Frustration

Trust Your Struggle

Garth Beyer

Trust Your Struggle Graffiti

I’ve talked about The Struggle before. It’s that time between seeing something you want to make in your head and that moment you realize while attempting to create it, that you aren’t skilled enough.

I’ve had too many of these moments to count, and what got me through them was following a piece of advice that a building told me (graffiti). “Trust your struggle.”

You have to trust that despite your inability, your struggle, and your frustration, that you will gain something monumental out of it. The majority of Struggles I’ve gone through, I have learned the lesson immediately after it’s completion (sometimes poor completion, but lesson learned, regardless).

Other times, it has taken awhile. When I was struggling through NaNoWriMo (writing a novel in one month), trying to force myself to write until it was manifested, I teared up because I was struggling so much. The struggle was real, it was frustrating, but I refused to let my mind, my fear, my inability to meet the perfection I saw for myself stop me from writing. It ended up being a fairly good first book.

If we ever want to create something that we picture in our minds, we have to trust The Struggle.

 

Stay Positive & Trust It, Again And Again

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Where To Find Your Muse

Where To Find Your Muse

Garth Beyer

Find Your Muse, Stay In Your Flow

The feeling of boredom comes to every linchpin, artist, and entrepreneur from time to time. The reason is quite clear: actions have become easy, challenges are few and far between, and there is less need of a growing skill.

As a result, the impresario seeks out larger challenges that require focus, additional connections, and an incessant need to learn new skills to accomplish the goal.

But once the artist sets down that path, she realizes she has set too lofty of a goal, too large of an expectation of herself, too tough of a challenge, so she returns to the start of this post, desiring a calmer path, a quieter challenge, an easier goal.

As Peter Turchi writes, it’s a cycle of satisfaction and frustration. To find our muse we must find the flow between the anxiety of a difficult practice and the boredom of an easy task.

The real problem isn’t doing what it takes to stay within your flow, your muse; it’s noticing when you’re outside of it, when a task is too easy or a challenge too large. Both of which are slippery slopes that lead to failure and resentment.

 

Stay Positive & Be Aware Of Your Flow

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Higher Education Gatekeepers Restrict Innovation

Garth Beyer

Two Yale students made news recently with their creation of a better version of the school’s course catalogue.

The site didn’t make Washington Post news for being a useful website. It made news for being blocked and shutdown by Yale. Just another example of higher education gatekeepers restricting student innovation.

It’s frustrating that while universities endorse the idea of innovation and creativity, they don’t provide the instruments to effectively create within policy guidelines.

Instead, school systems use their policies to restrict innovation. It’s their glass ceiling to creativity.

Some might argue it’s not a ceiling; that it’s the last roadblock to success. I say no.

Ideas aren’t like cars with a cinderblock pressing down on the gas pedal. Ideas have momentum, but when stopped, have to work at building the momentum again. And when two students get so far with an idea, restarting (to accommodate school policy) is more daunting than building some new idea.

The positive part?

It’s much more difficult to stop a passionate idea fueled by frustration.

 

Stay Positive & Take The Dyson Approach

 

How It Works

Garth Beyer

There is a little known benefit to watching how something works.

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For most things, you can read blogs, watch YouTube videos, or flip on the television show How Stuff Works to see how exactly something works. If you’re a real adventurer, you might go to the location of “it” and see for yourself how it works.

The little known benefit of watching how things work is that it becomes ever more difficult to hate it, dispute it, or rant about it.

After seeing this video on how clutches work, I don’t find myself getting angry when I’m shifting my motorcycle and it jerks me forward or backward.

There’s a natural tendency to care more about what we know more about. All opinions change as more information is acquired.

Next time something frustrates you. Learn about it.

 

Stay Positive & Stress Ball Profits Are Now Seeing A Decrease

(how do they even work anyway…)

Garth E. Beyer

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A Couple Types Of Creativity

Garth Beyer

Creativity

The first is unexpected; the type that just comes to you out of nowhere; that moment when you have never been happier to have a notepad in your pocket, or a paintbrush in hand, or pieces of your art around you.  Hirschman would argue that this is the best kind of creativity.

Hirschman wrote:

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding.

The second kind of creativity is a lot like hitting your head against the wall in hopes you will knock out a creative idea. Or, less physically painful, you toy around with different tools and dies you have at your reach until something starts looking like a creative piece of art.

I fancy this second type of creativity. It allows for frustration, it tells whether or not a person is determined and passionate or not.

And heck, if anything, I always say that some people hit their head against the wall just because it feels good when they stop. It’s a win-win situation, whether you end up creating something or not.

 

Stay Positive & If You Don’t Try, You Fail

Garth E. Beyer

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