I was in church the other day.
The choir was on fire.
People were screaming and dancing. I even saw someone lying on the floor.
And somewhere in the middle section of the church, third row, I spotted a quiet girl.
I call her quiet because even with all the music and dancing and singing around her, all she could do was sway from side to side with faraway eyes.
At some point, she sat down and fed her eyes on other people’s joy and overexuberance.
After the service, I called her for some questioning.
‘Are you angry at God?’
‘Ah, No, I’m not’
‘I saw you during the service, you weren’t dancing or singing or anything that’s why I’m asking.’
‘Oh, I’m just not the overzealous type in church.’
Now, I could understand that.
So I asked her, what if you were somewhere, anywhere, maybe your house and armed robbers broke in? They point a gun at your head and begin to destroy your property and steal things from your home.?
What if you were on a plane, flying over the Atlantic? Turbulence overpowered the plane and it began to sink in mid-air.
What if you were at a high-tension, dangerous point in your life?
How would you react?
How quietly would you call on Jesus’ name?
Would you be overzealous then?’
As humans, it is easy for us to be myopic, and only see the short side of things.
We don’t do things sometimes, simply because we don’t feel like it.
We don’t feel like working out, so we don’t.
We don’t feel like studying, so we don’t
We don’t feel like praying, so we don’t
We limit ourselves to being driven by our emotions.
At a time I used to pray for this.
That when the time came, the Lord should give me the courage.
I didn’t know when that time would come or what it would entail.
I didn’t even know the type of courage I spoke about.
Whether it was the courage to die,
Or the courage to live.
They call this, the courage to live, discipline, or accountability. It has many names.
The courage to know what you want and do the things that will get it.
It is not related to dancing in church, that was just to emphasize human myopic nature.
It is a CEO habit that must be found in any leader.
However, it is more crucial for us creatives.
For CEOs and Entrepreneurs, it’s a given. It’s obvious that they need to lead the business, be the head.
The position puts them on an administrative psychological path. So just sitting in their office, speaking with employees or customers, gives their brain a nudge to be proactive and productive.
For creatives, not so much.
It can take an average creative years to even first discover that their art is a business and even more time to treat it as such.
Creatives are not placed into any psychological pathway. They are simply normal people.
They have to create that space for themselves and swap out their normal behaviors for the routines of Entrepreneurs and CEOs.
I go into more dimensions of this in my article, You are acting like a Billionaire.
I will cite micro examples, little changes in everyday life that show that the creative has awakened his ‘entrepreneurial’ muscle.
If he wakes up early every day and spends an hour on his craft.
He swaps out the time he would use on social media to learn more about his craft.
He constantly obsesses over his work.
Don’t let the words I use scare you, as a creative, you have to be obsessed with your work. It makes us devoted, and it makes the business grow.
So what happens when we do not have this quality?
Danger.
Your art, craft, business, initiative whatever it is, will die a natural death. A business doesn’t stand without a good leader or a good system.
A business needs to be pampered, to be watered.
A creative who doesn’t believe in his work, who isn’t courageous enough to spend time on his work, is one who will most likely not succeed.
Chances are, if you are a creative still searching up ‘How to Overcome Procrastination,’ you are not invested in your work or you don’t believe your work will succeed.
Another thing about humans apart from being myopic is that they are greedy. They want many things.
Creatives often then fall into this cycle of wanting. They make ambitious goals but then do nothing to achieve them. They then set more goals and the cycle continues.
At the end of the day, they have gaseous goals, goals with no work hours, no feedback, no conclusions, non-existent and unattainable.
When we get to the point when we can order ourselves without necessarily needing permission from our emotions, is when we uncover true power.
True power, that is, power over the self.
The ability to make our own decisions and act on them simply because we have made them.
True power, will get us farther than our myopic minds can see.
It will get us to the point where our business hours are non-negotiable.
And even to the point where we can dance and shout in the presence of God not necessarily because we are the shouty type, but because there will come a time when we will wish we had, when there will be no more time to.
When we can do everything that our emotions have been holding us back from doing.
That is the courage of an Entrepreneur.
