

What they've said about Life Beyond Reason:

"Kevin Rhodes is a stick of dynamite. This book is a stand for doing the unreasonable with your life, the impossible, and the amazing. Get ready to be blasted by truth, creativity, and spikes of genius. Bravo!"

Tama Kieves, best-selling author of _This time I Dance_ and _Inspired & Unstoppable: Wildly Succeeding in Your Life's Work!_ http://tamakieves.com

"This is a candid, moving, and deeply reflective tale of Kevin's life journey. I felt like I was reading his diary! If you've ever felt obsessed to move forward with something beyond all reason, then you will find a kindred spirit in Kevin!"

Jackie Kelm, author of _The Joy of Appreciative Living_ http://appreciativeliving.com
Life Beyond Reason: _A Memoir of Mania_

Kevin Rhodes

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Kevin Rhodes

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes.  
If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

ALSO BY KEVIN RHODES

Not This Day! Special Features  
(with co-author Gillian Rhodes)

Running For My Life: When Impossible is the Only Option

Apocalypse: Life on the Other Side of Over

Ethos

Tell Me A Story: 104 Short Stories in 52 Weeks  
(with co-author Gillian Rhodes)

Law, Enlightenment, and Other States of Mind

The Legal Times They Are A-Changin'

### CONTENTS

Preface: Baking Bread and Broken Bones

Introduction: Follow Your Mania

In the Beginning

Mania

The Empire Strikes Back

Not This Day!

PART ONE: INSPIRATION

Response, Not Reason

Mission: Impossible

Stuck in Shtick

Wakeup Call

Creation's Risk/Return Curve

Skin in the Game

Adventure Capital

Reason's Last Stand: I'd Keep My Day Job if I Were You

The End of Reason: Buying the Pearl of Great Price

Forget Plan B

Your Voice, Your Time

Show Must Go On

It's Never a Good Time to Jump Off a Cliff

Last Call

PART TWO: PERSPIRATION

How am I Gonna Tell My ___________? [Fill in the Blank]

How to Start Your Very Own Fan Club

Lunch With Conventional Man

You Say You Want a Revolution?

When Mr. Perfect Isn't

The Great Gatekeeper Myth

[Ideas and CorporateSpeak: Or, I Hear One More Idea About How To Do This  
And Somebody's Gonna Get Hurt](tmp_4fed434d36a3f149fe96c361362fc362_ddl9qc.ch.fixed.fc.tidied.stylehacked.xfixed_split_033.html#ideas)

Take a Facer (Not a Bow)

Hell Hath No Fury Like an Ego Scorned

Things Could Get a Little Bouncy Up Ahead

Time to Face the Facts (Or Not)

So That's What Picasso Meant!

It's All About Us, All the Time

Full Accountability: You Mean I'm Responsible for This Mess?!

How Many Excuses Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?

Meet Coach

Giving Up on Quitting

Essence

Accept No Substitutes

Drama Queens Needn't Apply

Disappointment Junkies

Bring It All or Not At All

Mercy

The Way Things Are

PART THREE: A COMEDY OF ERRORS

Too Many Jobs, Gap Vision

(Mis)Management 101

Vive La Fraternité!

You Mean You Want It To Be Commercial?!

Sneak Peek

Afterglow

The Oracle Comes to Visit

Riddles and Puzzles

Caught in the Undertow

Don't Do That to Your Fan Club

The Universe Where We Live

Railroad Crossing

Autopsy

Friend or Foe: The Finale

[One More Time, With Feeling:  
Can You or Can't You Go Home Again?](tmp_4fed434d36a3f149fe96c361362fc362_ddl9qc.ch.fixed.fc.tidied.stylehacked.xfixed_split_066.html#home)

False Summits

Quantum Leap

PART FOUR: TRANSFORMATION

It Wasn't About Saving the World After All

99.9% Pure

Life in the Nebula

March to Mordor

Extremis

Metamorphosis

The Eagles are Coming!

Life is a Story: Make it a Good One

Legends

Life Beyond Reason

Epilogue

ABOUT THE AUTHOR, LINKS

### Preface:  
_Baking Bread and Broken Bones_

This book is about what happens to us when we decide to create the lives we want in the face of every reason why we can't. It's about pursuing our dreams and passions and big ideas, and remaking ourselves and our lives from the inside out . It's about how to face down impossible odds, and what to do when the only path to hope is hopeless.

And a whole lot of other things like that.

I wrote it because one Sunday afternoon I was kneading a batch of bread in my kitchen when I saw and heard a stage spectacle playing out in my head – set, lights, music, dancing, the whole thing.

My teenage daughter walks in. "Gillian!" I say. "We could do a show that's sort of a spiritual journey about these kids who have to overcome fear with courage and hope, so they...." My breath is short and my words come in bursts as I describe what I'm seeing and hearing as it flickers across my internal movie screen. We volley ideas like a table tennis match.

All that's probably no big deal if you're in showbiz, but I wasn't. I was a lawyer, with no background in theater or film. "Screenwriter" and "show producer" had never shown up on a career aptitude test. They weren't on my bucket list. The show just appeared out of nowhere that afternoon – unexpected, unanticipated, unplanned, and definitely unauthorized. Someone or Something had gotten inside my soul, picked up the remote, and switched my life to some new cosmic channel I wasn't subscribed to.

The show wasn't just a sweet little dance recital for my daughter to put on at her high school. It was Broadway and Cirque du Soleil combined: a big, bold, world-embracing show with a life-changing message. The whole thing was nuts, and I went nuts over it. It put a verve in me I'd never known.

Gillian and I sketched out a dramatic line and demo music, and I started cold-calling performing arts people, looking for someone to produce the show. A couple fruitless months and I was ready to bag the idea. There was outrage at home. The show was about not giving up; how can you give up on a show about not giving up?

I booked three days at a silent retreat center, feeling fractured, scattered, indecisive, intimidated. I brought headphones and punctured the silence with our demo soundtrack. By the evening of the second day it was obvious: I was going to produce the show. The skies cleared; ambivalence and indecision vanished; I made lists, drove home, got to work.

I thought I had decided to take on a creative project. I was wrong. Instead, I had decided that my life would change forever.

I never saw it coming.

Turns out it's always this way when life as you know it ends. You think you can envision what will rise in its place, but you can't, not really. And you can't get there from here; you need a whole new you to do a whole new thing.

I know that now; I didn't know it then. Then, I was still a respectable lawyer running a respectable law firm making a respectable living in a respectable community. That very competent persona took a sudden, unannounced leave of absence when the show unpacked its bags, leaving someone possessed in charge.

That would be me, launched without my knowledge on a personal Hero's Journey, complete with monsters, ordeals, and magic elixirs. The particular challenges of my quest included a midlife reinvention, a new business startup, a financial crash and burn, and a personal awakening. Any of those alone would have been enough; taken altogether, they were my undoing.

And my remaking.

Throw in a couple major accidents two years apart, with fractures and hospital stays and drawn-out rehab, and when all was said and done, I was broken and broke.

Now _that_ , I wasn't prepared for.

A couple years into the process, I started writing –collecting my thoughts, trying to make sense of something that made no sense. In time, two moments of awareness turned that collection of thoughts into a book.

First, it became clear that my story wasn't just about me. Countless other people had gone this way, and I'd met a bunch of them – in person and in books. They became my tour guides and fellow travelers. We were all in this together. I wasn't as alone and weird as I'd thought. I had written as Everyman – not just my story, but the story of many. I hadn't experienced anything that wasn't already widely known.

Second, I learned that _I_ _had in fact been possessed_ when I decided to produce the show – possessed by that particular kind of madness that overtakes us in our moments of greatest inspiration. People who study the human brain call it mania, and if you're feeling inspired, it could happen to you, too. In fact, chances are good that, if you've been drawn to this book in that strange and wonderful way that books find us, it already has.

Put those two things together, and the riddle was solved, hindsight made sense of things. It was a Eureka moment, and I wanted to share it.

I was also wary of doing so. Life had spilled a lot of goo all over me, and I didn't want to cause unnecessary mess. I needed to know there was value in what I had to say. I started taking my ideas public: I wrote a blog, conducted interactive workshops, offered my help as a mentor and coach, shared the unpublished manuscript, and generally tested the ideas in countless coffee shop conversations. (If you like, you can read the reviews and evaluations I've gotten from those activities on my website.)

Several years of that, and I was convinced it was safe to tell my story. Which is maybe the ultimate irony. My story wasn't anywhere even close to being safe. There's nothing logical, sensible, prudent, or reasonable about it. Yours won't be either, if you go this way. But in the end, we'll both have a story to tell, and it will be worth it – so worth it, it will be laughable and irrelevant to say so.

Only by then it won't be just a story. It will be a legend.
Introduction:  
Follow Your Mania

This book doesn't promise fame or fortune, and for a long time that bothered me. Besides crushing the remnants of an ego I thought was already rubble enough, it was obvious that my exclusion from the Exalted Assembly of Successful Self-Help Writers Who Successfully Write About Success would be permanently sealed if I couldn't deliver world domination. In the end, the book went ahead without it.

Bummer. I really wanted into that club.

This book has "memoir" in the subtitle, but it's really an audience participation event. It needs you to be overtaken with inspiration, so that you decide to reinvent yourself, make a dream come true, live with passion, or otherwise bring radical change into your world. It needs you to commit to the simple idea that something else is possible for you, and then courageously launch yourself toward making it happen.

Part One, Inspiration, invites you to start. We all have the same reasons for sticking with the status quo. We need strong energy to break out. Inspiration changes our energy, gets us going. It parades out all the familiar reasons Why Not, and invites us to launch anyway.

Part Two, Perspiration, takes on the Resistance with a capital R we always run into when we move boldly toward what we want. We think Resistance is a personal problem but it's not: it's a human being problem; we all face the same obstacles to our big ideas. Turns out most of them come from within ourselves, and that's where we need to look if we want to make progress. Part Two helps you do that.

Inspiration and Perspiration are about creating change, and they take us a long way, but there's more. Eventually our ticket is punched all the way to personal transformation.

Part Three, A Comedy of Errors, is that blurry transitional space between change and transformation. The move from change to transformation isn't linear, it's shift. The work of change is largely about remodeling our internal rules and living by new ones. The work of transformation is about realizing there are no rules anymore, we're just making it all up.

If you don't understand what I just said, you will, once you get there. When you do, Part Four, Transformation, will throw a friendly arm around your shoulders and invite you outside to look up at the billions of galaxies that shine on your new existence. Maybe you'll look up and marvel, and maybe you'll wonder what that has to do with anything. Probably you'll do both.

Which is another thing it's useful to know about this book: each section reflects the awareness and understanding I had at the time I wrote it; I didn't go back and rewrite it from an integrated hindsight point of view. That's why, after you pass through Inspiration and Perspiration and arrive at Transformation, it feels like the book just went somewhere brand new. It feels that way because that's what actually happened to me.

The same shift will happen to you, too, if you get that far, and I really hope you do.

But first we need to get started. How about it?

### In the Beginning

In the beginning, there is inspiration.

Inspiration ignites us. It is both fuel and fire, the match that strikes and the blaze that bursts.

Inspiration thrills us with new passions and possibilities, shocks our unused neural pathways into unaccustomed life. It shakes us awake in the dead of night, urges us to our feet and outside to gaze into deep space. It plays a new tune on a new instrument, until our long submerged essence resonates with a new boldness, stunned at the robustness of its own long-silenced voice.

Inspiration invades our numbed lives, overwhelms our defenses, disconnects our habitual sense of what is normal and possible, detaches our allegiances to status quo. One minute we had an ironclad case for The Way Things Are; the next we're tearing it down. One minute we were drifting and purposeless; the next we have a cause to throw down for.

Inspiration's days are glory days. We revel in their freedom, joy, and passion. These are days of newness and discovery, celebration and vigor, days of wildness and courage and daring, the sweeping dive of new love, the dizzy freshness of everything that's good about life.

Inspiration is our beginning. It is also our destination – the shining new reality we will inhabit when our idea unites with our hope. What we see and think and feel when inspiration first greets us is what we'll see and think and feel on the grand and glorious day when we finally arrive where inspiration calls us to go.

Without inspiration, we wouldn't create at all. At its core is this one idea: something else is possible...and because it is, everything must move aside to make room for it.

And therein lie the seeds of its particular kind of madness.

### Mania

__And all should cry, Beware! Beware!__

_His flashing eyes, his floating hair!_

_Weave a circle round him thrice,_

_And close your eyes with holy dread,_

_For he on honey-dew hath fed_

__And drunk the milk of Paradise.  
__

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Kahn

Wild-eyed and unkempt, staggering under the weight of eternity, mumbling ecstatic rantings... either the guy's off his meds, or he's in touch with reality at a different level than the rest of us. Is he a prophet? A creative visionary? It's hard to tell. Most prophets and visionaries of any kind – religious or otherwise – are considered crazy until history and hindsight prove them otherwise. We can never tell at the time.

People like that are possessed of a special state of mind called "mania." When we're in it, life has a heightened sense of meaning and purpose, serendipity and synchronicity rule the day, and everything in and around us is an amazing unified oneness – perfect, whole, and complete. It's the place where auspicious connections are easily made, where imagination makes visions and dreams come true.

Neuroscientists locate that state of mind in the brain's prefrontal cortex. That's where the brain tells us all is well, where all of our perceptions come together into a meaningful whole, in a happy stew of the right hormones and chemicals in the right balance to make us feel really, really good.

Compare that to the opposite state of depression, where all is disjointed, fragmented, without meaning or purpose, where social bonds are severed and life is a random walk of disintegration, where the most basic life activities are burdensome, and fruitfulness is a pipedream.

Which would you rather have?

I'll take the mania, thank you very much.

I took the mania when I decided to produce the show.

But watch out, the neuroscientists tell us: you can have too much of a good thing. Get the wrong mix in your neurotransmitter soup, and your natural high can be replaced with delusion, hallucinations, paranoia, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, Tourette's Disease, addictions.

Not the prettiest list.

That's why mania is plutonium for the human soul: powerful almost beyond measure, equally suited to creation or destruction, and tricky to control once we let it loose. But dark side or not, mania is why we dream big dreams, and the bigger they are, the more mania we need. If we want to make our dreams come true, we risk mania's dark side.

And now you've had your first warning.

### The Empire Strikes Back

Mania wants big, bold, busting, breakthrough change – doesn't just _want_ it, but jumps up and down and waves its arms and yells that it's already on the way, almost upon us. We smile indulgently for an instant, but then we feel it, too – deep down, surging through our innards, demanding our assent and action.

There we are, droning along in status quo, not particularly thrilled with it but at least knowing what to expect out of life, when inspiration comes along and blasts through our defenses and sets our hearts on fire. Jolts of mania shoot through us; we're liberated and exhilarated, ready to give the world's pillars a good shake.

That's all mania needs to get the juggernaut rolling. From that point, it doesn't hire consultants to help us reengineer or retool, doesn't hold solemn conclaves and symposiums to debate and discuss. Instead, it pounces _:_ yanks us off the bench and pushes us into the game, makes our knees buckle so we step forward to volunteer, dares us to raise our hands and give the answer or ask the question that makes the room gasp.

No more postponing and procrastinating. No more declaring our visions grand and glorious but ultimately not worth pursuing. No more Big Ideas idling on the shelf waiting for the perfect moment that never comes. All that's over. It's time to answer the bell and hope we stay on our feet once we do.

No wonder mania gets us into so much trouble. We should know better. All that throwing caution to the wind can't end well. It feels good and freeing and powerful for a moment, but then look out: we just woke up the sleeping dragon; the Empire of Status Quo is about to strike back.

Status quo is the combined force of everything we're used to being and doing and thinking and believing, everything solid and reliable, lawful and decent and in order about our lives. Status quo makes sense of things, keeps us safe, tells us what's possible and what's not, and makes sure we don't get any ideas. Once mania gets its hooks into us, all that safety and security and predictability has to go. The center does not hold; we go spinning off axis; our lives fly out of orbit.

Mania makes us bold. Status quo makes us pay. Mania initiates. Status quo retaliates. Back and forth the Titans strike their blows and throw their thunderbolts. Their epic struggle is for keeps; there will be real winners and real losers, and plenty of collateral damage. The seas will rise and the thrones will shake. We stand dumbstruck, watching the tempest from afar, when suddenly the wind shifts and we're in the middle of it, scrambling for shelter, fearing for our lives. You know I'm not exaggerating if you've followed the creative journey this far.

And now you've had your second warning.

### NOT THIS DAY!

We named the show Not This Day! We got that from the scene toward the end of the movie Return of the King, where the good guys stand before the black gates of Mordor, a forlorn and hopeless island of good in a sea of unrelenting and inevitable evil. Aragorn rides in front of his quailing army and delivers this speech:

I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day! An hour of war and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down. But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!

Whenever I watch that scene, I don't hear a fictional character's call to a fictional army to stand firm in the face of impossibly long fictional odds. Instead, I hear a call to each of us to stand for the things we believe and hold dear, with the same kind of resolution and courage in the face of the demons that terrorize us, both inside and out.

Aragorn's call is to hopeless action in the name of hope, about moving forward when we're paralyzed with every fearful reason why we can't. That is also _Not This Day_ 's call and calling, and it became mine as well as I worked to produce the show. That's where the real challenges began: watching the show's themes play out onstage was one thing; watching them become real in my life was another.

In time, the challenges of producing the show and undergoing a personal transformation melded together until I couldn't tell them apart. Transformation does that to us: it blurs the lines, takes control, imposes its own rules for how things need to get done. It commands center stage, makes our stories bigger, gives them transcendent themes. It turns us into Everyman, makes it so we're not just living our own troubles, but the shared troubles of what it means to be human.

This book is about that bigger story – the one we all share when we embark on our inspired journeys. To tell my part of that bigger story, I need to refer to my experience of producing the show, but that's only my personal story, not the Everyman story we're all more interested in. Which is why I've tried to keep the specific show references to a minimum.

But now, we have a call waiting: inspiration is on line one. Are we going to answer its call despite all the warnings? Or not?

Let's find out.

### PART ONE: INSPIRATION

" _The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;  
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."  
_

George Bernard Shaw

### THERE'S A CALL FOR YOU ON LINE ONE

Response, Not Reason

Inspiration just invaded our status quo. We feel called to something new. Now what do we do?

Too often, the answer is nothing. The bigger the idea and the more passionately we're gripped by it, the more likely we'll dismiss it out of hand, or at least delay doing something about it. Instead of greeting it like the long lost friend it is, we take refuge in all the reasons why we shouldn't do anything rash. We want to understand what we're getting into, avoid risk, be prepared to cut our losses.

Sometimes we can't get it all worked out, so we don't start. Other times, we start but don't finish. We take the first step, meet the immediate need, face the imminent threat, and then try to hustle things back to normal. We do all that because we value being reasonable, and it's not reasonable to change.

Here's what George Bernard Shaw said about this:

" _The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."_

From Maxims for Revolutionaries.

Reason only works in the bright light of hindsight, and by definition, new is what hasn't yet been. Therefore reason doesn't know anything about it, doesn't understand it, can't explain it, and definitely can't trust it. If reason is going to create at all, it looks at where we are and how we got here, then projects its conclusions into the future, reverse engineering what worked in the past so we can do more of the same in the future.

We call people who operate that way realists _._ They can cite facts, data, track records, past performance. We credit them with being more in touch with reality than daydreamers and visionaries. We trust them to not lead us astray.

Each of us has that realist's voice inside us. Do something new? No way. It's not reasonable.

Inspiration isn't impressed. It wants idealists: unreasonable people who don't give a rip about reverse engineering. Inspiration buys what Einstein said about imagination being more powerful than knowledge. It pushes boundaries, asks us to believe what's irrational, illogical, impossible, even irreverent and heretical.

