Brilliant One:

Over the years, I’ve learned that I create most joyfully and flow-fully with this kind of cadence:

1. I go deeper into my daily morning ritual and flow practices, or even into Monk Mode
2. When inspiration strikes, I turn it into inspired action, fast
3. I pour myself empty onto the page or into the spreadsheet
4. Then, I take a sacred pause and tap back into more inspiration: I distract myself from the project and get out into nature, eat delicious things and put my body in beautiful places (including on the bike and in the gym – movement is key).

And I reup my inspiration stores by immersing myself in the art, process and products of other creative beings. In step 4, I often find myself inhaling books about writing, listening to musicians unpack their composition process and watching films about filmmaking.

And so it came to pass that on a plane a little while back, I took a couple of hours to watch the new HBO documentary, Spielberg.

This time, what caught my ear was less about Spielberg’s creative process and more about yours and mine. Spielberg was one of those young savant types. He was an Honors student in the school of 1970’s Hollywood. He had “so much potential”. (Sound like anyone you know?) As a very young man, he sought out and scored some Very Big Opportunities to do Very Big Things.

Things like: Jaws.

At twenty-seven years old, Spielberg was able to write his own ticket. And here’s what he wrote: he wanted realism and he wanted a big old shark. He wanted a $4 million budget and 55 days to shoot the film. And he got all of the above.

He got a six-figure, animatronic sharkbot that turned out to be a hot mess, with a dimpled smile that was adorable, not menacing. Oh yeah: and it sank.

He got the greenlight to shoot one of the first Hollywood movies to be filmed in the actual ocean, which turned out to be a complete sh!tshow of unpredictable lighting, tumultuous weather and near-death accidents. MULTIPLE near-death accidents.

He went way over budget. Like, double. And he went even more over time. Like, triple.

He missed the planned launch date, in the middle of the Christmas blockbuster season. Instead, they launched the movie at the start of summer, when most films bombed.

And you know what happened in the end. Jaws did a’ight. $60M in the first month. First film to hit $100M ever. I’m not overstating this, but that film created the summer blockbuster archetype. No big deal.

All of this from a film whose maker, Mr. Spielberg himself, has since said: “Jaws should never have been made—it was an impossible effort.”

Ok, so back to you and me. What was my big takeaway? Not that geniuses are those who envision and do super hard things, though they often are. Not that geniuses who persist win in the end, though they often do.

What hit me like a ton of bricks was that geniuses make one big mistake very consistently: they underestimate the resources it will take to create their big, beautiful, transformational thing.

We do this because we came to this planet with our spiritual DNA wired for envisioning and creating, but with our human senses fixated on the hard facts of what is real and before us right now. That gap between our vision of the future and our right-now reality can feel very, very uncomfortable. We desperately want to close that gap fast, so we underestimate the time it’ll take.

We do this because our culture has sold us a bill of nonsense about overnight successes and Instagram stars, when even those people will tell you that “overnight” takes about 4 or 5 years.

We do this because we have a penchant for uplifting, for being changemakers and for leading the change. And we have an urgent desire to see the desired change come to pass.

So we underestimate how long it’ll take. And how much it’ll cost.

We do this because we love building things and building upon the things we’ve built. We just want to build more and more. And in order to stay in that inspired creative cycle we mentally overlook some of the real-life time-sucks we’ll likely encounter along the way. This is why literally every startup in the valley has the pattern of postponing launches, releases and updates at least a time or three before they ship.

If you often make the error of starting a big project, realizing that you have underestimated what it’ll take, then figuring it out and finishing it anyway, that *might* mean you’re a creative genius. It certainly does not mean that you’re terrible at your work or that you’ll never ever ever be able to bring your full vision to life. Go easy on yourself and give yourself credit for being scrappy, while you work on getting better at scoping your work in the future.

On a practical note, you might want to take a long, honest look at whether you’re giving your projects the time, money, energetic and even human resources they really, truly need to thrive. If you’d like to feel less of that angst and agitation of feeling under the gun or behind the 8-ball or whatever other positional metaphor you want to use for feeling time pressured, then you might want to borrow a tactic from the accounting world and just add a factor of 25% or 50% to all of your time or money estimates, whichever you tend to come in too low on.

If you run a team or work with vendors, invite them to reality-check you on the time or money it’ll take to do what needs doing. I very literally surround myself with people who are very comfortable pushing back and revising estimates when I’m overly aggressive. You can practice your way out of this tendency, at least when it comes to projects that might blow up or cause problems for other teams if they go over budget.

On another practical note, if your to-do list is chronically frustrating because you could never possibly get even half of it done, try this tactic that works for me: I only allow myself five things on the list every day. Period. That’s it. And I put all five of them, including an hour or so for email, on the calendar.

But let’s set practicalities aside for a moment. So many brilliant beings and leaders turn their habit of underestimating resources into an internal sad song or self-defeating storyline about how behind they are in life and how afraid they are that if they don’t cross their big dream project off the list sometime super soon, they may never get it done before they die.

And that just ain’t right. We are not here to cross things off some big list in the sky to be worthy of our place on the planet (or elsewhere, for that matter). We are here for the joy and the expansion that happens in the process of creating. When creators and leaders and uplifters at any stage of their careers harshly judge themselves, what happens is not more creating, but less. The struggle feels even more real. The internal harshness constricts the flow of creativity and inspiration. We begin to dread and hate the activities and projects and work and customers we once loved so much. We shrink down because BIG feels undoable, given the chronic resource shortage we’ve practiced into our wiring.

Catch this principle: no one truly thrives at an endeavor they despise doing. This is how so many born uplifters lose the joy of life. It’s how so many find themselves in great jobs with brilliant titles making tons of money, yet dreading getting out of bed in the morning, already feeling behind.

Today I’m here to urge you to replace any level of self-judgment, frustration, self-criticism or shame spiraling about your habit of thinking you can create your big dreams faster than you really can with this reframe: maybe this pattern just means you’re an actual creative genius. And creative geniuses have some little twitches and glitches, this being one of them. If the worst thing you do is underestimate time and money needed, that’s fixable. You are not a bad person, a wrong person, a failure or a dilettante. In fact, this pattern is also a sign of a big vision and a big bias for action, both of which are precious and to be nurtured, not grounds for self-flagellation.

In other words: YOU ARE GIVING ME (and all the rest of us) LIFE. You’re on the right track. Lift your head up and your heart out, and keep moving forward—even if it feels like it’s taking so much longer than you’d like.

And one more thing: when it comes to time and money, we’re prone to underestimating how much we will need. But when it comes to two other resources, we consistently underestimate how much we already have:

1. Our own greatness, ability and readiness to do even the things we’ve never done before, and
2. The reservoir of Infinite Intelligence that is always flowing through us and to us, if we let it

So when you are scoping your next project or roadmapping the next month or six of your work, life or creative projects, don’t just crank up your time-needed and money-needed estimates by 25 or 50%. Dial up (a) your estimates of your own brilliance and (b) your willingness to trust that you’ll know exactly what you need exactly when you need it. Twenty-five or 50% will do.

Note: I am BEYOND delighted to be sharing the stage with some of the foremost transformation teachers and leaders of our time— including the rev angel Kyodo williams, Marianne Williamson, Glennon Doyle, Mark Hyman, Paul Hawken and Alicia Silverstone—at the first-ever Wanderlust Wellspring gathering in Palm Springs this October.

Trust: it’ll be next level. Join me: https://wanderlust.com/wellspring/

Head up + heart out,

TNN

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