was quite different from Dylan. Dylan had unusual depth which he developed at an early age. Spielberg developed his own sense of depth over decades.

Spielberg’s progression from Jaws (1975) to Schindler’s List (1993) demonstrates this. In those eighteen years, he grew by finding projects that spoke to him at a specific point in time. What felt authentic to him in 1965 was entirely different than 1993. That doesn’t negate his early work, he was just creating from a different place.

Spielberg’s voice evolved through his films, just as Dylan’s did through his albums. That’s why they’ve remained relevant for so many years. They’ve changed, adapted, and grown. But most importantly, both have had the courage to speak from where they were in each present moment.

Both faced criticism along the way for unpopular decisions, but that’s the irony of the whole thing. People are enraged by change, but if you stay the same you guarantee failure. You lose touch with yourself, a sense of fulfillment in your work, and a deeper connection to your audience.

Before you release your work into the wild, fight like hell to make sure it first resonates with you.

No one gets it right each time. There will be times you lose your sense of authenticity. Not even Dylan and Spielberg are immune to the chaos of life. But when the intention and awareness are there, it’s easier to rebuild and rediscover a sense of momentum.

Life is motion. Authenticity is about finding harmony in that motion.

It’s not always easy, but it’s meaningful. Allow yourself to evolve through uncertainty. When you find the courage to speak from this place, you add unusual depth and clarity to your voice. That’s what draws people in.

Start by reflecting on what resonates with you at this point in your life–experiences, interests, observations, values. Authenticity is your now. No matter where you are, trust yourself to create from who you are today.