Doing any of that is hard and unpleasant and of uncertain outcome, which is why we usually choose to be reasonable and adapt ourselves to the world. We keep our day jobs, hedge our bets, cut our losses, try to be prudent and practical... and generally do all the things I didn't do when I was producing the show. And so status quo goes safely on, and we keep living our reasonable lives until one day inspiration comes along and turns us into unreasonable people who want the world to adapt itself to us, and who are prepared to give ourselves to the dangerous ways of mania to make that happen.

Inspiration wants response, not reason. It hooks our hearts, then reels us in. Inspiration isn't just thrilling and fun, it's also unrelenting, insisting, demanding... even violent if we leave it no other choice. If it weren't, nothing creative would ever get started. Or finished.

### Mission: Impossible

Producing the show wouldn't have been impossible for someone who knew what they were doing. Challenging, yes. Daunting even. But impossible? No, not impossible. But for me? Yes, definitely impossible. The list of my lack of qualifications was so long, it wasn't even embarrassing, it was just insane. There was no way I was the right person for the job. Never mind that self-employed people do that all the time – hire themselves to do jobs nobody else would hire them for. But produce a show that way? No way.

Then why did the show come to me, and why did I decide to produce it anyway? Why did inspiration and I conspire to deliberately put me and my money and everybody who might come along for the ride into a venture that any reasonable person would have judged as likely to end in failure?

In the end, I didn't deal in any reasonable way with my lack of qualification, I just took the job because no one else would. It was up to me or I was going to have to let the whole idea go, and I just couldn't. The show had so captured my heart that I couldn't let it go, unqualified or not. The madness of mania had overtaken me.

Once we got rolling, mania was its own reward. Life hadn't been so good in a long time. The hours flew by, and I never got tired; I'd never had so much fun sleeping less and creating more. Synchronicity was the order of the day; everywhere I turned I met somebody who could help with the show: graphics designers, videographers, set designers and builders, composers, dancers, you name it. I was bursting with new purpose: the show's big themes made me feel noble and engaged; I lived everyday with an unshakeable feeling that we were going to do something big and wonderful and delightful for the world, something artistically awesome and thematically courageous. My vision was keen, and what I saw was thrilling: I could just see the show onstage, could see how audiences would respond to it, how individuals and institutions and cultures would be first shaken and then restored, how people would be empowered to do great things, how the world would change because of it all.

That's the way it is with mania. Inspiration serves up the mania in huge draughts, gets us drunk on the possibilities, overcomes our inhibitions and limitations, fills us to overflowing with hope and courage and purpose and meaning, forges connections, compounds our glorious visions into more glorious visions, makes us believe the impossible is just a reach away, that the seas will part and the walls will come a-tumbling down.

Through it all, inspiration persists in its practice of giving Big Ideas to the wrong people: to the small, the weak, the unknown, the unqualified. It's been that way throughout history and legend, myth and story, and it's still that way for you and me. Inspiration doesn't address its invitations "to whom it may concern," it goes looking for the most unlikely champions for its ideas and puts their names on its envelopes, personally delivers them, then waits at the open door for an RSVP. And somehow, it's not a mistake. Somehow, it's meant to be that way.

Besides, what do our past experiences and qualifications have to do with it anyway? We're about to try something brand new. We're painting on a blank canvas. We're going to have to relearn and recreate all sorts of things. If inspiration "knows" anything, it knows that much, and it's betting we can do it.

Who are we to disagree?

### Stuck in Shtick

I wanted to do two things when I graduated from college: make music and write books. So what did I do? I got a job selling life insurance. A few years later I went back to school and got an MBA and a law degree. Then I practiced law for 20+ years.

Makes sense, doesn't it?

Of course it does. That's what we do. We don't follow our dreams. Instead, we do the right, sane, normal, sensible, rational, prudent thing. We reach for the paycheck instead of the stars. Following dreams makes for good movies, but it's no way to live. It's for the chosen few. The rest of us better keep our day jobs.

Rewind, repeat.

And so we go on, living our lives of quiet desperation. We think we can get away with it, but we can't. Our unlived lives take up energetic space in our souls. We stuff them down there out of sight, but they want out. They need an outlet, and all that repressed energy will find one by itself if we don't give it one first. That's why guys buy their midlife sports cars.

Every now and then we unearth that energy unwittingly, and we're surprised by how it makes us feel. It's like finding that dusty box full of memory-rich stuff: a handprint from kindergarten, our high school letter jacket, a wedding napkin, a baggie full of moldering coins from an overseas trip....

"Wow, look at that! I didn't know I still had that old thing!" We try on the jacket to see if it still fits. We'll feel it on our shoulders, turn it over in our hands, and all the feelings come back.

It's not about the stuff in the box, it's what it represents: what we once were, what we once wanted to be, what we might have been. It feels good to feel the old feeling again. But it hurts, too, and that's what makes us close up the box and put it away. Reality takes over. There's no time for nostalgia in normal life. We've got work to do, responsibilities to meet. Back to sense and sensibility. Back to Plan B.

Rewind, repeat. No wonder dreams don't come true.

If you're like me, you created a shtick to explain why you weren't doing what you really wanted to do. Your shtick, like mine, probably wasn't particularly creative. Probably both of us just reached for the old standby: the "gotta make a living" speech. That one's been used over and over again, but for some reason we never get tired of it.

We have lots of practice with it. When we were kids, the adults told us, "You can be anything you want!"

"Cool!" we said.

Then they got serious. "But you know you really need to have a backup plan – something you can do to pay the bills if your dream doesn't work. Better have a Plan B."

"Um, okay, I guess," we said. So we learned the Plan B Shtick. And then we grew up and taught our own kids the same thing.

We think the Plan B Shtick is something to be proud of, because it's the _adult_ thing to do. It's the way we write "I will not cause my parents and in-laws and all the other people who think they know me heartache by trying to follow my dreams" 100 times on the blackboard every day of our increasingly empty and frustrated lives.

Funny how, in our moments of greatest desperation, there's not much consolation in doing the right, sane, normal, sensible, rational, prudent thing. "Hope deferred makes the heart sick," goes the proverb. Yeah, that about sums it up.

Stuck in shtick?

Maybe it's time to get unstuck.

### Wakeup Call

When I decided life was a matter of sticking to my shtick, I consoled myself by saying that, maybe by the time I was 50 or 55 (really old!), I might have something to say worth saying, and then I'd start writing books. In the meantime, I'd get a real job and maybe do music on the side. Promise made, I was off to the Land of the Day Job.

Have you done that? Not advisable. It will hurt you.

November 2006, Copper Mountain, Colorado, I'm 53 years old. I'm fresh from an easy morning, chillin' in the noonday slope-side sun, drinking coffee and eating Oreos. Back up to the top for another crack at some moguls. And then BAM!! Life invokes the "sometime when I'm 50 or 55" clause of our old agreement. A few minutes later, I'm sitting on a snowy ridge overlooking an expert run, waiting for the wave of nausea to subside. I knew it was bad when I fell. Am I going to ski down or take a ride on a ski patrol sled? I get up, try a sweeping right turn. Searing pain sends me crashing. I try a left turn. Same result. If I want to get down on my own steam, it's going to require short, quick turns and no stopping. A few minutes later, I stand at the bottom, unable to unclick my bindings and step out. I've just skied 2400 vertical feet on a shattered pelvis.

It was a wakeup call. Once awake, I would listen when _Not This Day!_ showed up a few months later. _Not This Day!_ took over from there, became the wakeup call to end all wakeup calls. Even that wasn't the end; more wakeup calls would follow, and after each of them, it was time to deal on a whole new level.

A former Marine Corps drill sergeant told me how they "greeted" new recruits: stomping into their barracks at 3:00 a.m., shouting and cracking whips. "I guess you could say we gave them a wakeup call," he chuckled. Then he got serious. "They needed to know right away that they weren't in Kansas anymore. Otherwise they weren't going to survive boot camp, let alone the kind of combat we send them into."

I designed _Not This Day!_ to open with its own wakeup call: a newsreel style video Prologue that parades the insanities of our world in front of us, hammering the point home with driving techno music. Our videographer gave me what I asked for, but the first dozen or so times I could barely stand to watch it. It made me cry in that way that makes your guts hurt. It still hits me hard, every time. I'm not inured to that stuff, and don't want to be.

Some people urged me not to put it on our website or promo disc. "It'll give a wrong impression," they said. "People will think the whole show is like that." So we added an intro with me explaining, "Don't worry, this isn't the whole show, it's only where it starts. The show ends with a hopeful message, really it does." It didn't help. People didn't believe what I said, the Prologue hit them so hard. It would take the whole show to convince them there's still hope.

Then why did the show begin with it?

Because it's a wakeup call. I wanted the Prologue to create tension, discomfort, dissonance, not with sensationalism, but with an unflinching look at what's uncomfortable in our world right now. Wakeup calls like that jolt us into a present, unpleasant reality. They leave us feeling disoriented, lost, and afraid.

But just because we're exposed to something unpleasant doesn't mean we'll wake up. It's only a wakeup call if we receive it as a call to change, otherwise it's just an episode we try to get behind us as fast as possible. But if it wakes us up, we'll get the message that what we're seeing isn't just about what's going on in our world, it's also about what's going on inside of us. Being willing to hear that message is what transforms the Prologue from a bit of artistic unpleasantness into a wakeup call, and that transformation invites us to the transformation of ourselves.

"This is where we live," the Prologue says, "And if we don't like it, then change starts right here, with us. We start right here."

Lots of people have gotten nasty wakeup calls this century: the terrorist attacks, the Great Recession (what was so great about it?), personal tragedy, job loss, business failure, downsizing, foreclosure, bankruptcy. When things like that happen, we like to blame forces we think are out of our control: it's the economy, the politicians, the terrorists, whatever. Pointing the finger like that is like hitting the snooze button; we just roll over and go back to sleep, hoping somebody else will fix the problem.

Staying asleep keeps our shtick in place, keeps us numbed and preoccupied, perpetuates the illusion that our unhappiness and discontent are someone else's fault, makes us forget the "maybe one day" promises we make to ourselves. But our souls don't forget; they think we should keep our end of the bargain. They know why we're here even if we don't, and when we make a deal to reclaim ourselves one day, they remember. Shtick is a web of lies we get tangled in; sooner or later it trips us up, and the truth comes out.

Every now and then I remembered my deal with Shtick – usually when I was particularly unhappy with The Way Things Are. On those occasions, I tried to accelerate my freedom date, so I wouldn't have to wait until I was 50-something. Those tries always went badly – my contrary commitment to the Land of the Day Job made sure of that.

"Not now," it would scold in its annoyed parent voice. "Maybe later. We'll see when we get there. In the meantime you better behave yourself, or there won't be a later."

Meanwhile, my unlived life – the one that got submerged because of my deal with Shtick – kept biding its time, waiting for the opportune moment to burst out, which came that first week of ski season. Two days before the accident I had lectured myself about how I really needed to stop being so bitter and cynical about not keeping that old promise to myself. It was never going to happen, so I needed to get over it.

Two days later I was in the hospital. The time clause in my old Shtick deal had been invoked. It was time for a new life. _Not This Day!_ arrived three months later. I got my new life, alright, and then some.

I made a pilgrimage to the site of my ski accident the following summer, and said a little prayer of thanks. There was a flat rock on the exact site that was scorched black, as if lighting had struck there. It was the only one around like it. I'm not kidding. I'm sure it was just a coincidence; there were probably other charred rocks around there I just didn't see.

No, not everybody has to fall on a snowy mountain like I did, or on a hard pavement in a bike crash, like I also did a couple years later, but all of us need to be ready to deal when our dreams come calling. And if we make a deal to postpone the day of reckoning, we better be ready to keep our end of the bargain when the due date comes around. Otherwise, if fall we must, then fall we will. Our dreams have personalities like wolverines: they wrap our hearts in a death grip and don't let go; they deliver the wakeup call over and over, until we finally get it.

And if they need to hurt us to get our attention, they will.

Lucky thing.

### THE ECONOMICS OF INSPIRATION

Creation's Risk/Return Curve

The Way Things Are gets suddenly solicitous when it thinks we might actually go for it. It takes us out to lunch, leans over the table. "We need to talk about risk/return," it says.

That'll squash your passion about as fast as when your fiancé hands you a prenuptial agreement.

We did a _Making of Not This Day_ video in the early days. At the end, the interviewer asks what if we can't complete the show. I struggle with the question, and finally answer that I can't imagine not finishing what we've started.

Just like you can't imagine not staying married to the creep who just handed you the prenup.

Sooner or later, we'll be right or wrong. Either I'll complete the show or I won't. Either you'll stay married or you won't. Either we'll be poster children for why you should listen to your heart or for why you should never, ever go there.

How do we assign risk/return odds to that?

Creation is risky because you can't control it. It puts things in motion and you don't know where they'll end up.

Plus, creation is doubly risky because it requires faith, and faith is risky business no matter what the context. You've got to believe in your dreams to follow them, and either your faith is going to be rewarded, or you're on the fast track to disappointment and despair. We rarely fall as hard and fast as we do when our faith lets us down. It's a long drop from the pinnacle of inspiration.

A guy who helped with the PR for _Not This Day!_ said he was doing it in the name of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. He was being clever (you'd expect that from an ad guy), but dead-on serious: _Not This Day!_ was a long shot, to put it mildly.

How do you draw a risk/return curve for a lost cause? I actually tried – got out the graph paper and started creating formulas and drawing curves. I couldn't do it. Apparently the risk was infinite, and I didn't know how to draw that.

Showbiz is risky. How could I know if our show was too risky? Doing my market research, I learned that Hollywood uses data-mining techniques to predict box offices – mostly based on star appeal. But what if you don't have a star in your show?

Broadway has been trusting hunches for a long time. A few years ago the Nielsen company thought it could do better and teamed up with a ticketing and theater news company to create a service called Live Theatrical Events, which began its consulting life by successfully redirecting the target marketing for _Wicked_. It also worked magic for _Altar Boyz_ , whose producer said he'd never do another show without it.

Not a bad start, but a lot of people on Broadway were skeptical. Others were downright hostile. "Whadaya mean, polling data? You need to trust your gut! That's what we've always done!" How's that for The Way Things Are talking? You can almost hear the cigar ashes hitting the desktop. I once read that 9 of 10 Broadway shows don't recoup their costs before closing. If that's true, then apparently even the most experienced guts on Broadway have a pretty bad batting average.

Why even have a debate? Why not do both: trust your gut and look at the polling data? Because that would be like signing the prenup. No doubt somebody's researched the odds for a marriage with or without one. It might be wise to know; it might not. But good odds or bad, a prenup doesn't exactly put you in the mood.

I say go ahead and do the research and sign the prenup and trust our gut. Head makes cloudy; heart makes clear. If our gut says yes, we're going to go for it.

EVERYONE will tell us for crying out loud at least be prudent, don't bet the farm, hold back a reserve, have a Plan B, don't mortgage everything to the hilt, and whatever you do, don't cash in the IRA and 401k! All of that's good, reasonable, sane, and sound advice, which we'll ignore when we figure out that inspiration isn't asking us to play it safe. Dreams don't suffer compromise. No one gets excited about small, compromised visions.

Which is why we'll go ahead and invest everything we've got. And then we'll throw in the rest. Our dream is going to get it anyway, prenup or not. Our dreams require all of us, which includes all we've got.

Go big or don't go.

Bring it all or not at all.

All the time. Every time.

That's our new deal with life. The risk/return curve of our new deal can't be charted, but we'll agree to risk it anyway. It'll cost us everything, but we'll pay it.

Besides, what are we saving it for? Another unlived life?

### Skin in the Game

You wanna play, you gotta meet the ante, and not just once, but every new round. That means the longer you play, the more you stand to lose, and that means every new round starts with gut-check time.

During the first few months of _Not This Day!,_ I kept facing the question, "Am I really going to do this?" The answer kept coming back yes, but what "yes" meant kept changing.

At first it meant, "I'm going to find someone else to do this."

Then it meant, "I'll do it myself."

At first it meant, "I'll find investors."

Then it meant, "I'll bankroll it myself."

At first it meant, "I hope no one notices how much time I'm spending on this."

Then it meant, "I'll leave my law practice to do this."

So it went, and so it goes. Up goes the ante, and in go the chips. We keep playing, round after round, pushing our chips into the middle until they're all out there.

People in the investment world talk about having "skin in the game." Translated, that means, "You want our money? Then put your own in first." A good pitch isn't enough; we also need to put our money where our mouth is. Besides, it's not about money, it's about commitment.

Commitment requires confidence, which literally means "with faith." The "fidence" part comes from the same root as "fidelity," as in faith, loyalty, allegiance, perseverance. Take the fidelity part out of confidence, and all you've got left is the "con" part, as in con man. It's one thing to lose someone else's money; it's another to lose our own. If we won't risk ours, why should someone else risk theirs? We're saying one thing while doing another, hoping somebody else will take a risk we won't. That's what conmen do, and savvy investors can usually smell one coming – Bernie Madoff notwithstanding.

We'll pass, thank you.

The longer we stay in the game, the more it's clear we're not trying to con anybody. We're not just betting on an idea, we're betting on ourselves – that we can do this. That kind of confidence goes way beyond any question about whether we've got skin in the game. It doesn't just run a cost-benefit analysis based on polling data or star appeal, doesn't just hire a lawyer to review the prenup to make sure our interests are protected. Instead, it shinnies up infinite risk/return curves, burns bridges, jumps off cliffs, marches straight into the teeth of countless teeming hordes of murderous orcs waiting in Mordor.

Confidence is how we speak with more than just our words. We turn inward and ask – _again, again, again – whether we've really given it everything we've got, emotionally,_ financially, and otherwise. And if we haven't, we ante up whatever we're holding back. We don't just toss chips into the pot; we lay heart and soul on the line, bet all of who we are and all of what we've got, inside and out.

Every big project has times when it's going nowhere. Whenever that happened with _Not This Day!_ , I'd go looking for those hidden pockets of doubt and unbelief, places in me that had quit watching the show and were looking around to find the two nearest exits. Invariably, I'd find new ways I was holding back.

Busted.

I'd have to take yet another deep breath and push the chips I'd been withholding out onto the table. Money, energy, commitment... it doesn't matter what it is, if we've been holding it back, we need to throw it in.

"What's it gonna be?" our Big Idea keeps asking. "You in for another round? Or you ready to fold 'em?"

That's a rhetorical question. When we're talking about our dreams and Big Ideas, folding isn't an option. We've got our shot, and this time we're taking it, not faking it.

Skin in the game?

Check.

Met the ante?

Check.

Kept meeting the ante?

Check, check, check, and check.

Okay, good start. We're still in the game. But now a higher standard kicks in – the confidence standard. Confidence says all in, or no deal. All the chips into the pot. No folding. No quick exit. That's how we play this game. If you wanna play, you gotta be all in.

You in?

You all in?

Okay, good.

Deal 'em.

### Adventure Capital

Now that we're in the game, we need a game plan.

Sometimes planning becomes procrastination. We get stuck in the paralysis of analysis. We do that because we're afraid, and planning is how we put off the day of reckoning. Stay stuck long enough, and we'll quit before we start. Crisis averted.

Assuming we don't fall into that trap, there are lots of ways to plan: draw on napkins, make vision boards and do affirmations, write detailed business plans complete with market research, budgets, and financial proformas (my approach), whatever. Pick one – they're all good.

But, no matter which one we pick, they all have the same problem: when we're planning for the adventure of our lives, our normal planning approaches don't work. We've been using them to create the reality we've decided to change, and we can't use the old to create the new.

Are we getting this yet?

