The Innumerable Amount of Variables in this Equation
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I’ve never told anyone this before, but when I lived in LA I developed an honest-to-God fear of the microwave clock. Every morning there it was, staring at me while I made my coffee, counting down the time like the grim reaper in a toll booth until I had to leave for my unpaid internship reading scripts at this small writers’ management firm.
It was by far the least favorite part of my day. Not sitting in traffic on The 101 without A/C. Not changing from my dress shirt into my bartending uniform while driving out of the Valley. Not the leering cougar stationed at the front desk with the wandering eye and weird comments that made me realize sexual harassment goes both ways. No, watching those pale green digital dashes rearrange themselves to march me a step closer to my cubicle prison was the worst.
It had been about 6 months since I had migrated West after graduation, and things were not going to plan. I had moved to California to be a writer, not to be working double shifts at hotels and reading other people’s shitty screenplays for free. The move alone had felt like an accomplishment, but the real hustle began the minute I crossed into LA County.
I didn’t really have a choice. All the money in the world I’d ever acquired and not spent amounted to about $3k, and that went QUICKLY. I had never lived like an adult before, so I was surprised to discover that simply staying alive required things like “security deposits” and “car insurance” that came with pretty steep price tags. Also at that time “cell phones” were becoming a thing, but “family plans” weren’t. Before I knew it I was out of money. Not surprisingly, I had grossly underestimated the time it would take for me to become a critically and commercially successful writer. This is what happens when you’re part of a generation raised to believe they can “do anything.”
Worse, I started to become self-conscious. I compulsively began to compare myself against how other people I knew were doing with their careers. They were working for Goldman’s or NBC or getting their masters at some prestigious grad school. As far as I could tell, I was falling behind.
This is about when I started to slip into my depression. I started drinking more, not just out at bars but during the day, by myself (just like a real writer!) I started to lie about my success (also like a real writer!) and worst of all, I stopped writing.
I became obsessed about finding a job “in the Industry” and started worrying less and less about writing so naturally, I eventually found a job “in the Industry” and all those projects I was working on gathered metaphorical dust on my hard drive because
That which you focus on expands.
Yes! I was now a “Studio Production Associate”, which may sound fancy but actually means you just roll calls for TV executives, remind them when they have meetings, and occasionally pick up $500 bespoke cakes for their kid’s birthday (I didn’t even know they made cakes that expensive).
It didn’t matter that it wasn’t writing. I had a name badge. I had a company computer. I was a professional goddammit. For a hot second I was happy, but it didn’t take long for the luster to wear off the name badge and leave behind a gnawing feeling that ate away at my edges when things were quiet.
If I had “made it”, why couldn’t I sleep at night?
The problem was that I had mixed up my priorities against Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I had made “safety” and “belonging” more important than self-actualization.
How Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Works
Once upon a time in the 1940s, a sociologist named Abraham Maslow came out with what I guess you could call a “theory about how humans feel fulfilled in this life” and it works like this…
Human consciousness is constructed within a pyramid. The goal is to get to the top, but you can only move a level higher once you’ve achieved the level below it.
At the base are the most basic things that need to be met. Food. Clothing. Shelter. They’re known as the psychological needs; the ones you cannot survive without. And if you’re not alive, you can’t be fulfilled as a human. So yeah, they’re pretty important.
The next level in the Hierarchy is having a sense of safety. This can be everything from environmental (like not having to worry about getting shot) to financial (like being able to pay the bills). This is where I first started to get into trouble. I wasn’t willing to go into debt for the sake of creating art (and to this day I still believe that leveraging debt for your passion can be a dangerous decision when done incorrectly) but looking back, I wish I had been a little more willing to bet on myself. Still, being averse to risk wasn’t my real problem.
Maslow’s next level is achieving a sense of belonging. At it’s most basic this is the feeling like someone actually gives a fuck about you. This level includes the universal desire to be loved and accepted, which can be quickly corrupted if you go about it the wrong way. It can scale all the way up to the desire to have everyone adore you (think: Kanye/Trump), or devolve to a constant pursuit of sexual attention (think: anyone who’s ever cheated on anyone). When you’re depressed, this can be hungriest wolf raging inside of you. Which is why it often becomes the strongest one. Which is what happened to me.
The next level is esteem. This is feeling like you matter to society; that your sovereignty as a human is respected, and that you have a voice worth listening to. If belonging bogged me down, then esteem is what stopped my progress completely. I got so caught up trying to feed the esteem and belonging and safety needs that without knowing it, I stopped the journey, and so I laid awake restless at night, having never gotten to the final level.
The last level of the pyramid is what Maslow calls self-actualization– reaching a psychological sense of nirvana. This is the need for doing what is aching in your heart, and this is the wolf I let starve.
Yes, I could afford to go out and meet girls and I was able to pay my bills, but I wasn’t actually doing what I wanted. All day long I would wish I was somewhere else. I hated my job. I hated my apartment. I hated everything around me– even the good things — because the mainstream definitions of success didn’t fulfill my need for self-actualization. That was the gnawing feeling I felt in my stomach when I was alone, and it was making me miserable.
