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Transcript

Permission to Be Impractical · The Daily Writer

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Daily Writer, where we share a lesson each day to help you cultivate the habits for creative success.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have people in your life who are trying to help but they're not really helping?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, who are these people?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: They are the ones who try to talk good sense into you.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: They say things like, That book is a waste of time.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: You can never make money as a writer, or you should do something more practical with your talent.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the problem with this advice is that it's not practical at all.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Every single great work of art, every great invention, and every new idea that moved society forward came as a result of one simple thing.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that one simple thing was that people took a risk and they did something that was considered impractical at the time.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: For example, was it practical for the architects and stonemasons in 12th century France to spend their time building the Chartres Cathedral?
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Or should they have stuck with familiar designs that they already knew?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Was it practical for Nathaniel Hawthorne to spend two years writing the Scarlet Letter after he lost his job due to politics?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Or should he have spent his time trying to claw his way back into a system that clearly didn't want him?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Was it practical for John Glenn, Alan Shepard, and the rest of the Mercury 7 to enter the NASA space program in the 1950s and attempt things that had never been done before?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Or should they have stayed in perfectly good careers as test pilots?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Was it practical for Michael Jackson to start his solo career in 1971?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Or should he have always kept his talent within the confines of the Jackson 5?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Pablo Picasso once said, the chief enemy of creativity is good sense, with the word good in quotes.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, history is filled with amazing artists who didn't do the sensible thing, but instead they took a risk and they invested in something bigger than themselves.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: So should we be responsible?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yes, of course.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: But that doesn't mean conforming to what everybody else expects.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to be successful as a writer or as any kind of artist for that matter, it means taking risks and doing things that don't always make sense to everybody else.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: So give yourself permission to be impractical.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, thanks so much for listening to today's episode.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hope you enjoyed this.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: For more, you can visit us at dailywriterlife.com.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much, and I'll see you tomorrow.