Which is why my plans turned out to be mostly irrelevant. They were fine as far as they went; they were all by the book, but it was the wrong book. It was crazy for me to try to produce the show in the first place, but trying to do so using a textbook planning approach... now that was crazy.

When a business asks for money in the land of The Way Things Are, it gives you a prospectus that lists all the "risk factors" of the proposed investment. Most are standard issue, carefully-worded statements, and what they say amounts to something like, "Hey look, we already thought about everything that could possibly go wrong and now we're telling you about it so you won't even think about giving us your money." About what you'd expect from something designed to comply with securities laws.

Those kinds of risk factors aren't much use even in the land of The Way Things Are. Applied to the creative process, they don't just miss the mark, they shoot at the wrong target. They focus on circumstances out of our control, but in the creative world the real risks lie inside of us. What we really need in the creative world is a risk factor that says, "The creative visionary might get carried away." That's a real risk. It's huge. It's so real and so huge it can crater the whole enterprise.

Inspiration calls us to adventure, which is unpredictable by definition. Adventure always involves surprises – some happy, some not – and the risk isn't so much in the unexpected circumstances, but in how we deal with them, especially when we're under mania's influence. That's the Mania Risk Factor. It's inherent in the creative process, and we ought to consider it in our plans.

We're not talking about venture capital here, we're talking about _ad_ venture capital: how _we_ will respond to those surprises when the mania runs high. That's when we get the adventure capital calls, and when they come we'll need to go digging deep into the dark deep pockets of our own souls to find what we need. Whether we do or not is yet another creative risk.

My _Not This Day!_ business plan actually had a risk factors section – not the standard issue, but a list of risks I honestly thought someone ought to think about before they did what I was trying to do. My plan didn't include the Mania Risk Factor; I had no clue about it at the time.

My plan also set performance and risk management benchmarks, just like it was supposed to, but once again I didn't take mania into account and assumed I'd stick to those benchmarks when things got exciting. Not so. In the heat of the mania, those benchmarks were like dissenting board members, always out-voted while everybody else rubberstamps whatever the business founder wants to do. That would be me, upping the creative ante. That would be me again, rubberstamping my own cost overrides. The only question was how far I was willing to go with this new love affair that had so entirely swept me off my feet. The answer turned out to be far enough to get in way over my head.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying don't plan. Not at all. I believe in planning. I create financial spreadsheets with the best of them. Our creative visions have a funny way of getting achieved when we write them down in the form of goals. I am saying, though, that when it comes to pursuing our Big Ideas, our plans would be better if they could somehow address Mania Risk and assess the amount of adventure capital we've got in the deep pockets of our souls.

Whether we think they could ever do that or not, it's good just to remember that mania is not a mistake, it's an essential part of the creative journey. No mania, no creation. Period. We can't plan away mania, and we don't want to.

And really, isn't life risky? Wherever did we get the idea it could be any other way? And isn't pursuing our Big Ideas about creating on a whole new level – one that embraces life in all its glorious riskiness? Besides, what do we really stand to lose? Just the lives we didn't want anyway. That's what's really at risk.

We can't plan for that risk. We can only take it.

### Reason's Last Stand:  
_I'd Keep My Day Job if I Were You_

The Way Things Are likes to quote lines from _Shtick For Dummies._ You're familiar with one of its favorites: "I'd keep my day job if I were you."

Translated, that means, "Don't get carried away. It's been tried before. Who do you think you are anyway?" And blah, blah, blah – all insulting and unoriginal advice. What if we're not buying it? What if instead we think we've got something worth cashing in the 401k?

That's when we turn pro, and keeping the day job be damned.

Most people don't do this; maybe most people shouldn't. The ones who do aren't exactly good role models. They're the creative fringe, the radical, aberrant few. They left the safe center of the bell curve behind long ago, and now they're statistically irrelevant, three or more standard deviations out from normal.

Ever notice that great people live unbalanced lives? It costs a lot to do that, and the creative fringe are willing to pay the price – not to be great, but because they've got something that keeps them up at night. They think getting a life is overrated. They work too hard and don't know when to quit. They spend too much money, mostly their own. They're often not likeable, or fun or safe to be around.

They're also the creative leaders we need in our world – especially right now.

Maybe you're one of them. Maybe, if you've tried and failed at normal, if you won't be fully you unless you lay it all out there, if you're going to be forever wondering if you could have done it that one time when you were so tempted to just go for it... then maybe this is the time for you to finally do just that.

Maybe inspiration has something in mind for you other than normal. Maybe it's time to take a trip beyond the edges of the map, where the seas are uncharted, out where there be dragons.

Ever looked down the throats of those dragons?

I have.

Now there's a story worth telling. It could be yours. And I guarantee you won't be hearing or telling it in the break room at your day job.

### The End of Reason:  
_Buying The Pearl Of Great Price_

Passionate, sold-out people with Big Ideas don't ignore risk/return curves, they transcend them.

Jesus told a story once that makes me wonder how it ended. He said the Kingdom of God is like a pearl merchant who found the "pearl of great price" and sold all his pearls to buy it.

The guy is a pearl merchant. He buys and sells pearls for a living. He's found something really good, something he really wants, something that's totally captured his heart. His wildest dreams have come true.

So what does he do? He sells all of his inventory to buy one stinking pearl. Obviously he's lost it. He's drunk with inspiration and his judgment is impaired. This is madness, the end of reason. He's gone over to the dark side of mania.

Jesus said it's because the pearl merchant found the Kingdom of God. Okay, fine. Good for him. He found his bliss. That's a good thing. Can't argue with that.

But what I want to know is, now what's he going to do? He can't make a living anymore – he's got no inventory to sell. He's like a car dealer who sells everything on the lot to buy the Batmobile.

This is a good thing?!

I mean, how are the pearl merchant's kids going to eat if dad just put himself out of business? He needs the rest of us to slap him out of his stupor before he does any more dumb things.

And what about the rest of us? Now where are we going to buy our pearls? All he's got in the store is some absurdly big old pearl he pets like a kitten. We need him to get over this phase and sell that thing and re-open his shop. But every time we try to talk to him about it, he just gets choked up and starts going off about it and wants to show it to us. Like we care.

It's all a big nuisance. We need him to get back to The Way Things Are.

But he's not coming back.

We might as well get this now: visionary people who pursue dreams that consume them at the passionate, essential core of who they truly are... those people do crazy things. They're out there on the edge with the wild-eyed few. By any standard of normalcy they're delusional. They're no longer productive citizens. They take irrationality to new extremes, become a danger to themselves and others.

You might be one of them.

Sure, there are exceptions to every rule. You might be the kind of merchant who can buy the pearl of great price and still get an unsecured loan (no way you're going to put that thing up for collateral!) to finance some new inventory. If so, good for you. I mean that. I wish I was. But I'm not, and most people I know aren't either.

The rest of us are going to have to sell our entire commitment to The Way Things Are in order to buy the thing inspiration showed us. That's the cost of our freedom. From this point forward, whenever The Way Things Are wants to sneak back in and rob us of life, it'll have nothing on us.

It can keep its stuff. We'd give it back anyway, even if the prenup didn't say we had to.

### Forget Plan B

I suppose the pearl merchant could plead temporary insanity. The Way Things Are probably already suggested that. But I doubt our man is going to cop a plea.

When we're about to do something huge for ourselves, there's no point in asking The Way Things Are for advice. It will have nothing useful to say. It knows nothing about where we're going or how we're going to get there. If it can't scare us off immediately, it will urge caution and orderliness, careful preparation and planning – all to the nth degree.

Yeah, like the rest of our lives are like that.

If we're going to answer inspiration's call, we have to neutralize The Way Things Are's chief argument, which is that what we're about to do is unreasonable. We do that by conceding the point.

Am I making this up? _Yes, I am._

Am I crazy? _Yes, I am._

Is there anything to be afraid of? _Yes, plenty._

Am I going to do it anyway? _Yes, I am._

Now can we get on with it?

Sometimes we need to get crazy to get what we want.

Plan B is Risk Management 101. It's about hedging bets and managing risks. It's for ideas that might not work, and if they don't, it's no big deal, we can always try something else. If that's the case, then we're not dealing with a Big Idea anyway, and we might as well reach for Plan B and save ourselves the trouble. But if what we've got really is a Big Idea, then it's Plan A or bust, and risk management be damned. Holding onto the possibility of Plan B means that's where we end up, and no Big Idea should have to suffer that indignity.

Plan B says we can't afford to fail.

Plan A says we can't afford not to try.

Forget Plan B isn't for everyone, or everything, or all the time, but sometimes it's our only option. Some things are worth doing no matter how insane they are, like selling a whole shop full of pearls to buy just one. Or deciding to release the unlived life whose cries for freedom have been haunting us.

Or taking on the challenge of producing a show that arrived one afternoon over a batch of bread.

We've done the research on normal. It's time for something new, something unreasonable.

Something insane.

### LAST CALL:

Your Voice, Your Time

Things get scary when we go public with our creativity. Belting it out in the shower is one thing; bringing it to the house is another.

I had an object lesson with this a couple years back. I decided to do a one-man show, just me and my music and stories. Word of my plans got around the gym where I worked out, and pretty soon all these guys – many I didn't know – started stopping me between reps to tell me about their own musical talent, how many instruments they played, the bands they'd played with, how they'd performed and recorded and promoted music for years.... It gave me a complex. How come _they_ weren't the ones doing the show?

Then I realized, that's just the point. They weren't the ones doing the show because they _weren't._ The show was my deal, not theirs. They weren't the ones who got the idea and wrote and rehearsed the songs and the monologues, who booked the hall and got the sponsors. I did that. I had the vision and was executing it. They might have game, but on that particular night they weren't bringing it. When the houselights went down, it was going to be me up there in the spotlight.

I became a rehearsal animal. I worked on phrasing and intonation, pacing and transitions. I found the kernel of emotional truth in each song and monologue, memorized my patter and delivery like I was learning lines from Macbeth. I put up posters and called the local papers and button-holed friends to come.

Along the way, a friend gave me some priceless advice: "Kevin, you need to do the three S's: show up, stand up, sing out."

That's the call all creators share. Bring what you've got, and bring it in your voice. The crowd is here for you, and you're here for them. Give them all you've got, and give them all you are. It's your message, your time, your voice. No holding back.

Show up, stand up, sing out. That's what you want, and that's what we want from you.

So what happened with my concert?

We filled the house.

And then I brought it down.

### Show Must Go On

Our videographer from _Not This Day!_ filmed my concert. When Ray walked in to set up his gear, he stopped in the middle of the seats and turned around, sniffing the air. "Ah," he said, "This smells just right."

He was experiencing one of the greatest joys I've experienced in the world of theater: the thrill of walking into an empty one.

The stage is bare. The maze of lights hanging overhead is dark. The fly space above recedes into deep space. Only the working lights are on, casting angular spills of dim yellow onto the stage through the black drapes. The wings are cluttered with shadowy sets and props. Grids and catwalks and rigging crisscross in the darkness overhead. Cords and wires and outlets and switch boxes are everywhere. Backstage is a cavernous mystery.

And, yes, there is a certain smell to it.

It's all there, full of possibility, waiting for the magic. It's the universe in the micro-milli-nanosecond before the Big Bang.

Yeah, Ray my friend, this smells about right. In fact, it smells like everything we ever wanted. It's not just the vast swirl of infinite possibilities that makes your head swim. It's the sudden realization that what's possible is us. We are the message. We are the story. We are the show.

And we are about to go on.

We don't create out of nothing, we create out of chaos – the wild swirl of unformed energy from which universes are made. The chaotic energy of inspiration pulls us into itself, requires us to become it, to live it. We don't create from our habitual place of detachment; we get all the way in, until there's no distance between us and the act and fact of creation. We get inside the infinitely minute and heavy mass that's about to detonate, so that when it does we can ride the explosion all the way out beyond the farthest galaxy.

Once we commit to the life of creative belief, our lives will be immersed in chaos. That's where we will find first our message, then the voice to carry it. If we do that, then on opening night all that chaotic energy will explode into a creation far beyond what even we imagined. We will witness our own signature Big Bang, the one people will know us by.

I believe this with all my heart – so much that I would be there on opening night if I were the only person in the theater. You don't get a chance to witness a Big Bang every day.

From the time the first call goes out to beginners and all the way to the big finale and the curtain calls, we need to be there. Creation does not suffer life in hiding. Creation requires that we be there, in every scene, all the way, all the time, until the show is over.

If we have any intention to live, to be the people we want to be and were intended to be, if we're going to find our own voice and if our dreams are going to come true, then the show must go on.

Will you be there?

### It's Never a Good Time to Jump off a Cliff

Inspiration doesn't have a watch and doesn't believe in calendars. It doesn't know or care how old we are or whether we've got all our ducks in a row. It loves good stories with lots of adventure, and the best ones always start at the most inconvenient, illogical times, in rash, impulsive ways.

That's not what The Way Things Are taught us. It wants logical and orderly, wants us always to be ready to explain why we're doing what we're doing. And it better be good.

That's no way to tell a story. I say forget neat and clean and orderly – let's go jump off a cliff!

Are you called to create your Big Idea? Then jump. Shut your eyes if you need to, but just jump.

Don't wait until the time is right; it never will be.

It's never a good time to jump off a cliff.

### Last Call

Inspiration has said all it has to say, waited long enough for our response. The time for analyzing and feet-shuffling and nay-saying is over. We're past having your people call my people and we'll do lunch. It's time to meet the ante, time to deal. Are we going to lay our visions and ourselves on the line in a way that will forever change who we are and how we experience life... or aren't we?

The impossible mission is possible; inspiration already told us that. We are also possible; inspiration told us that, too. Now it's up to us. Are we in or aren't we?

If we've delayed this long, beating ourselves up with endless what-if's and self-doubts, then probably the last thing we need to get over is ourselves. We've heard all the warnings. From here on out we don't get to fake it. We play to win or not at all.

The gangway's about to go up. Only the committed (or those who should be) get to board. If we're still convinced the ship's a leaky old tub with a nutcase for a skipper, then it's best we don't go aboard. Mutinies are messy. Let's part company while we're still friends.

This is our defining moment. What's it gonna be?

Last call. All ashore that's going ashore.

### PART TWO: PERSPIRATION

" _Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."_

William Butler Yeats

### FRIEND OR FOE?

How am I Gonna Tell My ___________? _[Fill in the Blank]_

It gets scary when our Big Ideas go public. It's one thing to think about them ; it's quite another to actually tell somebody, especially family, friends, employees, co-workers – all the people most invested in the status quo we intend to change.

It's a fragile time, just starting out. We're inspired, but still not so sure about this follow your dreams bit. We're barely registering on the confidence meter. We need people to get inspired with us. We need supporters, not naysayers; believers, not skeptics. We need to guard ourselves and our ideas as they take shape, until we're sure who's friend and who's foe, who's in it with us and who's sitting this one out, who's cheering for us and who's rooting for the other guys.

Being careful who we tell isn't deception, it's self-preservation: say too much to the wrong people too soon, and we get squashed in a hurry. Nothing personal, it's just that Big Ideas are Big Targets. People pounce on them just because.

It's worse when we drop our Big Ideas into close relationships: that's when they stop being cute little hobbies and start invading personal space. No wonder the defenses go up, and well they should: the prospect of change is no idle threat in that context; the more we pursue our Big Ideas, the more we change, and that means we change in relation to the people around us.

Some changes are on the surface: how we look, how we talk and what we talk about, what time we get up and when we go to bed. Other changes go deeper: what we believe, how we think and feel, how we act and react.

After awhile, the people in our lives figure out that they can't depend on us to be ourselves anymore. That makes them afraid – for us, and for themselves – and they resist. And why not? They are authorities on the subject of us: they know what we've been and done, what we can and can't do, what's possible for us and what's not. Which is why they know we won't be able to make a break from The Way Things Are, and even if we do, we'll be back before long, eating crow all the way.

They especially know all that if we've tried to make the break before and it ended badly. We invested a lot of time and money, caused them a lot of grief, and then one day we were back to the day job. Do we really have to go through that again?

It's not their fault; we're the ones who conditioned them to think that way. We've been so consistently and predictably stuck in Shtick for so long that they've gotten comfortable. As far as they can tell, we intend to stay safely stuck forever. They have faith in our status quo; they can rely on it. And now we've come along and upset the apple cart – not just ours, but theirs. No wonder they're upset.

Whenever we make big changes – alter the company's strategic direction, get promoted, get fit, change our marital status, whatever – we disturb relationship energy. We're shaking up the balance of power. It's another episode of "whoever speaks first loses": say too much too early, and we give the other person all the power, and now we're vulnerable, we owe them.

I was lucky. After I got started on the show, my wife watched for a couple months, then decided she liked what she saw and joined the journey with me. My daughter Gillian was already in on the deal, had been ever since that first moment of inspiration in the kitchen. The others came along, too, each in their own ways and in their own times. In time, the show recast who we are as a family.

How about my law partner and the other constituents of my prior professional life? Um, not so much.

And our extended families? Well, that took years in some cases. That's no reflection on any of them, it just shows how creating new realities puts the most strain on the relationships that have the most to lose.

Which is why it's often better not to say too much in the beginning, and instead let things take shape while our confidence level stabilizes and our Big Idea develops a life of its own. Until then, it's probably best for it to be seen and not heard. Or neither.

It takes some practice, but after a few too many blank stares and people getting agitated and defensive, we get better at ending those conversations before they do too much damage. We learn to practice disclosure on a "need to know" basis, and let the others find out if and when and to the extent they need to.

Usually, we can reshape relationships so that everyone gets what they need while we continue to move ahead. But not always. Sometimes people can't and won't and don't move with us. Which is why sometimes we need a whole new set of friends to support where we're going. I know, that sounds ruthless, but that's what it takes. Our Big Ideas require us to be fierce; nothing else is strong enough to pull us free from the gravitational pull of The Way Things Are. And that means we need to be fierce in our relationships, too.

Sometimes, pulling free is going to cost us too much in the relationships arena, so we shut things down. Okay, I get that. I've done it myself. But just know that if we do that, our dreams won't die. They'll be back one day, and then we'll have to deal with them again, and so will everyone else in our lives.

It's not easy, this friend or foe thing.

### How to Start Your Very Own Fan Club

A year into production, we ran a Sneak Preview showing of _Not This Day!_ A few weeks later, I met some friends from my lawyering days and showed them a newspaper review. It had a photo of me being interviewed for our "making of" video. One of them snatched it. "Look at this!" he shouted, poking the photo. "He looks like a totally different person!!"

Those guys became my personal fan club. You can start one, too: just follow your dreams until they change you enough that other people notice how full of new life you are. Maybe they'll like your Big Idea on its own terms and maybe not, but for sure they'll like the change in you. People like it when we come alive.

We need our fan clubs. We hit yet another major obstacle. We're depressed and full of self-doubt, feeling lost and alone, overwhelmed and helpless. We'd do anything to rush back to the waiting embrace of The Way Things Are. Then we run into someone from the club and they smile and want an update, unaware we just quit the whole stinking stupid hopeless mess an hour ago. We mumble something about challenges, but they don't hear the despair in our voices, they just start reciting platitudes. "Oh, I'm sure it will work out! I mean, it's got to, right? It's such a great idea!"

We can't let them down. We resolve to carry on.

Apparently our Big Idea came with batteries. Courage is contagious. We love it when people passionately pursue their dreams. Almost everyone wants to do it but almost nobody does, so we get to be heroes if we do. We get to sit there while our friends exclaim over a newspaper article.

For the longest time, there were people who always greeted me with, "What's up with the show?" I needed those people; they kept me going when I wanted to give up. I owed it to them to stick with it, even when every ounce of me wanted to quit the whole sorry business.

Especially then.

### Lunch With Conventional Man

Early in the friend or foe process, I met Conventional Man.

