One Question. Zero Fucks. Becoming a Fearless Creative.
Dismantling critics in one easy step.
Buckle up, friends, we have haters to ignore …
What does negativity feel like?
As creatives, we all experience it.
You spent days, weeks, months or even years working on the thing then along comes one rando on the internet who doesn’t like it, and what do you do?
Spiral into a negative thought pattern that has you thinking, “Well, I’ll just burn my masterwork, and nobody will ever need to see it again, because I suck and I’m terrible and that one time in 3rd grade I cheated on a math test, ergo, I am the worst person ever and also a talentless sack of donkey shit.”
No? Just me? Anyway, onward …
In the creative space it makes sense that critical commentary cuts. You pour your heart and soul into whatever you are making - be it writing a book, creating art or music, videos and films, and you push it out into the world. You want other people to experience your stories. You seek like-minded tribes. You desire resonance. You want to be seen. When that reaction comes back and it’s negative, it shakes you because you have tied your identity to something and presented it for judgment.
What is judgment, anyway?
Feel free to judge my art. We both know deep down it is magnificent.
Art - all art - is subjective. It’s the observer’s experience that is the frame of reference. Judging art from the observer’s view is the point of art - feel something.
I dislike performance art, interpretive “modern” dance, and abstract paintings.
Taping a banana to a wall, prancing around like a deer in a forest, or throwing a pair of your paint-soaked underwear against a 10’ x 10’ canvas and claiming it’s representative of the struggle between man and his inner self is all absurdly stupid to me.
And some people see what I create in the same way.
Fair.
Creativity comes from your life and your heart. Criticism of such work is by extension a criticism of your identity. You poured time, effort and energy into it. All to have someone say (at best), “It wasn’t for me.” Maybe they even went as far as, “I really didn’t like this,” or the dreaded, “Bro - that’s an orange underwear splatter on a canvas that cannot fit into a front door.”
These days it’s the feckless and supremely stupid, “SLOP!11!!”
Fear not my creative friend, I’m going to show you - with one simple question, how to place all of this into the appropriate dumpster fire so you can step away whistling and can get back to creating in the very next moment.
First …
Meet my big brother, Joe. He’s dead, by the way.
Oh, I’m sorry is the non-chalant way I dropped that fact uncomfortable? Good.
On February 8th, 2019, I was sitting in a restaurant in Las Vegas, 2300 miles away from my brother. I was waiting for an order of nachos and a beer at 10am. (It’s a 3 hour time difference, OKAY? It was like 1pm for me and I was on vacation, cut me some fucking slack).
My sister called, I picked up.
“We lost Joe.”
That was it. My brother was in the hospital for a routine arthroscopic shoulder surgery, under the knife for all of 15 minutes, and his heart gave out coming out of anesthesia.
Over. 54 years old. Four children, teens and early 20s, all of them.
The loss reverberated through my family, my life, my relationships, my friendships, and sent me into a deep, deep depression right after I finished my debut novel, The Caretaker.
Reviews of the book came in, and many of them were stellar. I received an email from someone anonymous that literally told me that my book saved their life.
Negativity came too.
And it crushed me.
What was in view at the time was the negativity, and when judgment of my art came, it felt amplified because the wound was raw. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Joe was about to become something very different in my life.
Finding your creative anchor.
It took me a solid 2 years to get back to creating anything. I was so stubborn that I didn’t allow myself to mourn his passing until 2021, and it took about two years - through 2023, to feel like the mourning was out of my system to a point where I could regularly embrace creativity again.
And then a switch flipped.
Joe became something different once the depression gave way.
He became my anchor.
“He is not here anymore, so to honor him, I’ll keep creating.”
That’s what I kept telling myself, and it worked, but the sting of negative reactions to my work stayed. Yes, I’ll keep creating, but damn it’s so depressing when someone doesn’t vibe with what I’m making.
And at one point when a particularly scathing critique of my work hit my eyeballs and I spent two days kind of wrecked over it …
Joe showed up, and he helped me. He stepped into the role of my creative anchor. I thought of one super simple question, and that question let’s me create with absolute fearlessness of opinions, critiques, or even threats.
Ask the question your Anchor answers …
What’s the question? It’s stupidly simple, but it doesn’t work unless it is attached to something that can ground you in the roughest of seas. Find your anchor, and you’ll find the answer, and you’ll see how much of a difference it makes to you moving forward.
Don’t like that I use AI to create my art?
Don’t like the music I make?
Don’t like my images, writing, or stories?
Don’t like that my creations resonate with others?
Don’t like me because you dislike how I communicate?
Want to cancel me?
Dislike me because you think I have an ego, barely any talent and you’re a “REAL” creative?
Here’s the question I ask myself:
“Does this matter more than my brother?”
Guess what?
The answer is always “no.”
That’s the source of truth. That’s what grounds me in the roughest of seas formed by negativity or hate.
Joe believed in me. He knew I would have success. He supported every single thing I created, or wanted to create. We dreamed about these things together. And when he left, many of my dreams died alongside him.
Until they didn’t. Until new ones presented themselves in a world without him.
So the fact is:
I do not care what anyone thinks. You will not get me to raise the anchor and move somewhere else because what I create isn’t to your liking. I’m staying put. I’m perfectly comfortable. You’ve discovered a “you problem,” and you can go ahead and be miserable wherever you want because it doesn’t affect me in the slightest, and I’m not moving.
Right here. Staying afloat. Doing exactly what I want to do and I don’t give a single solitary thought if you don’t like it. I exist in these rough seas because Joe matters, and I am the storyteller who remains unafraid and wanting to inspire other people that I resonate with. That’s my tribe, and I’m not changing how or what I do because of your opinion.
I don’t care how many followers you have.
I don’t care what your accomplishments are.
I don’t care if what you create is “better” than what I create.
You aren’t paying my bills.
You aren’t making my art.
You don’t matter more than my big brother…
If you believe you can break the bond that I built with my big brother and my hero since childhood, you are either monumentally stupid, or monumentally narcissistic.
I’ll pray for you either way.
So throw the sea at me. Throw the storm my way. Make it as rough, dark, menacing and furious as you possibly can. Scream. Insult. Attempt to cancel.
My anchor is immovable.
And if you’re the creator that struggles dealing with negative feedback or people that have a voice and use it to knock you down?
Find your anchor.
Then ask one simple question:
“Does this matter more than what matters most?”
I’ll wager the answer is always going to be “no.”
Keep creating friends, the world wants to hear your stories.
<3
One Final Thought
If you want to experience fearless storytelling, there is an entire universe of incredible music, fiction, lore and creativity getting ready for an amazing Kickstarter at Alyte.AI. Go. Check it out. Sign up. Say hi to Alyte!
And now I MUST have the Unicorn on a shirt.
The Cupcake-pooping Unicorn looks like an early 70s album cover.