Friend-o-mine:

I recently saw the film director David Lynch give a talk about meditation. (He creates renowned bizarro flicks, including Twin Peaks and Eraserhead.) During the Q+A, a Lynch film fanboy got up. This guy couldn’t care less about meditation. His favorite director was in the house, and he’d been given a mic, so he gushed with gusto.

“David, I love your work. You’re my favorite director and Mullholland Drive is my favorite film. My brother and I watch it over and over. But we have a question about this one part. We disagree on what’s really happening in it.”

Homeboy proceeded to set forth the nature of the fraternal dispute.

David let him finish. Then he answered, saying something to this effect:

“Thank you so much. I’m glad you like the movies. I was done creating Mulholland Drive when I finished editing it. Now it’s your turn to interpret the movie as you like.”

Takeaway: Require your audience to co-create with you as they engage with your creations.

The next day, I went to see the radiant Erykah Badu perform. She did a shout-out for “all the 90’s babies in the house”. After their uproar died down, she elaborated. “Listen. I wrote this song when I was pregnant with my own 90’s baby, and I wrote it specifically for you who were born in the 90s. I’ve been waiting TWENTY YEARS for you to be emotionally and intellectually ready to understand this song. I’m so glad it’s time.”

Takeaway: Trust your audience to receive exactly what they need from your work, all in divine timing.

Here’s the last one: I just got back from a delightful trip to Spain. We started in Barcelona, took the train to Figueres to visit the Dalí’s museum, and then made a final stop in Madrid. In Barcelona, of course, we immersed ourselves in the work of the City’s cherished son, Antoni Gaudí. We stayed next door to La Pedrera, had an architect walk us around town for a few hours and teach us about his work, and of course, visited Sagrada Familia.

Gaudí was exceptional in (at least) one important way: he eschewed straight lines as man-made and, thus, necessarily inferior to the God-made curves and lines of nature. So his buildings are swooping, soaring, colorful, curvy devotional works of art: including and especially Sagrada Familia.

If you’ve been to Barcelona or even have ever talked to someone who has, you know the headline about Sagrada Familia: construction began in 1882 and construction continues today. Current eta for completion is 2026 (no typo).

Gaudí’s unusual style rendered it impossible for his projects to be built strictly from blueprints. Instead, he built miniature-scale plaster models, and his assistants constructed the buildings from that. As he began work on Sagrada Familia, only completing a couple of corners in his lifetime, he moved into the church full-time and spent his last few years feverishly working on models for the project.

Catch this: He didn’t even aim to complete the building. His sole mission and focus was to communicate his vision by completing the models so someone else (or many someones) could complete the building.

What struck me was the clarity of Gaudí’s vision and the purity of his motivation, his total devotion to providing a grand place of worship for everyone, rich and poor (not the norm at the time), knowing full well he could never live to see the day of its completion. In the basement of the basilica, we found this quote I loved. He said: “It is not a disappointment that I will not be able to finish the Temple. I will grow old, but others will come after me. This will make it even more grandiose.”

Takeaway: You can’t build anything grand by yourself. Learn to love that. Get good at collaborating, communicate the vision clearly to your co-creators and trust your team to create something more grandiose than you ever could on your own.

Here’s the deal: Those of us who feel called to do transformational work, to lead transformational businesses or market transformational products, can get very hung up in fretting about what the audience will think, whether they’ll love it or hate it, and how on earth we’ll ever get it all done.

But I found a massive chunk of fresh creative power when I got to the place where I stopped fretting about audience reactions and started creating what I feel inspired to and what feels alive for me while I’m creating it. When I feel engaged and alive while I’m creating something or giving a talk, my audience will feel that, too. It happens over and over again.

On the other hand, worrying too much about how something will be received before I write it or say it has a chilling effect. It stops the flow. It’s like trying to edit something as you write it. Your brain can’t work in flow mode and edit mode at the same time. And worrying about the audience reaction to something while you’re creating that thing is like asking for editing input from hypothetical folks in the future.

It’ll pinch you right off from your internal pipeline of inspiration.

Our job as creators and leaders is to stay in that place of feeling engaged, create what feels alive, edit and shape that with wisdom, experience and judgment, and then put it out into the world and continue to shape it with the collaboration of the audience.

Like many of you, my art is my business. I create because I am called to. I create to express myself fully and freely. And I create with the objective to uplift, engage and spark wanted change for my readers, customers and clients. Passive content consumption does not transform people’s lives; content + action + connection does. So I create content and experiences that spark people into action and connection in their real, everyday lives.

So you can see why La Badu’s, Dir. Lynch’s and Sr. Gaudí’s comments prompted me to think about business and marketing and even my team through a fresh lens. I’m moving into a season of program-design and product-building at SoulTour having made a big shift.

Instead of trying to solve so-called business “problems” or overcoming “challenges”, we’re answering these questions:

• What if we trusted our audiences to co-create with us, in the way they activate our content in their own lives?
• What if we trusted in the universal law that everything is always working out for the expansion of ourselves and of humanity?
• What if we applied that to the way we interact with our customers and our audiences?
• What if we trusted that the right customers will come to our work at the right time, and would engage with it in a way that would ultimately work out for their good and ours?

What if we created what feels alive and resonant, after having studied and immersed ourselves in our customers’ journeys and listening to their hopes, dreams, wants and needs?

• What if we then put it out to them, in an highly valuable, but imperfect, state?
• And then, what if we took the feedback we like as a green light to invest more and do more of that, and the feedback we don’t like so much as course correction, instruction about what to do less of
• What if we viewed our audiences, customers and employees as co-creators or collaborators, instead of as the tough nuts to crack we so often envision them to be?

The shift to viewing your audience, customers and team as co-creators and collaborators does a number of things. It shifts the whole energy of your business, for one. Things get more light and playful. Possibilities expand. Innovation becomes the order of the day. It feels more like answering questions than solving problems.

It also shifts the whole energy of marketing, in particular.

It makes it less fraught, less life or death, less win or lose. It turns every piece of marketing, every marketing message into an invitation to your prospective co-creators.

And there are two essential components of an invitation.

An invitation is, first and foremost, a summons. This creative summons, the business and marketing kind of summons, tells your audience your presence is requested by a certain someone, at a certain time, in a certain place.

But an invitation is also a welcome: a preview of the delightful thing you’ve written or created or built for your audience. It’s the message that look, I created this beautiful thing for you. Just for you. I’ve lit the fire, plated your favorite food, turned on your favorite music and when you get here, you’lllove it.

Catch this principle: When you write something and put it out into the world, start your podcast or blog, create an MVP version of your product, or market whatever your work is to market, you are doing nothing more fearsome than sending out an invitation to co-creation. You’re beaconing out a signal to the readers, listeners, watchers, audience members, customers and even partners, employees and investors who will want to play this game of business and life with you, to co-create with you.

The overarching lesson of The Badu, Dir. Lynch and Señor Gaudí is not only to trust your creative process, but to trust the co-creative process. You’ll create with more ease and joy, and you’ll create more grandiose, more impactful, more beautiful things that way.

Head up + heart out,

TNN

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