You'd kill for his credentials. He's been around. He's someone who ought to know.

He was gracious and always started out encouragingly when I described the show. "Wow! Great concept!"

Watch out when somebody in showbiz says, "Great concept." It means the pleasantries are over and they're about to gun it down. Talking about _Not This Day!_ , the litany was predictable: nobody's ever heard of you, no one will back you, the media won't cover you, it's too risky, the budget is too high, the show is too edgy, too new, you've got to stay with the tried and true....

And so it went.

Conventional Man is a good guy. You can do lunch. He's full of great stories. Besides, he's got places to go, things to do, people to see, and he doesn't need to waste himself on you. So you listen with all the gratitude you can muster, even if it feels like getting smacked around by a middleweight working the light bag.

But when it's over, you still say thanks but no thanks.

I remember the precise moment when I figured out that Conventional Man wasn't my guy. I'd just been tag-teamed over lunch with two of his most impressive representatives. While they hammered away, I sat there thinking, "Then... why... would... anybody... ever... even... try...?"

The answer came after I thanked them and paid the bill (you always pay Conventional Man's bill), and was staggering toward my car, hoping passersby wouldn't notice the welts on my face. Suddenly it hit me. Wait a minute! Conventional Man doesn't believe in what _Not This Day!_ is about. He doesn't believe the show's tagline "Because something else is possible." He can't and doesn't and won't go there. He's got too much to lose if he does.

Conventional Man is all about The Way Things Are. He got the corner office because of his past success. Life's been good, so let's not mess with the program. He knows the magic formula, and all we need to do is recite it and get a Free Pass to Paradise. All it costs us is to give up our unique and original voice and message. Would that be so bad?

It's tempting. Hey, formulas work. Do something once, it's innovative. Do it twice, it's a formula for success. Why reinvent the wheel? Why climb that impossibly steep learning curve? Originality is overrated; better to stick with what works. Copycats can and do prosper. The first pioneers take the hit while the latecomers buy up their abandoned grubstakes.

And on it goes. Don't like the sound of that? Deal with it. It's The Way Things Are. Got a problem with that?

Yeah, plenty. You can't live a formula with passion. Formulas deplete energy and divert focus. Formulas sell, but they don't make our dreams come true. Big Ideas don't fit the formula. If they did, they wouldn't be Big Ideas.

So thanks for the time, Conventional Man. I appreciate that you mean well, but how about you sit this one out. I need someone with a different spirit.

I need Revolution Man.

### You Say You Want A Revolution?

N _ot This Day!_ was out to break the stranglehold of fear that's got our world in a death grip. That was going to take a revolution, and Conventional Man couldn't lead it. That was a job for Revolution Man.

The show's promo pieces used words like "manifesto" and "revolution." You've got to be careful, using words like that. The sound grandiose and courageous, but they're also disturbing and threatening. Maybe the cause is worthy, but things could get ugly.

An advertising exec said don't use words like that. "They're too hard, threatening, violent," he said. "Call it a movement or something softer." He was another of those people who ought to know. He'd won Clios, after all. His advice was sound and indisputable, but ultimately not for us. We needed "manifesto" and "revolution" because we were onto something that big, and we needed hairy, scary words to proclaim it. When the inspiration to live beyond fear comes calling, it's not a social visit, it's a call to arms.

No wonder Conventional Man was freaked about the show. He was afraid for me, for himself, for the The Way Things Are, but mostly he was afraid of Revolution Man. And in his defense, so was I. Revolution Man is an HR nightmare: you can't control him; he won't play by the rules. You let him loose and never know what you're going to get. You know things are probably going to get messy, and just hope people don't start losing their heads.

Another sales and marketing person asked me. "What's your desired audience response?" That's a useful question for politicians and marketers: answer it right and you'll get the right people on your side; your revolution will win the day and you'll sell a lot of your product. A guy I recruited to be our General Manager thought that way, too. His idea was to lead with the Revolution, not the show. Organize it. Give people something to do once we get them all fired up. Put them in groups. Give them opportunities. Sponsor them. And then they'll buy tickets to the show and all your cool T-shirts and stickers and stuff.

Who knows – his plan might have worked. But cool as it sounded, it wasn't right, for the same reason we weren't going to call our revolution a movement. Messy or not, Big Ideas need Revolution Man's spirit, and once he's on board you can't fake a revolution for the sake of selling your stuff.

Besides, there wasn't a "desired audience response." Our talk about change and revolution wasn't a me-too grab at a trendy slogan. Trendy quickly becomes so yesterday, and we had more than a limited run in mind. _Not This Day's_ revolution deliberately wasn't political or social or religious. It wasn't grounded in an agenda, but deep inside, in the human heart. We weren't going to tell people what to do, we were just going to put on such a great show that, once audiences saw it, the same energy and spirit that created the show would pulse through them as well. They'd get inspired, and they'd figure out what to do next. The show would move them, and then they would reckon with inspiration on their own terms – the same way I had. They would find their own version of Revolution Man within themselves.

That was the plan: change hearts, change the world. That was our revolution, and that's why we needed Revolution Man.

### When Mr. Perfect Isn't

A close cousin to Conventional Man is Mr. Perfect, and he's not going to help you either.

Mr. Perfect was perfect because he could do all the stuff I didn't know how to do, didn't want to do, didn't want to learn how to do. He had the contacts I didn't, could make the sales and raise the money I couldn't. He was smooth and persuasive, had an impeccable résumé. He could do this.

Steady now. Steady.

I wanted Mr. Perfect on my team because he was a mirror to my own fears. He was confident and secure and accomplished and a lot of other things I wasn't. I needed him to make up for my deficiencies.

Or so I thought. Truth is, my confidence in him and lack of confidence in myself were both misplaced. He hadn't accomplished my dream before either. No one had. It was my Big Idea, and it was up to me to make it happen. Other people – maybe including him, and maybe not – could help, but making my dream happen was up to me.

In showbiz, you don't interview, you audition. I wasted way too much time and money trying to produce the show before I figured out that everybody needed to audition – not just our creative people, but people on the commercial side, too. And that included Mr. Perfect.

Experience, accolades, and references are a useful way to say hello, but they don't count for much after that. Talent isn't what you've done or where you've been or who you've been hanging out with. Talent is now. Show me what you got now. If you can't bring it now, you can't bring it. Period.

If Mr. Perfect was going to help, he needed to help on those terms – now terms. If you don't have a wow audition, you don't get a callback. No exceptions, no special treatment – even if you are Mr. Perfect.

It's tricky, asking people to lay aside their laurels while you try to figure out if they're truly resonating with the spirit of inspiration that's fueling you, or if you're just carried away with your own inadequacy. Tricky but essential. Our Big Ideas are more important and impressive than any one person, including Mr. Perfect. If that leaves him out, then so be it.

Maybe he can join Conventional Man for lunch. I'll make the reservation, and the two of them can fight over the check.

### The Great Gatekeeper Myth

Another false friend is the Great Gatekeeper.

We march up to the Gates of Paradise brimming with inspiration and derring-do. We bang on the vast gates, but they're unshakeable. We pound at the walls but our fists make no sound. Finally, we hear an unfriendly laugh from inside, and an icy echoing voice speaks.

"Nice try, pal. That's really cute. Now quit bugging me and get back to your cubicle."

Apparently the Gates of Paradise are guarded by an imperious Gatekeeper who has his orders: they are to keep out all but The Chosen, and we're not on the list. We don't know the right people, don't have the right agent, haven't paid the right dues. No way we're getting in.

And we're especially not getting in if we can't say the magic words at the right time and in the right way: while turning counterclockwise and crossing ourselves backward three times at midnight on the first full moon after the Winter Solstice.

Never mind that it's impossible to get an appointment with the Great Gatekeeper, let alone find out just who The Chosen are. How to join that exclusive club is the best-kept secret since Santa Claus. Never mind that, if we ever did get in, we would quickly find that there are many, many levels of Paradise, ranging from bare subsistence to outrageous favor beyond merit. Apparently, even in Paradise, time and chance happeneth to them all.

No matter, we'd be the good guys if we ever got in. We remain determined and resourceful. We try schmoozing the Gatekeeper's staff. They look like us, and they got in. Well, not exactly – they mostly hang around the entrance looking like they don't have much to do. But at least they get to wear the black T-shirt with "Staff" in white block letters on the back, which is cool. Surely they could pull a few strings.

We make a lot of noise and one of them finally strolls over and looks at us with pity and tells us it's a long shot and a tough business and we ought to have a Plan B but hard work and paying your dues count for something so go ahead and try if you want to you might get lucky but I doubt it. And if you don't mind a little criticism, your idea's been tried before and the other guy didn't make it and you're going about it all wrong anyway.

Then in an unguarded moment he drops the secret code. We snatch it up and race once more to the Gate and. . .

BAM!!! We still can't get through.

He shrugs. "Dunno," he says. "Worked for me."

Have we had enough of this drama yet? How about we get this straight: Gatekeepers do not control the entrance to Paradise.

We do.

Amen.

Pinning our hopes on the Great Gatekeeper means we're looking for Someone Else to open the door, let us in, save us a place, and if we can just figure out who that Someone Else is and arrange to meet him or her and get him or her to like us, then our dreams will come true.

Never mind that the Great Gatekeeper turns away 99.999999999 % of all comers. We'll be the exception. We'll ride an elevator with the Great Gatekeeper and give her our elevator speech so convincingly that we'll become a household name. We'll get discovered.

Stop.

If we're going to believe in our ideas and dreams, then we also need to believe there's a place in the world for them. And for us. Believing there's a secret society of Gatekeepers with the power to block us robs us of that belief, disempowers us, turns us into victims. More than that, it robs us of the challenge of dealing honestly with the question of whether our Big Idea really has a place in the world. That's a tough issue, and we must and will deal with it eventually, but when we're just starting out isn't the time to do that. Right now, we just need to get in the game, and going through the Gatekeeper is _not_ the way to get there.

Listen to our self-talk: "Only The Chosen get in. The rest of us need to keep our day job." It's like we're back on the playground wondering if we'll get picked for a team so we can play.

If we want to play, we can play. It's our game.

Forget this Machiavellian trolling for Gatekeepers and sucking up to people in power. We don't need them. When it's time to sort friends from foes, the Great Gatekeeper is always a foe.

Besides, forget that whole elevator speech thing anyway. People don't talk on elevators, they look at the numbers. Or at their shoes, which usually could use a shine.

### Ideas and CorporateSpeak  
_Or, I hear one more idea and somebody's gonna get hurt_

We share our passion with people and their brains start cranking out the ideas. We're wired that way: we create because we breathe, and we create with ideas.

I love it when that happens, but even I got to the point where the deranged homicidal twin who lives in my subconscious was going to lose it if I heard one more idea about what to do with the show.

After awhile, we figure out that there are ideas, and then there are ideas – just as there are idea conversations, and then there are... well, the other kind.

Sometimes people don't want to have anything to do with our crazy project, so they use ideas to deflect. "I heard about this, that, the other thing. You should try it.

"Now go away and leave me alone."

Other people think our idea sounds cool but they're so caught up in their own stuff that they can't get on board with ours. We get the same thing from them: "You should do this, do that, go here, go there," they'll say. The emphasis is on "you should." Their ideas land on our to do list, not theirs, which is how they stay safely uninvolved and protect their already overburdened calendars.

Before long we've got a pile of ideas. We'd probably find some good ones in there if we dug through it, so we add a new task to our to do list. "Review idea folder," it says.

Don't bother. Hit the delete button. Print it out and send it through the shredder.

Ideas like that clutter up our souls. They represent the dreaded "buy-in," which is Management CorporateSpeak for, "If we can get people to accept a weak version [buy-in] of the real thing [heartfelt excitement and commitment], then they'll give us what we need." Meanwhile, what's happening on the receiving end of CorporateSpeak goes like this: "I'm not really interested but I'm trying to pretend I am in case it might affect my job."

Good luck getting anything done that way.

You can't trust buy-in. It's paper thin; lean on it and you fall right through. What's worse, buy-in conversations are just plain toxic: they don't pump us up, they weaken us. Somebody dashes off a string of great ideas, and we sit there thinking, "Omigod I have so much to do! And why didn't I think of that?!" We feel depleted and overwhelmed, and the one thing we don't need right now is a longer to do list, or another hit to our sense of inadequacy.

At its very best, buy-in signals only intellectual curiosity. It doesn't reach the heart, and that's a problem. Ideas don't succeed because they're intellectually satisfying, they succeed because they're compelling. We want ideas that resonate with the essence of our Big Idea, ramp up its energy, propel it forward, create urgency that moves people and keeps them moving through the tough times. Follow an idea that moves, and we'll end up somewhere worth going.

Ideas like that are alive, because a real live human being is actually going to do something about them. Or already has – which is the best idea you can get. It's a keeper.

And most likely so is the person who came up with it.

### LIFE IN THE GAP:

Take a Facer _(Not a bow)_

We answered inspiration's call, met the ante, got in the game. We're sorting out friends and foes, spending all our money, risking everything. So now what? Time to take a bow while the world applauds?

Nope. The bows will have to wait. What comes first isn't a bow, it's a facer – into the Gap.

The Gap is the distance between here and there, now and then, who we are now and who we want to be, what we do and have now and what we want to do and have when our dreams come true.

The Gap is tough stuff. Fear, self-doubt, our shtick... those things are why we don't get started. The Gap is why we don't finish.

The Gap is about hitting The Wall, and hitting it hard. And there's not just one wall, but a whole line of them. We hit so many walls that after awhile we get into a state of mind a friend of mine calls "Crash Dummy Syndrome." When we hit a new wall, it's not a catastrophe, it's just another day at the office. Brick wall incoming! BAM! Go back and do it again. BAM! Do it again. BAM!

That's Crush Dummy Syndrome – not a fun job, but crash dummies save lives. In the Gap, we're the crash dummies, and the crashes are for real.

Is that any way to live?

It is when the life you're saving is your own.

It's not so bad at first, when we're freshly charged with inspiration. Meeting challenges is fun: we learn new things, find resourcefulness we didn't know we had, feel triumphant when we overcome. So far so good, but before long the Gap starts throwing new kinds of challenges our way. The ones before were mostly external and logistical. The new ones get inside us, mess with our heads and hearts. The inner game becomes more important than the outer.

The more we're knocked around, the more disoriented we become. Things don't make sense. What we used to know and believe, the behaviors that got us this far... none of that works. And the more we're departing from The Way Things Are, the more intense the experience. Impossible, it seems, is a relative term, not a static condition of fact or certainty but a will-o'-the-wisp. Time, space, and energy morph in size, shape, duration, and intensity. Delays take longer, and detours run further out of the way. Obstacles are more imposing and setbacks more disheartening. Our compass needle spins around like it's possessed, and if we somehow manage to arrive where we meant to go, it's always the darkest part of night and all the places in the guidebooks are closed.

Meanwhile, we've been going through our supplies and reserves (of every kind) way too fast, until one day we get to the point where there's not enough left to advance or retreat. The good news is, we're not hitting any more walls. The bad news is, the reason we aren't is because we're not moving anymore.

We're now at the Ultimate Impossibility, and this time we're finally, hopelessly, utterly stuck. We wriggled free in the past, but not this time. This time we're stuck as stuck can be, and screwed anyway you look at it.

Still inspiration urges us onward.

That's life in the Gap. No wonder people give up on their dreams.

The Gap is where the desire to change becomes the need to be transformed. Once we're in it, the only way out is through, and to get through, we must overcome not only the Gap's challenges, we must also overcome ourselves.

### Hell Hath No Fury Like an Ego Scorned

The Gap is our handiwork. We create it by moving toward what we want. The Gap exists when and because we decided to answer inspiration's call, and not before. If we hadn't made that choice, there would be no Gap. There's no one to blame for the Gap but ourselves, not Fate or God or the Devil or some principle that says life has to be hard. None of that. Not nobody but us.

We didn't see the Gap coming, and didn't plan for it. Now that we're here, it's obvious no travel brochure could do the place justice. They'd probably describe it as "rugged." They probably wouldn't say it's like trying to breathe the air on Neptune.

The real problem with the Gap is that we took ourselves along for the ride. We're no longer thinking about our dreams and visions, planning for them, observing them from afar; we're going for them, which puts us here, right in the middle of things, and our presence changes everything.

What we're really up against in the Gap is what I call "ego." By that, I mean what makes us who we are: the dynamic organizing principle that gives our lives psychic shape and physical expression, that creates and sustains who we are, what we do, and what we have.

We formed an ego around ourselves when we were young, to make us feel safe in a scary world. Ego gives us our sense of self, creates boundaries that differentiate us from others. It's the summation of belief and behavior that shapes our habitual experience of life. It accounts for how we make decisions, our likes and dislikes, our areas of competence and ignorance, and a whole lot more. Ego draws our experience of reality into orbit around itself, defines for us what's normal and what's not, what's safe and possible and predictable and what isn't.

Ego is why we resist change – even the change we want. Ego blocks new ideas not on their merits but as a matter of policy. The Way Things Are and ego are in league; when inspiration challenges one, it also defies the other.

The resistance we meet in the Gap is ego shuddering in the face of our passionate commitment to change. The bigger the change, the greater the threat, and the fiercer ego's resistance. Ego began as a normal part of psychological and social development when we were kids. Now it turns on us. What was once our friend and teacher and bodyguard is now our Resistance with a capital R.

Ego can't create the new, but it can sabotage our efforts to do the same. Either we break ego's control over us or we go back where we came. The Gap is where we settle the issue.

And hell hath no fury like an ego scorned.

### Things Could Get a Little Bouncy Up Ahead

We begin in the energy of mania: visionary. idealistic, creative. It lifts us up, puts a gleam in our inspired eyes, fills us with passion. Mania's energy is ethereal and fiery, able to bend light and make galaxies swirl. It's like the universe's dark energy, accelerating its expansion, propelling the cosmos ever further into the chaotic emptiness.

Then we hit the Gap and go crashing into the energy of The Way Things Are, which is more like the universe's dark matter. You can't see it, but there's more of it than anything else, and it's out there doing what it's always done: holding everything together in its invisible, weighty way.

Throw those two together, and you get the kind of turbulence that explodes supernovae and brings billions of galaxies into existence.

Do we really want to mess with that?!

Yes we do. In fact, that's exactly what we do in the Gap: we go after the core of what holds our lives in their current energetic shape, because that shape doesn't have room for our dreams and visions and Big Ideas. To make them happen, we need a new reality in which they are possible, and that reality can only be shaped by mania, not ego. Which is why the Gap is a violent clash of energies – turbulence to the nth degree.

It's a humid August night. We take off from Denver in one of those small commercial prop planes. The pilot says there are thunderstorms over Kansas, and it's probably going to get a little bouncy up ahead. For the next three hours, our flight is the world's biggest ever bad-ass roller coaster. We shoot up hundreds of feet, wondering if we'll ever stop. Then the bottom falls out. We go sideways. And all directions at once. My buddy across the aisle hates to fly. He's panicking. He grabs my arm, looks like he's going to try to climb into my seat. I grab his hand and hold it. They're predicting more storms when our meetings are over three days later. My colleague insists we drive 90 miles to the nearest large airport and sweet talk our way onto a flight with "jet engines and gray hair in the cockpit." The rest of us don't argue. He's not the only one who's had enough.

When we chase our dreams, we chase storms. No, more than that: we create storms, and then we fly right through the middle of them. A little bouncy up ahead? More like Storm Chasers.