No matter how great, every person at some point has felt like their life didn’t reach their full potential. Every kid has a dream to chase something big. The difference between those who get to the end of that chase and those who don’t is not a matter of talent or ability or resources, it’s simply a matter of focus. Which brings us, Dear Reader, to the educational portion of our article…
HOW TO DO WHAT YOU WANT TO WANT INSTEAD OF WHAT YOU HAVE TO
An artist’s path is paved with uncertainty. Scratch that- everyone’s path is paved with uncertainty. Because everyone is an artist. Being an artist is more than just someone who likes to paint or make music or write. Anyone who wants to deliberately spend their time doing something they love, who wants to leave behind a personal expression of themselves, is an artist. It doesn’t matter what you choose to spend your time on. It can be rapping or accounting or coding or raising a daughter or playing Mobile Strike. Whatever the fuck it is that makes you feel like you– as long as you’re not harming others– it’s your right to pursue. But regardless of the craft you choose, it’s a good idea to know what you’re spending your time on.
Here’s how to do that…
Take out a pen (digital or literal) and write down the top 12 projects you are working on right now. Not daily tasks, but the big picture achievements you’re looking to get done in the next 3 months. Want an example? Here’s mine:
- Find a job I enjoy that pays me enough to keep paying my bills
- Build a relationship with someone where we feel we trust each other enough to want to live together
- Start paying down my debt
- Write for Lamp City
- Podcast for Lamp City
- Keep in touch with my family
- Coach football
- Learn how to golf
- Learn how to hunt
- Do a kip-up
- Read 12 books this year
- Finish LFAD
Next, rank them. Not in order of importance in your head, but in the time you actually dedicate to each.
Be honest with yourself.
Now, rank them again, this time in the order of importance that you would like them to get done.
What do you see? How well do your 2 lists line up?
Are you happy with your rankings?
Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not.
Instead, take a look at each project and ask yourself why they are where they are. What wolves are each one of those projects feeding?
Are you having trouble breaking through to the next level of your pyramid? Maybe something in your environment is holding you back.
Are you not working on what you want to work on? Maybe you need to start pushing yourself a little more, and risking your need for safety/belonging for your need of self-actualization.
Or, maybe the priorities are actually where you want them to be. Maybe spending time with your kids, and nurturing that need for belonging IS actually more important than becoming the next Beyonce. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you are aware of it.
The earlier you can focus on self-actualization the better off you’ll be. With this technique, you can balance your priorities against one another more effectively, and not feel like you’re wasting your time on things you don’t actually want to do. You may come to find that your self-actualization may be doing well at that job, not because you love the work but because you love the life it provides you [safety]. Maybe it’s spending time with your kid to make sure they don’t become an asshole [belonging]. That is your art. That is your expression to the world of who you are as a person.
Everything you’ll ever need has already been given to you.
To achieve self-actualization you only have to work on what’s inside your heart. But you have to do it for the love of the craft, not for the recognition that may one day come of it. Many artists develop a bad habit of trying to look too many steps ahead. They try to see all the different ways their life could go, thinking, “If only this ONE piece gets the financial accolades it deserves, then all will be right in the world.”
Don’t do that.
Not only is it literally getting lost in fantasy land, but there are so many steps between you creating something original and it becoming a critical or commercial success that trying to plan out how each of them goes quickly becomes maddeningly impossible.
There are an innumerable amount of variables between here and you standing on the standing on that stage, accepting the award for Best Picture (or not) and no matter who you are, you don’t get to control all of them.
You have to trust that what you’re working on is working. Even if there are no external signs telling you so. No agent calling you up. No royalties coming in. It’s not about that. It’s art for art’s sake. All you can do is create, you can’t worry about what becomes of it. Once you put something out to the world, it’s reception becomes the property of others, and you don’t get to control that either. Because life’s a bitch.
Art is the reason, if for no other reason than because it is what truly is our own.
It may sound weird, but I miss those days when I was miserable in LA. Looking back, I realize I wasn’t miserable because of the things I did. In fact I was exactly where I wanted to be. I just didn’t look at the situation in the right light. I miss the studio life. I miss the parties in the Hills with the infinity pools and the LA skyline winking on the horizon. I miss the nights sharing cigarettes with the regulars out on the back patio after we’d closed up the bar for the evening. Why is it that we are always wishing we could be somewhere else, never where we actually are? I was making strides towards the life I wanted, even if I was feeding the wrong wolves. I wish I could have been more present during those days, and a little easier on myself; because the art was being made without me knowing.
Control the things you can control. Stay focused on the here and now. Stay present. The swells we create now are the waves we will ride later. You can’t determine if you’re going to get that dream job you want to get, but you can make damn sure that the application you present is the very best version of yourself that you can produce. You can’t make that record deal. You can just make the music.