It's not that we aren't safe in turbulence, it's that we don't feel safe. Pilots are trained to fly through thunderstorms; we aren't. Our pilot on the trip across Kansas was a young buck, logging hours on the way up the commercial ladder. He probably told his friends how much fun our flight was. For my buddy, it was a near-death experience – not actually, but because his imagination created it. Inspiration isn't the only one with an imagination. Ego has one, too, and when ego uses its imagination, it builds worst case scenarios that turn our inspired dreams of Paradise into disaster movies. Ego can't help it; its nature is to be fearful, and there's nothing scarier for ego than the Gap.

Trying to hold the energies of mania and ego at the same time creates a special kind of turbulence in our souls I call "dissonance." By that, I mean what happens when we hold competing beliefs about something. We say we want our dreams and visions to come true, but deep inside there's a contrary belief that says no way. We're like a stringed instrument with two strings just off, vibrating in that way that makes the oscilloscope dance and your eyes cross.

That's not gonna work. Our souls need to get on the same frequency as our dreams. Until they do, we're in a state of dissonance, and we're not going anywhere, or if we do it's going to be a tough slog of one step forward, two steps back.

We often misinterpret dissonance as doubt, and we're conditioned to be wary when we feel doubt. We think it has the goods on us, knows we're doing something wrong, and is warning us of impending doom. But not so. Doubt isn't doing any of that. It doesn't accuse or judge, doesn't blast us with agendas we're not following or hint darkly at concealed answers we ignore to our peril. Fear and ego do that. Doubt's only role is to reveal dissonance. That's it. Doubt tells us there's a clash of frequencies inside us, and we need to adjust the tuner if we want to quit waking up at 3:00 a.m. wondering if we've ruined our lives for good this time.

We don't know about all this turbulence and dissonance when we start out. We're rarely aware that we're holding beliefs and engaging in habitual behaviors that were forged in ego, and that those beliefs and behaviors are in conflict with realizing our dreams and visions. But the Gap knows, and gets to work exposing all the ways we sabotage ourselves, all the ways we believe and behave that contradict what we say we want. The Gap is where we eliminate all that internal dissonance for good.

Which why the Gap is like being on one of those airplane flights.

Sometimes we wish we could be free from doubt. That most definitely is not what we want. What we want is to be free from dissonance. Dissonance makes us tentative, hesitant, unsure. In the Gap, the issue isn't are we qualified for the job or should we keep our day job or have a Plan B, it's how we're going to deal with dissonance so we can keep flying in the direction we want to go. Until we get rid of our ego-driven, fear-based ways of doing things, we're going to keep sabotaging our own efforts.

That's why, instead of running away when doubt comes calling, we need to welcome it in, offer it a drink and some munchies, and ask it to tell us all about our dissonance, so we can get rid of it. Remove the internal discord, and our souls become clean, clear, strong, resonant. We see more clearly, respond more truly, act more powerfully. The skies clear; there are no more thunderheads between us and a safe landing. We're cruising above the turbulence, propelled forward by the power of mania – the dark energy plowing ahead into the abyss, taking the universe where it hasn't gone before.

You can't buy that just anywhere. Only in the Gap.

### Time to Face the Facts _(Or Not)_

Ego believes facts happen to us: that there are data points of objective reality floating around out there carrying messages that anyone should be able to interpret to reach the same conclusions ego does. And, according to ego at least, The Way Things Are is always better than whatever new thing we have in mind.

Ego thinks that way because it only knows the facts as it now sees them, including what's gone before. Ego steers by looking in the rearview mirror, decides what's possible by testing new ideas against what has always been. No wonder they always come up short.

That's why, when ego screams at us to face the facts, it's not an invitation to objective examination; it's an accusation: "If you would just be realistic and reasonable and practical, you'd reach the only possible logical and unbiased conclusion, which is that The Way Things Are is better than this crazy new thing you're trying to do."

Not so fast. As Einstein said, "If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." That's what we need to do.

Science used to think we could observe without influencing outcomes. No more. Now, science knows that observation changes how things behave. We change the behavior of things by watching them – kind of like how kids become little angels when they know their parents are watching. We _create_ facts not by "discovering" them, but by investing data with significance. We see what we're looking for, and find the facts we need to substantiate our theories.

Ironically, this is where The Way Things Are came from in the first place. Ego doesn't realize that, and wouldn't admit it anyway, but The Way Things Are hasn't always been. It replaced an earlier version of itself. It came about when someone was bold enough to create new facts to support a new theory, and when that new theory was widely adopted, a new The Way Things Are was born.

And so it goes. Time marches on.

Most of us haven't yet caught up to science. We still think we have to live with what we "know" to be true, as determined by ego. Thinking that way limits what we believe is possible, which limits what we can create. If we revert to that way of thinking, we vest ego and The Way Things Are with the power to oppose us.

If we want something new, we need to engage another of Einstein's truths: "Imagination is more powerful than knowledge." Imagination fueled by inspiration reverses the pecking order, tells us _first_ to create and _then_ to know.

That's not just good science, it's good creativity.

Face the facts? No. That won't get us anywhere. Let's create them instead.

### So _That's_ What Picasso Meant!

If we want to create, we must first destroy.

Do we destroy ego in the Gap? Reshape or reform it? Transcend, transmute, or transform it?

Yes.

One way or another, we make ourselves new.

Big change means not just the end of life as we have known it, but the end of us as we have known ourselves. When we come true, so do our dreams.

When we accepted inspiration's impossible mission, we committed to the end of ego, and when ego falls, everything it supports falls with it: all the trappings of The Way Things Are, everything that's normal and predictable and safe about our present reality. That's why pursuing our Big Ideas always costs us everything.

Surely this is what Picasso was talking about when he said, "Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction."

Maybe the pearl merchant knew this, and decided to just get it over with.

Maybe this is why we quit our day jobs and turn pro.

Maybe this is why Plan B isn't going to work.

What we destroy in the Gap is the way we and our lives have always been. We do that to make room for a whole new way of experiencing life; one that includes the Great Big New Thing that started all of this in the first place.

Inspiration says all this destruction is worth it; ego says no way. Inspiration opens our souls with hope; ego clenches them in fear. Inspiration propels us forward; ego pulls us backward. And so it goes – a cosmic tug of war playing out inside us. We end it by being willing to first destroy in order to create.

Just like Picasso said.

### LESSONS LEARNED:

It's All About Us, All The Time

We all have our own unique lessons to learn in the Gap. I'm about to tell you about mine. Experience with my workshops tells me you'll be able to relate. But before we learn anything, first we need to get skilled with an essential learning tool: self-awareness.

"Self-awareness is the gentle motivator for change," a friend of mine used to say.

Yes.

We've all got an Observer inside of us – a consciousness that watches, listens, takes notes. Over time we give it lots of voices, many of them snarky and critical. We don't need that. We need to hear from the still small source; that's where we get the good stuff. Self-awareness takes us there, but we don't get it on the first try; it takes practice.

Who's got time for that? Take time for "Know thyself"? Sorry, I'm pretty sure I've got something going on that night.

Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." It's good advice that most of us don't follow. But self-awareness isn't optional when we're after our dreams. It's the ultimate ego buster; we can't get through the Gap without it.

Self-awareness goes digging, roots out those pockets of resistance. It tells us when we're trying to get the new by using the old, when we're believing one thing while trying to do another, when we're quitting and compromising. And lots more.

Gotta have it.

Which explains why, once we decide to set our dreams free from where we've been hiding them, it's all about us, all the time. No, that's not an accusation from a relationship gone bad, it's what happens when we dare to answer inspiration's call. Big change isn't going to happen without self-awareness. We get started in the direction of our dreams and visions, and suddenly our unexamined life is examined, big time.

There are lots of paths to self-awareness. Choose one. And forget the shortcuts; there aren't any. And besides, this is too important.

I think of self-awareness as Peter Parker: unimpressive in street clothes, but Spiderman underneath, a guy who'll bend bars to set us and our dreams free.

We're going to need his help.

### Full Accountability:  
_You Mean I'm Responsible for This Mess?_

Can we really create what we want?

Not only can we, we already do. We already have exactly what we want. Right now. We created it.

No way.

Yes way.

What we've already got is what we want. Or at least what we wanted. Our current circumstances reveal our desires and beliefs, the choices we've made and how we've acted. They tell us what's gone before, what got us to this moment.

We did all that. We are fully responsible for getting ourselves to where we are, right here, right now. We created The Way Things Are. If we want to continue accepting it as the objective truth, we can. But we don't have to. We have a choice. Don't like these facts? Create new ones.

That's the principle of full accountability. A friend introduced me to it over coffee one day, and I found myself wanting to niggle about loopholes and exceptions. But then I thought, why would I want to? So what if I can find holes in this theory – what's that going to get me? Wouldn't I rather embrace it if it gets me closer to what I want out of life?

New thoughts make our brains hurt because they travel over previously unused neural pathways. They're uncomfortable and awkward, but we get used to them with practice. Besides, to move in the direction of our dreams, we don't have to win a debate with our old way of thinking. We just need to be self-aware enough to move ourselves ahead instead of falling back into old habits that leave us stuck in a loop of creating the lives we don't want.

Pretty simple.

Besides, debate is pointless anyway, because full accountability doesn't ask us to believe we control everything. It only asks us to believe that we control what we believe and how we behave, and that those things create our lives. If that's true, then we don't need to look any further than ourselves to find out why our dreams aren't coming true.

Yes, there are true victims in life. I get that. But we're not talking about them, we're talking about us and what we want out of life. Besides, arguing about what we do or don't control very quickly becomes one big all-powerful excuse to justify all the rest of our excuses – the justification of all justifications for victimhood.

No thanks. Been there, done that. Time for something new. Time for some full accountability for my life.

But be warned: once we start practicing full accountability, we can't get away with squat. We used to be able to go mindlessly along, creating lives we didn't want and blaming the fates or dumb luck or other people or whatever. No more. Now, when we ask why our Big Ideas aren't happening, the finger points back at us, and the only issue is whether we'd like the long or short version.

The short one will do, if we're willing to act on it.

Besides, how about this: if we created what we now want to change, that means we have the power to create the new thing, too, doesn't it?

Yes it does. Full accountability empowers us to change. We're not victims anymore, no longer under the thumb of The Way Things Are.

To think and act otherwise is to give our power away, to become volunteer victims. We learned long ago to never volunteer. How come we sign up so eagerly for that?

### How Many Excuses Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?

Full accountability means no excuses. The Devil didn't make us do it. The Great Gatekeeper didn't bar the gates. It wasn't Fate. The odds weren't stacked against us. We did what we wanted or we didn't. Period. If we didn't, there's no one to blame but us. End of discussion.

The law sometimes imposes a standard of "strict liability." If the car's gas tank caught fire in a collision, fault and cause and effect don't matter. It's irrelevant that the car was rear-ended, or that the design and engineering were faulty, or that the execs decided the odds of this ever happening were so small it wasn't worth the extra cost to build the car differently. If strict liability applies, none of that matters. The only question is, did it catch fire? If so, the car manufacturer is liable. No further questions, Your Honor.

Same deal when we ban excuse-making. All that matters is, did we or didn't we. That's it. Fault and cause and effect are irrelevant. Loopholes don't matter. The blame game is over. Put the pointing fingers away.

Excuses clutter our sentences, our brainwaves, and our lives. The language of excuse making is convoluted and evasive, full of whining, sarcasm, and cynicism. I would whine, too, if someone else was in charge of my life and was doing a crappy job. What's pathetic is when I complain about the crappy job I'm doing with my own life.

If we stop making excuses, we can speak simply and clearly, and measure our outcomes by our intentions. Anything else is superfluous. One reason I like working out is that truth in the weight room is simple: either you lift it or you don't. Clear, easy to interpret. I did or I didn't. That's it. Why or why not is irrelevant unless it helps me train differently so I can lift it next time.

We need that kind of clarity in order to create. Lack of clarity opens us to dissonance and doubt, fear and confusion, and other achievement-trashing states of mind. Clarity cuts to the chase. Are we doing what we want or not? If not, then what needs to change?

Sometimes it's surprisingly easy to make our world a better place.

No excuses living can be as tough to swallow as full accountability. We want to argue about what we can and can't control. How about we don't. How about if instead we ask why we so desperately want to justify why we can't create what we want?

That question should end the argument in a hurry.

How many excuses can dance on the head of a pin? I don't care, and my world will not suffer if we end that debate.

Besides, the answer is millions, from what I can tell.

### Meet Coach

I got my training in full accountability and no excuses living from someone I call Coach. I met him one day after waking up at 3:00 a.m. in a panic about how _Not This Day!_ had ruined my life. Our dreams will do that to us. "THIS IS TOO HARD!!!" we scream into the blackness.

Later that morning, I took a walk and met Coach. His age is hard to guess, but I'd put him at 60-something. Gray hair. Stands military straight. Wears a London Fog topcoat and a felt hat. I think he's modeled after Tom Landry.

He's a disciplinarian, but always fair and never cruel. He's also frequently exasperating, because he never knows when to call it quits, never recognizes when I've reached my absolute, all-out limit. He always thinks I've got more to give, and always requires it of me.

I once asked him about that, and he replied that his one job is to make me a winner, and in his way of thinking, me being a winner means making my Big Ideas happen. He starts by accepting what I say I want at face value, and never doubts that I truly want it or can achieve it. Once he's clear on that, he does two things. First, he finds what's inside of me that will win and develops it. Second, he finds what's inside of me that won't win and destroys it.

He reminds me of Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks in the movie _Miracle._ He knew exactly what it was going to take for the Americans to beat the Russians ("We're going to skate with them!") and he drove his team to do it ("Again!"). His players hated him, his assistants doubted him, he pushed everyone way, way past their limits. And guess what?

They won.

I want to have that kind of steel in my spine, that clarity of vision, that absolute commitment to achieving the goal no matter what. Coach wants to give me that, and I'm glad he's in my life.

Not that I wouldn't like to strangle him sometimes.

Maybe you'd like to meet him. You can; just take a look inside. You see, Coach is imaginary, at least in the sense that you can't shake his hand. But just because he's imaginary doesn't mean he's not real. He's part of my divine gift of personality; he's the drive inside me that will not accept that something is impossible if I really, really want it, that believes in me no matter what, and won't let me quit or call myself a failure.

Each of us can find our own Coach in the deepest, most life-affirming impulse within ourselves. The Gap drives us to that place, and now we've got a fulltime personal trainer who will stop at nothing to empower us to win.

That's what we want, isn't it?

I mean, it is, isn't it?

### Giving Up on Quitting

If we don't get the thing we want, that means we failed. Right?

Coach doesn't believe in failure.

What?!

Before I say more, think about this: why aren't we overjoyed to hear there's no such thing as failure?

Why indeed. Why would we want to hold onto failure as an option?

For one thing, if we fail, we can quit. We can give up on our dreams and Big Ideas and agree with The Way Things Are that the whole thing was a really dumb idea after all. We can finally cave in to being reasonable, and there's a perverse satisfaction in doing so. Conventional Man and the Great Gatekeeper were right all along. We're finally seeing the light. Now we can get back to normal life. No more Crash Dummy Syndrome. We've had enough. We're exhausted and exasperated, and we're sick of The Speech: "Shame on you. This has gone too far. It's not funny anymore. You're being selfish. What about your responsibilities? It's time to quit and come home."

Yes, you're right: it has gone too far. We've given it absolutely everything we've got, and it hasn't been enough. Plus we're afraid. Fear's been our constant companion since we began, and we're sick of fighting it. Besides, the odds of this thing ending well are getting worse by the minute.

And on it goes. What do we say to all that?

Well, for starters, it's a lie that the odds are worse now than they ever were. Bookmakers set odds beforehand; they don't change once the game is on. It was an all-or-nothing, winner-takes-all game when we started, and it still is.

And sorry, but the truth is, no, we haven't given it our all. Determination defies endurance. Just because we're broke, lonely, worn out, discouraged, and might actually be crazy... all that doesn't mean we've got nothing left. There's always more. Coach knows that, and we know it, too. We especially know that now, at this stage of the Gap, after all the times we've made like a crash dummy and hit The Wall and somehow found the resolve to keep going.

As for The Speech, it's just one big wordy hysterical excuse, and we've sworn off excuses, remember? Besides, it's a good thing that sometimes The Speech falls on deaf ears, otherwise we'd never get to make heroes out of people who persevered and triumphed when everyone said give up. They kept going until their stories got to that one last surprise plot twist that changed everything – for them and for us – and our lives are richer for it.

Coach is in the same league as people like that. He doesn't believe in failure either. He thinks failure is an optional fact we can create or not, and if we choose not to create it, then it doesn't exist.

Lots of marvelous people talk beautifully about embracing failure as part of the creative process. I hear what they're saying, and enjoy hearing them say it. Their approach does the same thing as Coach's, which is to take the judgment out of the word "failure." If embracing failure in the creative process works for you, go for it. I like Coach's approach better, because I like thinking we can live in a world where failure doesn't even exist unless we want it to, and therefore if we so choose, we never need to use the word or feel the sting and shame of its judgment ever again. "You're a failure!" is one of the meanest judgments we can pronounce. It wounds the soul. Most of us are much too kind to do that to someone else, but we'll do it to ourselves.

Raise your hands if you think failure is a great idea.

I thought so.

Oops, there are a couple of hands, way in the back.

Odd, isn't it, the way we defend the idea of failure, the same way we defended our list of all the reasons why we couldn't have want we wanted? Why do we do that?

Because reserving the right to stamp Failure on ourselves and our efforts is a perverse last subterfuge to make us give back the power we've reclaimed through full accountability and no excuses living.

And because failure is the crowning achievement of the disappointed. It derives from our conviction that we cannot have and do and be what we want. It comes from the same core belief that values pain, struggle, hardship, lack, need, impossibility, insurmountable barriers, striving, denial, endless back-breaking, soul-killing, fruitless labor, powerlessness, unrequited sacrifice, and pointless self-martyr-hood.

How about if we end that way of thinking? We can, if we first end our infatuation with failure. We can start by planting the possibility of something else in our heads, by suggesting to our souls that failure, although eminently satisfying to ego, may not be as good or desirable as success, for the same reason that struggle may not be as good as ease, deprivation may not be as good as plenty, isolation may not be as good as connection, or remaining dull may not be as good as being awake.

How about we think about _that_ the next time we're inclined to pronounce a failure judgment on ourselves?

Whether we think failure doesn't exist or embrace it as part of the process, either way I say let's give up on failure.

Which means we can also give up on quitting. If you thought "You're a failure" hurt, then try on "Quitter!" for size.

Ouch.

I can live without wearing that judgment around my neck. How about you?

### Essence

The Gap puts ego under siege. Full accountability, no excuses living, taking back our power, no failure, no quitting... all these choke off ego's lifelines. What's left? Any other ways it can strike back?

Yeah, a few. One of them is compromise. We compromise our dreams and visions and Big Ideas when we're out of touch with their inspired essence.

Essence is our Big Idea in its most concentrated form. It's where the flames are hottest, the bell tones purest, the vision keenest; where our breath is the deepest and our heartbeat the strongest.

Often, we don't see essence right away, and don't take the time to. Instead, we go charging ahead, start plotting how we're going to _express_ it. We build the lodge before we appreciate the mountain.

If we stay centered in essence, our dreams stay powerful; if we don't, they become weak. Compromising essence drains our Big Ideas of their power, saps our personal strength, and derails the creative genius behind why inspiration chose us for the mission in the first place.

Suddenly the adventure loses its luster, and all that's left is a project.

Who needs another one of those?

Several months into producing the show, our composer and choreographers got together and decided they wanted to create a show using music without lyrics. That wasn't in my plan, but I agreed to let them try.

Why? Same old refrain: I was unsure of myself, and assumed their artistic vision was better than mine because theirs came from experience, while mine was based on some freaky thing that happened to me one day when I was kneading bread.

Of course they were more experienced!! That's the whole point, remember? It's worth saying again: Big Ideas are compelling because inspiration gives them to us, not to someone we think is better qualified. It does so precisely because we're going to have to live through the Gap in order to make them come true, and living through the Gap means we're going to die to every contrary impulse in ourselves that doesn't serve the inspired vision, so it can emerge in its purest, most concentrated, most essential form.

Freaky or not, that initial moment of inspiration came with the full smack of essence, and told me everything I needed to know, including the need for lyrics as an important storyteller. I gave that certainty away when I decided someone else was smarter, better, and more qualified, and agreed to compromise my vision with theirs.

Ego was totally on their side. It liked the idea of compromise, because it was afraid maybe those better qualified people were right, and therefore it made better sense for me to produce their show instead of the one inspiration gave me – even though I was as unqualified to produce theirs as I was mine.

Huh?! Now who's being unreasonable? Maybe inspiration's ideas were crazy, but ego's were just plain stupid.

Unfortunately, I didn't see it that way. I was too insecure, so I went along with the proposal. I didn't know then what I know now, which is that inspiration doesn't give its visions to the wrong people, and isn't vague about what it wants. Our Big Ideas are compelling because they come with an essential center. It has to be that way, because vague and shallow ideas don't move us, and they're sure not worth all the trouble we go through on their behalf when we hit the Gap.

We may not see the essential core right away, but we will come to know it in time. Meanwhile, inspiration faithfully guides us back whenever we depart from it. We know instantly when we lose touch with it. We can feel it. Ever made a decision or taken a position you immediately knew was wrong, but you stuck to it anyway? Bet you have. Don't we all?

That's what I did; I knew right away that the no lyrics experiment was off the mark. Their idea wouldn't create the show my heart was moved to create. It was a rookie mistake to let them go ahead with their idea anyway, and eventually I put an end to it, but not before it cost us a lot, in more ways than just money and time.

I wish I could say I never compromised like that again, but I can't. Fortunately, though, the Gap is faithful. It's confident when we're not. It stays with us until we learn. When we finally get it, we're left with our clearest vision. We can see all the way to essence, and it's a view we'll never forget.

We can live a long time without that kind of clarity. Once we get it, we won't let go of it again. It's too captivating, too perfect.

It's not just the diamond; it's the brilliance.

### Accept No Substitutes

Finding essence also keeps us from rationalizing – compromise's close cousin.

Rationalizing is ego trying to foist cheap substitute goods on us. We accept them not because we want to, but because we believe we can't have the real thing.

Rationalizing is ego singing the blues when it's lost all hope of ever getting us back. By now, the refrain is familiar: it's one great big gigantic excuse for why we can't and won't and don't and shouldn't and never will get what we want.

That theme gets way too much play. There are scores of stories and songs about the team, the cause, the guy or girl, or the whatever that's loveable and admirable but ultimately hapless and eventually doesn't quite make it, but never mind, we love them in their failures anyway. At least they tried. And, really, they were better people than their opponents anyway. Anyone can see that.

We love the false consolation these stories offer us. They help us deal with our own failures. "Better to try and fail and be a good sport about it than not try at all," we sigh. Our heroes weren't going to succeed anyway, and neither are we. They knew it, and we do, too. But we're glad in a way. We like them better in their failure. We can relate. They're just like us. We're failures, too. We quit and compromise just like they do. That's the way life is sometimes.

Stop.

Just stop.

Now.

Rationalizing tries to make a bad thing sound good. Consolation prizes are the most misnamed trophies in the world. They mean well, but they don't help. There's no consolation in them; not to our hearts, anyway. Maybe they placate ego, make it feel smug and satisfied, but we still feel lousy. We were in it to win, and we lost, and we're hurting. Where's the consolation in that?

No dream worth facing the Gap should suffer that kind of indignity.

Accept no substitutes. Hold out for the good turtle soup. Forget the mock.

### Drama Queens Needn't Apply

Clarity and essence also save us from drama. I don't mean the kind that makes for a great story, I mean the kind we engage in when we're aimless, stuck, or just too full of ourselves to get the point.

Drama like that majors in minors, forfeits the game by not showing up, loses the war by winning battles that don't matter. We get a rush of power when we make a scene, but after it's over we're no closer to what we want.

We roll our eyes at other people's drama, make jokes at their expense. We expect the diva to storm out, and it's gratifying when she does. Sometimes we even recruit a prima donna just to spice things up. And sometimes we even catch ourselves at it, and we have to admit, it _is_ funny.

So go ahead and have a laugh, but then sober up and realize that drama isn't so funny after all. It's a dream killer. It distracts and blinds us, diverts our energy from what's important, impairs judgment, leads to compromises, makes us quit when we should hang in there. Drama drags us into bouts of depression, causes us to walk out on promising jobs, careers, and relationships, makes us miss opportunities, keeps us impoverished and unloved.

Not the best résumé. More like a rap sheet.

### Disappointment Junkies:  
_It's Time to Kick Some Habits Around Here_

Compromise, rationalizing, drama, and all the rest... why do we do that to ourselves?

Because staying within the familiar confines of ego is more comfortable and secure than change.

Because we'd rather be victimized by The Way Things Are than suffer the Gap.

Because it saves us major grief if there's a mysterious power out there – call it Fate or the Great Gatekeeper or whatever – that we just can't overcome, that keeps us in our places, keeps us small and powerless.

Because try as we might, life isn't giving it up for us, and really that's okay. Guess life's got its reasons, and we just need to deal with it.

Stop.

Just stop.

Now.

Fatalism and rationalization, apathy and passivity, the deception of drama... all of these tell us lies, lies, lies. They deal disappointment on the street corner, give us free samples until we're hooked. When we should stay riveted on our dream, we inject ourselves with a big dose of poison that says dreams don't come true, at least not for us. What began as a pity party turns into a lifelong addiction to disappointment, to not getting what we want.

We've become disappointment junkies.

Maybe it's time to kick some habits around here.

### Bring It All Or Not At All

My daughter Gillian was 16 when we created _Not This Day!_ Somewhere along the way, watching how we kept running into increasing levels of impossibility, she figured something out.

"Dad," she said, "Every time we try to do anything that's less than everything, nothing works."

She was right.

We planned to create a world-class performing arts company that would produce world-class shows that would change the world. Whenever we compromised that vision for _any_ reason, the whole thing shut down. Nothing worked. We got mad, frustrated, floundered around. When we returned to the original, full, glorious, passionate vision, things got moving again.

Bring it all or not at all became our new creative standard.

### Mercy

But what if, after all that, we just don't want to keep going?

It's a good question, and if we've struggled all this way through the Gap only to find ourselves at that place, then what?

The Gap provides a surprising answer: mercy – the kind that comes in a moment of special awareness, when we realize that we truly don't want what we said we wanted, that we didn't fully know our hearts' desires when we started, and now the Gap's pressures have revealed a deeper truth and more abiding passion.

Now that we know those things, there's no point remaining in the Gap. That would be pointless suffering. The Gap has done its work, and now we can leave it.

Mercy comes with absolute conviction, truthfulness, integrity, honesty, and authenticity, without despair or regret. And then some. And then some more. If it doesn't come that way, it's not mercy, it's quitting, and we've been duped with fake mercy, the kind that says there shouldn't be winners and losers so let's send everyone who shows up home with a ribbon. Or that says you get far enough behind you don't have to finish the game. That's false mercy – another attempt at a consolation prize that doesn't satisfy. Our souls know better. Cheap mercy leaves a bad taste – not just in our mouths but in our spirits.

Quitting sends us back where we came with a load of regret. That will hurt us. Remember: our dreams have long memories and personalities like wolverines, and if we're not truly done with them at the farthest reaches of our being, then they're not done with us, and it's gonna hurt for them to get our attention again. That's not mercy; that's just pain.

Mercy offers an escape from that pain. It invites us to create, the same way inspiration did. Only now our vision is clearer; we're in touch with essence like we weren't before. And that means we're ready to create in a way we weren't before.

Quitting and mercy _feel_ different, and we know the difference. Quitting mocks us because we've painted ourselves into a corner; mercy blows the roof off and shows us the stars. Quitting says it's over; mercy signals a beginning. Quitting fills us with regret; mercy stuns us with relief.

We passed the point of no return long ago. Quitting can't undo that, it can only make us regret we ever got this far. Mercy can't undo it either, but it doesn't want to. It doesn't call us back to what we so desperately wanted to leave behind, it invites us forward to what we really wanted in the first place.

When we reach the place of mercy, it's not time to quit.

It's time to begin.

### The Way Things Are

You've long since noticed that I use the terms "status quo" and "The Way Things Are" interchangeably.

The Way Things Are came to me early on, in exactly those fonts. I liked saying it, and writing it. It felt good to get on status quo's case, to condemn it as something bad. It gave me a sense of calling and purpose, filled me with righteous indignation, made _Not This Day!_ seem more noble and worthy. We were the good guys and The Way Things Are was the Evil Empire. We were right and they were wrong. We would win in the end, and everybody would agree they had it coming.

You get the idea.

We tend to get huffy about the things we suddenly decide we want to change. It's a common and forgivable tendency, especially in the early going when we feel uncertain and insecure, but in the long run it's misguided and counter-productive. All we're doing is setting up the thing we want to change as a rhetorical straw man, and making ourselves feel better by knocking it over. Maybe it feels good, but it's a waste of energy. We're pumping ourselves up with false courage but avoiding the real foe.

Which is why I don't get on my high horse about The Way Things Are anymore. A few years of fighting a worthy foe in the Gap will do that to you. I respect status quo more now than I did at first, not just because of what it does for us (makes sense of our lives, helps us feel safe in a scary world), but especially because I now understand where it comes from.

In the beginning, I spoke and acted as if The Way Things Are was some kind of external, sinister force we needed to bring down. I was wrong. It doesn't exist apart from us, it exists because of us, and if we want to break from it, we first need to face up to how we have created and sustained it. In a story that already had countless revealing plot twists, I suddenly understood my foe's true identity. Its name wasn't The Way Things Are, and it didn't live somewhere out there, it lived within my own skin. The biggest foe I faced was the one I saw in the mirror every day.

The foe who blocks our way is none other than the aggregate of all the ego structures that make us who we are, and our lives what they are. Its intelligence about us is complete: there is no weakness or self-sabotaging tendency it doesn't know about and isn't prepared to exploit. It is entrenched and fortified beyond description; and it will continue to resist long after the truce flag has been waved.

Now that I know who's responsible for all this Resistance, I'm now willing to mourn its end, even if I'm also the one bringing its demise about. Just because the ego structures that have been holding me and my life together need to step aside to make room for my dreams doesn't mean they didn't serve me in the past. They had their place and time, but now those days are over, and if I want my dreams to come true, I will do everything I can to put them behind me.

But here's the key: when I honor status quo for what it gave me, I also honor myself for having done my best, which allows me to see the past without regret. Regret will keep me looking backward; I need to be free from it to keep moving forward. Honoring my past will give me that freedom.

Follow your mania, yes, but do so with a free and forgiving heart. This, too, is another mercy to be learned in the Gap.

### PART THREE: A COMEDY OF ERRORS

" _A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable,  
but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."_

George Bernard Shaw

### FRIEND OR FOE– THE SEQUEL

Too Many Jobs, Gap Vision

I didn't know any of what I just said about the Gap when I was going through it. The Gap dominated my world, had everything to do with what was going on in and around me, but I only understood it months, even years later. At the time, I was too busy with my new job, which was to create both a show and a new business to support it.

Oops, that's two jobs. Oh, and I needed to manage people who – unlike me – actually did know how to do their jobs. So that makes three.

And then there was getting through the Gap, which was the most demanding job of all, because all my other jobs depended on me mastering the Gap's lessons right now. I needed mastery before I started, actually. The first day I started my on-the-job training was one day too late.

Sigh. I guess that's four jobs. Or five, if you count being both trainee and supervisor separately.

At one point, a planning consultant asked me for our company's organizational chart. I put one together, and it was thorough and impressive, like my original business plan. It had all the right titles on the boxes (although I wasn't entirely sure what a lot of them meant), and all the right lines connecting them.

There was just one problem: a whole bunch of the boxes had the same name in them.

Mine.

I've now lost count of how many jobs I had, and I'm sorry I ever brought it up.

Plus there was the problem of Gap Vision, which isn't a job, it's an affliction. Gap Vision is when you get to the point where your self-awareness practice is working so well that you're always looking in the mirror and never seeing anything looking back at you but your junk. Gap Vision turns your life into a never-ending job performance review that's not going well.

Let's see... Do you quarrel over full accountability?

Okay, I admit it's tempting.

Make excuses?

Well, maybe sometimes.

Whine?

Oh shut up!

Compromise? Rationalize? Get caught up in drama?

Okay, okay, okay!

What's worse, Gap Vision doesn't afflict just us. Pretty soon, we want to share it with everybody else. We're so aware of our own bad habits that we see them in everybody else, too – kind of like when you want a certain car and that's all you see on the road. We know better, but every now and then we can't help it, and we share our junk with others who obviously have the same issues.

"Insufferable" is what I think they call that.

We wouldn't have Gap Vision if we and everybody else could be immediately transformed the instant we see one of our ego issues in the mirror, but transformation doesn't work that way – which is too bad, because world peace might actually have a chance if it did.

Instead, our Gap lessons don't rub off on other people. Instead, we just rub them... the wrong way. And then they return the favor.

Sigh. I think this needs to count as another job.

By now, there were enough parts of me trying to do so many different jobs that I became a one-man Keystone Cops. My efforts to produce the show became a comedy of errors.

And all the jokes were on me.

Which meant they weren't funny at all.

### _(Mis)_ Management 101

"I need people who would do this for free," I told someone once, "Because those are the people I can afford to pay."

That's straight out of the Standard Self-Employed Business Owner's Human Resources Policy Manual. Visionaries are like that: we'll take the hit for our cause, hurt and bleed for it. And we think the people who work for us will do the same, just because.

That was me all over. I thought _Not This Day's_ cast and crew would catch its Revolution Man spirit just by hanging around, that they'd be as obsessed and passionate as I was, that they'd dive into their jobs and work for free, just like me. And then I was surprised when they didn't.

Because of our "revolution" and "manifesto" themes, we created a section on the show's webpage with the crew's photos and bios called "Meet the Resistance." Cool. Edgy. Tough. Heroic.

Nice idea, but things didn't turn out that way.

I hate stereotypes as much as the next guy, but too often that's what we had. A dancer would go AWOL and someone would say, "Oh, you know dancers – they're always flakey." And they'd say it like it was The Unquestionable Truth. I didn't want to believe our people were like that, but way too often they were. It was always something:

"I was sick." ("That means hung over," someone explained.)

"My car broke down/ the bus was late/ I couldn't get a ride/all of the above."

"We couldn't rehearse because the studio was locked."

And on it went. Some of our crew were chronically off schedule or didn't make good on promises. Others were poor listeners, more interested in their vision than mine. Others I had to move Heaven and Earth to find out if they were making any progress... and I was the boss!!

A few years back, there was a management buzz that said employees are volunteers, so treat them that way. A bunch of our people had the volunteer thing down, all right: I only got what they carved out of their over-booked calendars, and way too often they didn't bother to tell me about their conflicts ahead of time.

If tolerating all this offstage drama was part of my new job description as a show producer, then I really wasn't qualified.

I thought I must have made a management mistake: I should have gotten commitment before I hired people. So I went looking for great commitment quotes. Most of us know the one from Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Nice. I found some more, and put them into an inspirational piece to give people when I interviewed them.

I never used it. It was too late. I'd already hired everybody.

Yeah, I know. Pretty lame.

Then I thought maybe the problem was that I hadn't been clear about what I expected of people, so I created a document called _Expectations: The Rules of Our Game_. I posted it on the show's website, announcing to the world that this is how we do business – aren't we special! Then I went to our team members and asked them to read and sign it. You can imagine the responses. Some people were surprised, some were insulted, and some couldn't be bothered to read it but signed anyway. After awhile I gave up. My _Expectations_ had been as effective as my collection of commitment quotes.

I wasn't used to this. I was used to people showing up at my law office and being self-directed and staying all day – usually longer than all day. Was I really that lousy a manager? Or was something else going on?

Something else was going on: the Gap had extended its reach; its hooks weren't just in me, now they were in the whole company as well. I wasn't the only one in a state of dissonance; the whole company was, and it needed to be transformed as badly as I did.

We all form dream-making companies to help us with our Big Ideas. Maybe it's an actual company like mine was, or maybe it's a project team, a committee, an informal support network of friends and family, whatever. No matter the form, we create our dream-making companies in our own image, which is the shape of our ego when we get started. We institutionalize our egos as they exist at that time, take all our ineffective and self-sabotaging perspectives and behaviors and dump them into our dream-making companies as an initial capital contribution.

You can see the problem. Our old ego structures aren't going to work, either for us or for our companies. So what happens? We end up out there in the Gap, trying to overcome ego, not even aware that's what we're doing, and meanwhile back at the ranch everyone in our company is operating under the old ego we're now trying to overthrow. We're busy becoming self-aware, but everybody else thinks we're just trying to change the rules on them. Back in the beginning, we went tiptoeing around, trying to figure out who would support or squash us. Now the question is who will stay with us, and on what terms. And, on top of it all, because we have Gap Vision, we get annoyed that other people aren't getting with the program as fast as _we_ are.

And then they return the favor.

No wonder Big Ideas are so hard on relationships. We hit the Gap and think "I didn't sign up for this," but think how everybody else feels. They sure didn't sign up for this. We have no one to blame but ourselves, but they, on the other hand, definitely have someone to blame.

That would be us, of course.

Guess it's time to practice some more full accountability.

I reached for management solutions when there weren't any because I didn't know about the Gap and didn't see how it was affecting both me and the company. I knew our company dynamic wasn't working, but I didn't understand that I had created it to operate that way, or how I had done that, and therefore my attempts to change it were misguided (to put it kindly). My focus needed to be on transforming me, not on changing the company. If that could happen, there was hope for all of us, and for the show. Otherwise, we were toast.

Find that in your Management 101 textbook.

Fortunately, my slapstick routine took a welcome break when our cast and crew sorted themselves into roughly four categories:

People who were committed to the show and its themes, and who would show up because they were.

People who weren't, but were professional enough to show up anyway.

People who were chronically over-committed and never gave their hearts to anything, who might show up if something else wasn't in the way.

People who maybe should have been. Committed, that is.

Like a lot of bosses, I don't fire people well. Lucky for me and for them, many of the people who needed to go let themselves quietly out the back way. And also lucky for me, the others forgave me and stepped up.

By now, one thing was painfully clear: we needed to take down the _Meet the Resistance_ feature on our webpage. We weren't acting like a group of resistance fighters, much less a "small group of thoughtful committed citizens" out to change the world, and there was no point in pretending we were, no matter how cool and heroic it sounded.

It was a sad, honest, and sobering day when _Meet the Resistance_ went down. It sent a clear signal: both I and the company needed to get our act together without any management help from me, and we needed to do that before the time and money and relationship goodwill ran out.

And we were running short on all of them.

### Vive La Fraternité!

Every now and then I lucked out and met the kind of theater people I came to call _La_ _Fraternité_ because of their revolutionary, can-do spirit – as in _Liberté_ Égalité _Fraternité!_

They're a tough bunch: hard-working and dedicated, not to mention creative, innovative, resourceful, generally fun to be around, and devoted beyond expression to their craft.

"You want _WHAT!!??_ " is a daily occurrence for them. I'd tell them what I wanted. "Never seen that done," they'd mumble. I'd wonder if I'd lost them. Then they'd come back with, "You know, I think maybe we could...." Finally, it was "I'll get on it."

I once auditioned a team of stuntmen at their gym – a place filled with apparatus to climb on, swing from, jump over, fall off. Their leader introduced his crew by saying, "We're real-life bad asses. There's nothing we won't try to make something work."

Dizzy Dean said, "It ain't bragging if you can do it." I watched them for a couple hours, and it wasn't bragging.

Once when our kids were little my wife and I took them to visit the grandparents. I was sitting at the kitchen table with them, drawing pictures with colored markers, when my dad came in and made some crack about me playing with coloring books in that annoying voice people sometimes use to talk to their pets. Real men don't color, apparently.

Bless you, Dad, and R.I.P., but you were wrong. The creative life is big and honorable and demanding. It takes courage, determination, and ingenuity. It's a life of no compromise and no excuses, of doing the impossible and never giving up. It's for the best and the brightest, the few and the focused, the daring and the determined.

"There's nothing we won't try to make something work." That's the dreamer's calling. truth, pledge, and path.

Do the impossible? Yeah, we're on it.

### You Mean You Want it to be _Commercial?!_

Remember that "let's have music without lyrics" experiment? Well, it wasn't working, and I arranged to tell our composer and choreographers that they'd made a nice try, but the experiment was over.

I met our composer for coffee. Turned out he'd been talking to Conventional Man – did I mind if he shared some ideas? No, I didn't mind. I guess I should have. They were all good Conventional Man ideas, which meant we couldn't use them.

Then he shifted gears and started talking about how inferior and unsophisticated the music from CATS was, and how we shouldn't have music like that in our show.

Really? I mean... really?

I got so engrossed that I forgot to tell him.

He left, and our choreographers came in and we ordered salads. I stayed on track this time, tried to explain why lyrics and dance and video all needed to co-exist as storytellers. One of them felt that this cheapened the artistic value of the show, made it too common, took the focus off the choreography. "You mean you want this show to be commercial?" she blurted out, spitting out the word commercial like she'd just bitten a worm in her lettuce.

Hmmm. Our show shouldn't be _commercial_. And our music shouldn't be as bad as CATS.

Great concept.

That night at home, we drank a toast: Here's to creating a show as bad as CATS.

### Sneak Peek

February 2008 – one year after Not This Day! first came on the scene. My daughter Gillian and I drive home late after watching the final dress rehearsal of the Sneak Preview of our show. The house manager – a crusty New York vet – had exclaimed over our set. "This is like Broadway!" he said. We drive along, each of us silently reliving scenes from the past two days of load-in and tech and dress rehearsals. Finally I break the silence. "Gillian," I say, "We have got ourselves one kickass show!" She laughs, and we spend the rest of the drive excitedly swapping stories and comparing notes.

Six weeks earlier, we had no choreographer; our professional dancers had split to perform in Nutcrackers all over the country, our set was a box frame sitting in an unheated warehouse with a ton of steel stacked next to it, our new composer had written 45 seconds of music that our amateur hip-hop troupe had turned into a simple routine not all of them could perform, and we had no designs or plans or blueprints for anything – set, lighting, costumes, nothing.

What we did have was a theater booked for the show's opening in February.

On January 4th, I met with our set designer – or, I should say, the guy who had said he was going to design and build our set. He'd been busy working the Nutcracker and hadn't answered my calls and texts and emails for weeks. I wanted to ask whatever happened to the set and his lighting plan. Instead, I asked him what he thought was going to happen now.

It was a sunny day and we sat outside. He sipped his usual vente with three extra shots. "If you don't run the show now, you're gonna lose it forever," he said. That was it: either forfeit the theater deposit and cut our losses, or make another run at impossible.

Six weeks later, we had a set, music, lights, costumes, dancing, circus aerials, plus a couple videos that would run on the onstage video screens. And a couple weeks after that, we also had a movie-style teaser and trailer, several other video features, and a "making of" video. And a whole lot more.

There was no way to put the whole show together that fast, especially with a new cast and crew. Instead, I decided we would just showcase _Not This Day's_ main themes and performance styles in a series of demos, and Gillian and I would come out between them and tell the audience what they were seeing and what they weren't, and where we wanted to go next with the show.

We didn't have time to promote the Sneak Peek, so the crowd was all word of mouth. A few hundred people showed up – a lot of them friends and acquaintances who were fascinated enough with this new turn in my life that they wanted to check it out.

I remember several things about that night as if they just happened. Standing in the wings with the dancers, waiting for our entrances. The crowd first blasted with the Prologue's wakeup call and later by the Assassins (our bad guys) rushing the stage from the back of the theater, then spellbound by the lament music and ballet and Gillian's aerial act. The joy of standing onstage with Gillian, feeling the love from the crowd. The cast's snappy choreographed bows to a standing ovation. Members of our hip-hop troupe lining up afterward to thank Gillian and me for the chance to be in the show. People waiting in the crowded lobby to talk to us afterward. All the hugs and smiles. The piles of cash and checks in our freewill offering baskets. One of Gillian's friends telling me he had no idea we were up to something this amazing, and his friend – a quarterback from another local high school – dropping his jock persona long enough to tell me he could dance and asking if he could audition. A long-time friend taking Gillian and me out to a late night dinner and telling us how very proud he was.

And so much more. So, so much more.

I occasionally run into people who were there, and they still remember. It was one perfect night, created by the power of matter-of-fact urgency: Do it now or lose it forever.

Some of the best advice I've ever gotten.

### Afterglow

The local newspaper covered the Sneak. The reporter said he could give us maybe a couple hours on Friday. He stayed all day. And all night. And all next day. He for sure couldn't make the show on Saturday night. He came early and stayed late. He was under the _Not This Day!_ spell. He had joined the Revolution. The show captured his heart, and his article captured the show's. It started this way:

How do you change the world? If you're the father-daughter team of Kevin and Gillian Rhodes, you do it with music and dance and a powerful message of hope. On the evening of Feb. 16, that message exploded onto the Teikyo Loretto Heights Theater stage in a commanding hour of top flight entertainment and potent meaning.

People around town clipped it out and mailed it to me. The show's insurance agent had it laminated and sent it to us.

A professional friend from my lawyering days left a voice message Sunday afternoon saying he wanted to give us some money – who should he make the check out to?

Our videographer finished the show's video features in a white heat. He kept stealing glances at me as his girlfriend and I sat and cried as we watched the making-of video.

My advertising friend told me he'd brought some critics who couldn't understand why we stopped the show for our talking interludes. Were they listening when we told the audience at the start what was going to happen?!

We finally held our very first production meeting two weeks after the Sneak Peek. The newcomers didn't have much to say. The leftovers from our first crew talked about how they sure weren't going to do it that way again.

Three weeks after the show I had a fistful of newspaper clippings, a boxful of promo videos, a half-completed soundtrack, some fresh money in the bank... and the prospect of a little time off. Not a vacation, a retreat: time to reflect and debrief, sort out the tangles, and come charging back with renewed vision and energy. Then we'd shop the show to investors, recruit some new cast and crew members, and get back to production.

That was the plan – very orderly, neat, clean, and logical. Never mind that life with the show had always been anything but. Turned out that, although I had my plan, mania had one, too, and mania's won. The process of putting on a show was about to stop being change and become transformation, on a whole new level.

I never saw it coming. I thought life still worked the way it used to, thought I was still the same person living in the same universe I always had. By now, I should have known better.

But I mean, really, how far off track can you get with three days of quiet contemplation in the Colorado foothills?

Pretty far, as it turned out.

### CAUGHT IN THE UNDERTOW:

The Oracle Comes to Visit

March 2008. For 3 days and nights I record thoughts that flow unstopped through my brain. It's like being at a seminar, being the featured speaker but also recording and transcribing the speaker's words while creating the PowerPoint slides and sitting in the audience listening and taking notes and doodling in the margins of my handout materials... all at the same time. I write and draw with color markers I bought on the way out of town in the sketchbook I felt compelled to bring at the last minute for reasons I didn't understand. The contents offer fresh perspectives on the creative life, following your dreams, the process of personal transformation, and all the other things this book is about. When the "seminar" finally ends three days later, I write a title on my sketchbook: "What I Believe, Much to My Surprise." At one point, I ask the seminar presenter in my head, "Who are you anyway?" "Phineas," he replies. When I get home, I look up the name Phineas. It means "Oracle."

[Cue Twilight Zone music]

It was just like those first moments of Not This Day: no context or precedent, unanticipated and unauthorized, and definitely not according to plan. Except that this time, it wasn't just a cosmic channel I wasn't subscribed to, it was a channel apparently newly created just for me, for these three days, and I was both the audience and the featured speaker.

This time, I wasn't called to create something, I was invited into the creative process itself. Phineas had just walked me right past all the "No Unauthorized Admittance" signs and handed me the Top Secret Manual. Only trouble was, it read like a coloring book, and its content was all in riddles.

About what you'd expect from an oracle.

Have I mentioned yet that "Have a 3-day encounter with a voice in my head that identifies itself as The Oracle" was not in the plan? Maybe this kind of thing happened to weird New Agey types infatuated with "channeling," but not to me.

Wait! Did you hear that sound?

I thought I heard someone laughing.

Never mind. Must have been the wind.

Safely back home, I took out my sketchbook and read it – as if for the first time, as if somebody else had written it. And, true to its title, I believed what it said as if I always had, even though its contents were new and surprising and nothing I'd ever thought or expressed before.

Go figure.

I decided to v-e-r-y c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y "field test" the materials on people I trusted. I put it in an envelope and handed it to a friend, and he held it in both hands as if weighing it. He gave me funny look. "What's in here?" he asked. "I can feel some kind of energy inside."

Um, is that a good thing?

A few people I trusted read it, and nobody thought I was crazy. Just the opposite: they liked it, marveled over it, said it had good energy, made them feel good. One person declared that I'd downloaded in three days what her expensive life coaching course had taken a year to teach her. And everybody liked the doodles and riddles. They got you out of your rut, opened your mind, made you think differently.

So far so good. But now what? Why this? Why me? Why now? What about the show? I went on retreat to think about the show... remember?

Whatever these materials were, they weren't going to help me with the show – at least not right away. They were a distraction, a sideshow... a freak show, really. If they needed attention, I'd do that in my spare time. For now, the show must go on. The oracle could wait.

Wait! There it was again.

That sound – did you hear it?

I swear I heard somebody laughing.

### Riddles and Puzzles

_We shall not cease from exploration_

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, from "Little Gidding" (The last of the Four Quartets)

Not everyone has experiences like that. No voice in your head that won't shut up for three days and gives itself the name Phineas? Maybe not a bad thing.

I do believe, though, that once we've made it this far into the creative journey, all of us will get what I got from the oracle: the creative process will begin to reveal itself, tell us what it's done, what it's doing, and what lies ahead. It's as if the creative process waits for us to get this far to tell us these things. If it told us earlier, we wouldn't get it.

Inspiration asks us to do the impossible, but the impossible waits to be discovered. It's there all the time, with us and within us, in the darkness and the cloud of unknowing, until eventually Phineas – or whatever his equivalent for you – steps out from behind the veil and begins to unfold the mystery to us.

And when that happens, we believe it much to our surprise, and know it both for the first time and as if we always had – just like T.S. Eliot said.

After all our moving forward and exploring, all our trying and persisting and meeting challenges, after all this time being blind and lost and groping our way across the Gap, we start to see how the creative process works – the mystery actually starts to reveal itself in a way that makes sense. Finally we get an audience with the Wizard, and watching him pushing the levers in his booth explains a whole lot.

We learn that creation starts in chaos, but chaos doesn't stay chaotic forever. Eventually it organizes itself, becomes cosmos, takes on shape and order and structure.

And we learn that creation doesn't fire off commands and impose rules and formulas, doesn't promise that if we just follow these 10 steps we'll get it right.

Instead, we learn that inspiration is an invitation. "Here – solve this riddle," it says. "Put this puzzle together."

The trickiest part is that, since the invitation comes addressed to us and not anyone else, we're solving a riddle no one's ever solved, putting together a puzzle no one's ever put together. There's no right answer to the riddle, and no picture on the box cover to show us what the assembled puzzle pieces will look like. There's only the answer we provide, only the picture we choose to paint.

And yet the answer to the riddle is there, and so is the picture the pieces will make. Both wait to emerge – which they will do if we allow them, if we co-create with them. Inspiration doesn't just invite us to create, but to co-create. Our task isn't just to create what we want, but to co-create what wants to be.

My oracle-in-a-sketchbook revealed all that and a whole lot more, and when it did, I had a sense for the first time of what I'd really gotten myself into. Not that I saw and understood it all at once – I'm still working with the Phineas materials and probably will be for a long time, maybe for the rest of my life – but all I knew back then was I had a sketchbook full of really curious ideas and it was going to take awhile for the deeper impact of its lessons to unfold.

It was an unnerving thought. Apparently there was a lot about the creative process I had no clue about. And it was equally apparent that I was going to be hamstrung in my creativity until I learned more about what I didn't know. That didn't bode well for the show. It's tough to do things when you don't know what they are, and scary to think that your ignorance is putting everything you're already doing at risk.

Have I mentioned yet that oracles don't make the easiest of friends?

### Caught in the Undertow

When they teach you to do a business plan, they tell you to consider "environmental factors." Those are big picture things you can't control that might hurt your business – like whether there's a recession waiting around the corner. And if an environmental factor surprises you along the way, you're supposed to drop everything and figure out how to deal with it.

In hindsight, the oracle's visit was one of those. It was out of my control and a threat to the enterprise – at least in the short term. The oracle wasn't a freak show, like I thought, it was THE show. To finish what we'd started, both I and the company needed not just to know the oracle's lessons but to embody them. Trouble is, I didn't see any of that at the time. I didn't have the benefit of hindsight yet. My vision was still impaired.

Ever gone snorkeling where salt and fresh water mix? The water goes blurry, things are out of focus, and our autofocus mechanism can't snap them back in. To see clearly, we need to swim either further inland or further out to sea.

That was me, after the oracle's visit. My vision was blurry, and I just kept swimming further out to sea, right past the warning signs about dangerous currents, undertows, and riptides. Instead of reasonably proceeding with my reasonable plans for the show, I went sweeping right past the warnings and into the deep waters, caught in the undertow of mania.

### Don't Do That To Your Fan Club

A friend and financial advisor and I went out for a beer and bar food, and I told him I was thinking that maybe, instead of taking the time to find investors, I might just empty the last of my personal coffers so we could push ahead to finish the show. Presumably I'd get it back once the show was a success. What was his opinion?

He was a Platinum Fan Club Member. Back in the beginning, I'd taken Gillian with me to tell him about the show. He didn't say much, but a few days later sent a $15,000 check. I hadn't asked for money – he was a longtime friend, and I just wanted him to know. His check was the miracle vote of confidence I needed to quit looking for someone else to produce the show and to do it myself.

He listened to my new idea and finally said, well, I guess, why not? He had no idea I was about to trash my plans for good. It was my job to know that, not his. He qualified his opinion, as he should have, but still it felt like the vote of confidence he'd given back at the start.

Don't do that to your fan club. They're a cheering section, not a board of directors. Ever notice when you watch a game on TV and they show the team's owner in his skybox, he's never smiling? That's because he's got skin in the game. The crowd can go wild all they want, but he's counting the gate and hot dog and beer sales, and wondering what they're going to do now that the All-Pro corner is out for the season.

Simple rule: treat owners like owners, directors like directors, and fan clubs like fan clubs. Works every time.

I dumped out my piggybanks and stuffed the show's bank account with new cash. I booked a theater for an opening in September, hired new cast and crew, rented rehearsal space, got everybody going on a tight schedule.

In the movies, they call the final 20 minutes when everything comes together the race for the curtain.

Ours had just begun.

### The Universe Where We Live

I sometimes wonder how things might have turned out if I'd stuck with the plan. Interesting to think about, but not useful. What-if's belong in spreadsheets and alternate universes, but the creative process stays present in the here and now.

Creating our Big Ideas taps the essence of who we are and why we have Life within us, and the creative process will go deep to release it. Following our dreams isn't just making something happen, it's working out our salvation, the eternal well-being of our souls. And there's only one place to get saved: in the bodies and souls we have right here, right now, not in some what-if scenario or alternate universe.

I believe that.

The path to achieving our dreams isn't through us, we are the path. Our visions are realized in the universe which is us. And that universe needs to be created in the here and now.

Definitely not your conventional business strategy or mission statement. "Our company will achieve its goals when our founder becomes a new person in a new universe."

Um, could you run that by me again?

Maybe later. For now, it's enough to know that I didn't stick with the plan, and things didn't go differently than they did. Not in this universe, anyway. Never mind about the blurred vision and missed warning signs and all the rest. Things took their course in the here and now. They took their course in me.

Which is exactly where the action always is, and always needs to be.

### Railroad Crossing

I'm 19 years old, and immortal. We've been partying. Some friends and I jump in my car. We approach a railroad crossing that's strangely configured. The warning lights start to flash, but the arm stays up. I stop and we sit for what feels like a long time. Still no train. I grow impatient and start ahead. The arm drops suddenly, almost hits the hood on the way down. I slam on the brakes and the locomotive roars past, just a few feet away. A buddy in the backseat speaks with a small, scared voice. "Maybe someone else should drive," he says. I drive on, shaken. We head to a shopping center, where we get our picture taken with Santa Claus.

Maybe if somebody else had been in the show's driver's seat, they might have done the right and reasonable thing and shut things down before I dumped the rest of my personal savings into it. If they had, there'd be a different story to tell. But no one else was driving, I was. This wasn't someone else's story, it was mine. And I wasn't done telling it yet.

Turned out I didn't need to shut things down. The creative process did it for me. First the show hit the wall, and then I did.

What came next made my former life as a Gap Crash Dummy look like a Golden Age. The action would stop so suddenly and entirely, it was as if neither I nor the show had ever moved before or would ever move again.

And the silence would be so immense, it's still ringing in my ears.

### POSTMORTEM

Autopsy

The checks from my retirement funds had barely cleared when the income from selling my law practice dried up. Never mind why, but the result was that the financial needs of a family with three kids in college were now in direct competition with a gas-guzzler of a show.

Meanwhile, the show's creative and commercial engines were balky and sluggish, spewing out choking smoke as we made irregular progress and finally bogged down entirely.

All the while, I was increasingly immobilized in the Gap, and didn't realize that as long as I wasn't moving, the show wasn't either.

By the end of July, it was clear we weren't going to make it. The money was almost gone, but more than that, the show just wasn't ready, and wasn't going to be. A month later, _Not This Day's_ world premier officially crashed and burned.

In our making-of video, I'd said it was impossible for me to think we wouldn't finish what we started. After a year and a half of doing the impossible, we'd just done it one more time.

I sat dazed for a few weeks, then declared a lockdown to conduct an autopsy. I was impatient to get the show back on the road, so I gave it ten days. I emerged with a 53-page summary. Yeah, a summary – a full report would have been a phone book. It chronicled all the things I tried, did or didn't do, what worked and what didn't, who I talked to and who didn't return the call.... it went on and on – a über job performance review that took no prisoners, left nothing sacred.

When it was done, I shared it with a couple people, hoping for some perspective. No one finished it. It wasn't just exhaustive, it was just plain exhausting.

It was full of explanations but short on answers. It told me what I already knew, only in more detail. I'd been an unqualified novice who made every mistake in the book. No news there. I'd worked hard and learned a lot and got pretty far until my on-the-job training and lack of personal income sucked all the capital out. No news there, either.

That didn't help. It was like saying somebody who's been sick a long time died of heart failure. Maybe that's true in some technical sense, but it's just the last straw, not the whole perspective on why the body was sick in the first place. I needed to understand the whole scope of how my life had been invaded by the show, and how I'd worked with passion and commitment for a year and a half... only to come up short. I needed to know not just what happened, but why: why I'd led myself and my friends and family on what turned out to be the charge of the light brigade. If I couldn't figure that out, then next time I'd make the same mistakes all over again.

And, as disastrous as this outcome felt, I suspected there would be a next time, since I'd been going from one next time to another all my life, especially during all those years of my allegiance to Shtick. If I wanted to avoid doing that again, I needed to find some answers that ten days hadn't given me. Apparently the postmortem needed more time.

As it turned out, the postmortem took four more years. It started with the first reflections I captured in a journal the month I canceled the show, and ended when this book was finally done. Although the postmortem is now officially over, there's no doubt its lessons are still playing out in my life, and will be for awhile.

I see all that now in hindsight, but all I knew for sure back then was that I had a big mess to clean up.

### Friend or Foe: _The Finale_

I found out a couple years later that you can buy insurance against showbiz failures. It's expensive and hard to get, but that's what makes it so valuable. You have to convince the insurance company you're doing all the right stuff so there's virtually no risk you'll fail. Sure wish I'd known about it at the time. The application and underwriting process alone would have saved me from a gazillion mistakes.

But there's no point in might-have-beens. At the time, I didn't know what I didn't know, and therefore the creative process had been perfectly executed to get me and the show precisely to exactly where we'd ended up. It couldn't have been any other way.

I see that now, but didn't back then. Mostly, I felt bad for the people who'd given us money. They'd made it clear they didn't want it back or expect a return, that they'd contributed because they were captured by the show's mission and message. But still I felt bad. I wanted them to see the finished show they'd believed in. I'd been walking around for almost two years with a " _Not This Day or Bust_ " sign plastered on my backside. I never expected it to end up "Bust." Neither did they.

About then, someone told me it's a guy thing, all this feeling bruised about money. Maybe. I just know that I was reckoning as never before with whether I had any value as a human being if I couldn't financially support my family. It didn't help when I met the head of a job search company who mentioned that two of his male clients had recently committed suicide over job losses during the Great Recession. They figured their life insurance was more valuable to their families than their lack of income-producing work. I could relate. I'd spent too much time weighing that choice myself. In the end, I didn't have that option: I had to let my life insurance lapse because I couldn't pay the premiums.

It wasn't just about the money or the blow to my sense of worth. I lost friends, too. _La_ _Fraternité_ may be pros who come to work with the spirit of _les_ _amateurs –_ people who do it for love – but even they have their limits: they want to get paid. The show may be way cool, but if it won't pay, they're outta here. I knew that, but still, one of the hardest things for me to deal with afterward was how our cast and crew scattered once I could no longer pay them. I missed them.

In time, even my fan club lost interest. You can't blame them – I was taking way too long to get through the Gap, and they weren't going where I was anyway. I emailed asking about going out to coffee. They replied saying sure. I answered asking when. The string of messages always stopped there. In time, I gave up.

I was entering the next creative phase, where I had to go alone. No fan club, no Conventional Man, no Revolution Man, no _La_ _Fraternité._ In the end, they all fell down. I was the last man standing, alone with a dream that lived in only one place, the same place where it had started: in my heart.

It was just me.

On my way to meltdown.

### One More Time, With Feeling:  
_Can or Can't You Go Home Again?_

Where do we go when the wheels fall off?

Back.

We bulldoze the ruins of our big adventure into a great big pile and burn it. Then we go back, head down and hat in hand. Not that the good old days were so good – if they had been, we wouldn't have left in the first place. But surely they were better than this.

We're reaching for the last time we felt safe – when we had money in the bank and didn't live like a crash dummy. Maybe The Way Things Are wasn't perfect, but at least it gave us that. And surely everybody'll be glad to see us. I mean, they will, won't they?

Depends on who you're talking about. For sure _ego_ will be ready to take us back. It's been biding its time, waiting for its chance. It knew one day we'd come to our senses. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's better than this... this thing we thought we were in love with. It knew we'd come dragging back one day when the thrill of the affair was over and reality set in.

We won't get the welcome we want. This time ego's not taking any chances. We've had our fling. It's not letting us out of its sight again.

For me, going back meant to the law career I'd so spectacularly walked away from. I might have realized there was a problem with that idea when it took me a full two weeks just to fax the application for malpractice insurance. It wouldn't go through. My fax was down. The fax at the other end was down. Some pages went through but not others. I lost it, accidentally blipped it off the computer. The printer needed toner. On it went for two weeks. I kid you not. You don't practice law without malpractice insurance. Think maybe my heart wasn't in it?

No, it wasn't. I was singing that old, overused theme: we almost made it this time; we had it all, we lost it, but we're better off as lovable losers. It's so enticing, so appealing, it takes all we've got to resist it. It's a siren song. Don't fall for it. It's deception. Tie me to the mast until we get past.

The bad old days didn't suddenly get a character transplant; all they got was a whitewash job. What we're "remembering" is not what we had then, it's what we're missing now – missing only because we haven't created in our new life what ego used to provide in the old. We don't want ego again; we want what it used to give us. And we haven't yet figured out how our new life is going to handle that particular detail.

We lost a lot getting this far, and it hurts. We really did sell everything to buy the pearl of great price, and right now all appearances are we paid too much. Of course we feel that way. Who wouldn't? But we're forgetting one absolutely vital, critical, important thing:

We still have the pearl.

When we bought it, we bought our life. Which is why we can't go back. If we've come this far, we've come too far. Just because we haven't created provision in our new life doesn't mean we won't. And returning to the captivity of ego in the false hope of recreating that alluring, nostalgic memory of the good old days simply is not an option.

So what do we do?

We do the usual things we always do when we have a bad crash. We've been through trauma, and getting over it isn't instantaneous. We collect ourselves as best we can. We feel the hurt. We move through the grief stages of sadness, anger, apathy, depression, and finally acceptance. We forgive ourselves and everyone else.

Mostly, we need to empty the emotional content out of our memories, so we can look at the past without remorse. Interesting word, remorse. The "morse" part comes from the same root as "mortify" or "mortem." _Re_ morse literally means to die again. If we're filled with remorse, we just keep dying, again and again.

If we just conducted a postmortem for our Big Idea, that means we're not dead yet, even if it is. We're still breathing. Now it's time to go from barely breathing to living again. Life wasn't better in the bad old days. We've still got more life now in one pinky than we used to have in the whole neighborhood back then.

No, we can't go back. Not if we want to keep living.

Yeah, I get that technically we can. Of course we can. And we ought to, if mercy and not ego is the one opening the door for us. But if it's not mercy, then the dream we're giving up will be back one day. Wherever we left off, however much we assimilated into our souls, is where we'll pick up the next time.

And there will be a next time.

And there will keep being next times until we deal with that final creative destruction, that last phase of what Picasso talked about: the death of ego and all things old, where our striving ceases and our new selves emerge.

Yes, our dreams will be back, and next time the wakeup call might come in some form even more strident than drill sergeant style.

Just be warned, that's all.

If the creative process isn't done with us yet, then the mess we're in is yet one more invitation to keep moving forward. No it's not going to be easy. Creativity has its easy times, but this isn't one of them. This is tough stuff. But the time for mourning and conducting postmortems doesn't last. Eventually the wheel of fortune turns, and better days lie ahead.

Days of celebration even.

### False Summits

The second anniversary of my ski accident was approaching. I needed some light in a dark time, and decided we should celebrate. Maybe the show wasn't going on as planned, but it had already given us a lot of good gifts we were grateful for. So we invited friends to a Second Anniversary Pelvic Smash Party.

We started dinner with an appetizer of hot homemade apple pie and ice cream. We told stories and showcased talents, and I gave the obligatory after-dinner speech (mercifully short) about why we were celebrating. It was a great time, but more significant than the party itself were two events just before and just after it – two bookends on a shelf full of volumes entitled "My World Ever Since _Not This Day!_ Invaded My Life."

The first bookend was five weeks before the party. If everything had gone according to plan, that would have been the world premier weekend of _Not This Day!_ It was impossible not to wonder what the party would have been like if we could've added a world premier to our list of things to toast.

The other bookend came ten days after the party. An early November day dawned clear and sunny, and I decided to ride my bike to the office. On the way, I hit some sand and gravel left over from a snowstorm, lost control, crashed, and demolished my left femur where it joins the hip – an injury that made my pelvic fractures two years earlier look like a sprained ankle by comparison.

Two bookends: a dream in ruins on one side, and a body in ruins on the other. What do you think? Do they make our Pelvic Smash Party look foolish? Is it possible – as some people suggested – that our celebration _invited_ the accident, that our celebration triggered some major bad karma vibes that executed on paybacks?

In the middle of the show there's a series of scenes that we referred to in rehearsals as the "false summit sequence." The good guys are coming off a place of tragedy and mourning, but also resolution and rising. Our hero isn't going to take it anymore. What exactly he'll do remains to be seen, but it's clear he's going to do something.

Awhile later, he and the rest of the troupe have passed through a series of challenges and are newly awakened and free. They dare a little celebration. They start tentatively, then become less awkward as they awaken to a deeper realization of where they've been and what it took to get this far. As they make a solemn commitment to keep moving ahead, their celebration is no longer just about awakening and freshness, it's about heart-swelling courage and commitment. The emotional tone ratchets up another notch and becomes defiant. "The time is ours!" they sing. "We're seizing power!" They're throwing off their bonds, breaking their chains. Our hearts rise with theirs, and we wonder if the show is winding up.

It's not. Major challenges and setbacks remain.

The sequence invites the same questions people asked about our Pelvic Smash Party. Why so much celebrating at this point? Why all this joy, this resolve and defiance? Was it all premature and foolish?

I live in Colorado, where we have 50+ mountains over 14,000 feet high. Many have false summits that break your heart when you're climbing. You wheeze and gasp in the thin air, struggling to put one foot in front of the other, only to reach what you thought was the top and find that you haven't been climbing the summit ridge after all. A false summit blocked your view of the real goal, which now looks impossibly distant.

False summits knock the wind out of you. We've all hit way too many of them in our lives. We think we might be close to something we really want, we make a huge push to get there... only to find we're further away than ever.

You can't take too much of that, so we learn to become grinders. We tough it out, make the most of our half-hearted lives. Our creed is no victory, no party. If your deal isn't a success, then stow the crowing. Dancing and high-fives and photos and trying to see if there's cell coverage to tell your friends you're standing on a false summit? Save it.

There's a certain degree of professionalism in that. Early celebrations can be bush league. But never celebrate along the way? Maybe not.

Were there any false summits in the games you played as a child? I didn't think so. There weren't in mine either. I always hit the grand slam with a full count and two out and our team down by three runs in the bottom of the ninth. Always. Unlike the mighty Casey, I never struck out.

What if we could play at life and the creative process the same way – especially when we're doing something oh so serious like pursuing our most passionate dreams? What if getting to the top of the ridge and realizing we were gunning for a false summit isn't a signal to feel stupid and put our head down and start huffing up the mountain again? What if instead it's an invitation to throw down the packs for a minute and rally?

Maybe the creative journey needs periodic celebrations – small and big, private and public, quiet and raucous – so it doesn't degenerate into grinding.

Maybe an occasional break would give us a fresh deep draught of the passion and joy that got us started in the first place.

Maybe small celebrations would help us stop pressing and re-energize and let the creative breakthroughs happen again.

Maybe a bunch of small celebrations would get our party muscles in shape for the one great big grand celebration we really want to see, when our story finally does reach its happy ending.

Maybe it is a good thing to celebrate on false summits.

I confess – we haven't had another Pelvic Smash Party since that first one. And we _sure_ haven't had a Femur Fracture Fête. Now that would be a stretch. But I don't know, maybe it's worth a try.

What do you think? Party at my house?

### Quantum Leap

December 2008. I'm set up in a hospital bed downstairs. My wife works retail, and it's Christmas season. My sister calls – would we like some help? She and her husband fly in. They cook and clean, do odd jobs and empty my chamber pot. My sister-in-law and her husband send me an email saying every Christmas they give some worthy person $1,000, and I'm this year's recipient. I can't stop crying as I email them my thanks. Two of the people who were at the Pelvic Smash Party know we're out of money. They dig into their own pockets and do some fund-raising on our behalf. We receive nearly $25,000 in gifts.

January 2009. I'm recovered enough to start rehab. My left leg is half the size of the right, and half an inch shorter. It won't bend. It's going to take awhile.

January 2009. I develop a long-distance relationship with a Harvard-educated business consultant and engage the help of a CFO genius I know from my lawyer days. They help me re-vision the show's commercial engine and business plan. They work for free because they believe in the show. After awhile, our plans just won't gel, and we abandon the effort.

February 2009. I try to revitalize my law practice. The effort goes nowhere. I shut it down after a couple months.

March 2009. I try to pry the unfinished show music out of the show's composer, but he's lost interest and moved on to a new project. After a couple months I give up.

June 2009. When the gift money runs out, I take my cane and go for a short walk, complaining to whoever's listening that I've put everything I have into this and if I don't find a way to make some money soon ... A voice interrupts my tirade. "No you haven't," it says. I think about it, and the voice is right – there is one more resource I haven't tapped. I take a large cash advance on an unused credit line. It's the only deposit I make this year, and we live on it and my wife's salary until a year later.

November 2009. I join an international group of writers, speakers, and consultants. We'll all get coaching to make a quantum leap forward.

December 2009. It's my turn to introduce myself at our first coaching meeting. I open my mouth and... nothing comes out. Finally I say something about being surprised by the spiritual journey I've been on. I feel like the new kid at school who has to introduce himself, botches it, and is labeled Loser. At the break someone asks if I have a book. No, but I'm working on one, I reply. "What benefit would I get from reading it?" he asks. I can't say. He walks away without comment. A group of us go to dinner and share our stories. I get to the part about the cash advance. A guy at the table laughs out loud. "I just did that myself!" he says. He turned down a million dollars for his screenplay (!!), because he wanted to produce it himself. At one of our workshops, the final exercise is to create our New Guiding Rule and write it on one of the poster-size pieces of paper taped up on the walls . My Phineas voice says, "I will create like God." I write that on my poster at the back of the room.

January 2010. My wife and I visit a bankruptcy lawyer, then make plans to avoid it. We'll slash expenses, sell our house, trade our two good cars for an okay one with a low payment, aggressively pay off debt, etc. I kick the effort into high gear. We decide to move from our house in the mountains to an apartment in the city. I start selling furniture and making countless trips to thrift stores to give stuff away. It's not just about the money – it's about moving on with our lives. My wife tells people we're downsizing. They look at her with envy. "I wish I could," they say, "But I've got too much stuff." We smile - these days, our most prized possessions are the ones you can't see.

March 2010. Our plan isn't going to work. We can't bail fast enough. There's no money coming in, and the coaching group's 7 Ways to Make Money Fast can't help. I don't have a book to turn into an audio series, no materials to expand into supplemental products, no coaching practice to leverage into group sessions . . .no nothing.

March 2010. My wife sings with the Colorado Symphony Chorus. In a few weeks they'll do John Adams' "On the Transmigration of Souls," a piece which, like our show, was inspired by 9-11. The conductor's mother and best friend both die the week of the concert. He stumbles through rehearsals, barely present. I write this in a letter to him:

What an extraordinary thing, that your art should bring you to this pain. It is a tribute to your status as an artist, yes, but more than that, to the profound depths of who you are as a human being. As a result, the concert will also be extraordinary – but not just because of the piece and how it is played, but because of how you - the vehicle chosen to guide its playing – have been prepared to bring it.

I couldn't have written that a few years ago. The concert is a triumph.

April 2010. We move to a one bedroom apartment in Denver's Belmar neighborhood. "That's where all the 20-somethings live," someone says. That's us – like two kids, starting out all over again. Our own kids watch. "You're doing just what we're doing," they say.

April 2010. My daughter Gillian goes to Columbia. She plans to spend next year at their program in Paris. Their financial aid form asks for my occupation. I write "unemployed." I do the same on our tax returns. On tax day, I hear a report about tax filers' median income. Ours is 20% of that. Apparently we're poor – really poor. But, funny, we don't feel poor. In fact, we've never felt so rich – not in money, but in the fullness of the amazing creative adventure we're living.

May 2010. My daughter Hilary graduates from Sarah Lawrence College, declared the country's most expensive college. She went through mostly on scholarships. There's a benefit to having smart kids and being poor, I like to say.

June, 2010. My Platinum Fan Club Member friend asks, "If you knew 10 years ago what you know now, would you still be practicing law?" It's one of those questions you can't answer. "Maybe you could help some other people out," he says. I go to the Bar Association's Job Search and Career Transitions Support Group and find a roomful of bright, personable, and lost people. I pitch a workshop called "Finding Your Passion in the Law" to the Continuing Legal Education Board. Someone calls a few weeks later. "How about you do your workshop next week – free, over lunch?" 25 people show up, and it goes well. I rewrite the pitch and send it to a local adult ed organization. They book five 3-hour workshops. Two people show up for the first one. "Life-changing," one of them writes in her evaluation.

June 2010. Our house sale closes the day foreclosure would have started. Our real estate broker gives up her commission so the sale can close without requiring us to bring money to the table – something strictly verboten, our bankruptcy lawyer had warned us.

July 2010. Columbia gives Gillian a full ride to spend next year in Paris.

July 31, 2010. We file for bankruptcy. There are only two debts left that we haven't paid. One is the credit card charge for the coaching course. The other is the cash advance I took a year ago.

August 2010. I start writing a movie treatment based on Not This Day! I send an email to James Bonnet, author of Stealing Fire From the Gods, asking if he'd like to help me with it. I hit send, and see I've got an email from Alexis Neely. I recognize her name – the coaching people know her. She's selling a new program that teaches lawyers to find their passion in the law and create the practice of their dreams. She attaches her 35-page manifesto, and it's all so familiar I could have written it myself. James Bonnet calls that same evening. We talk for 45 minutes about our shared passion for story and the creative process. He'd like to review my movie treatment. "You're trusting that man with your future," a friend says later. "Either you get a green light for your screenplay idea, or you go back to a whole new practice of law."

August 2010. I write the above chronology in a "I made a quantum leap" writing contest for the coaching group. I don't win.

Funny how August 2010 seemed like such a crossroads, like I had only two options: either go back to practicing law or convert the show into a movie and try to sell it.

There are never just two options. Inspiration and life and mania are way more creative and unpredictable than that. "In five years, you'll look back and won't believe where you are or how you got there," someone told us. At this writing, it's been two years since she said that, and already it's clear she was right.

And even if I didn't win the writing contest, I had made a quantum leap, just not the kind the contest judges were looking for. Or that I was looking for either, for that matter. My quantum leap had been much bigger and deeper and more enduring: a leap of faith, into the arms of mercy.

_Question:_ When do you finally give up and throw yourself on the arms of mercy?

_Answer:_ You never, never, never, never, never give up.

And you always throw yourself on the arms of mercy.

### PART FOUR: TRANSFORMATION

" _The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens."_

Rainer Maria Rilke

### CRUCIBLE:

It Wasn't About Saving the World After All

By the time I reached what I thought was that crossroads in August 2010, every attempt I'd made to resuscitate _Not This Day!_ had been as impotent as all my attempts to restart my law practice. Neither was going anywhere.

By now the calendar was coming up on the fourth anniversary of my first accident, and I had changed, changed, and changed some more. Everything that had happened had been unexpected, probably way overdue, and even welcome, but what about the show? That's how all this got started, remember? And what about starting a revolution that was going to change the world? That was the real goal, wasn't it?

I wasn't disillusioned or bitter, asking these questions – I'd worked through all that. But I _was_ mystified and clueless and stuck. The show was, by every objective assessment, cold and dead, not much more than a dark dream from a feverish night. And yet, every now and then, in moments of nostalgia or grief, the show still moved me all the way to my passionate core, as it had at first.

What do you do with that?

In time, I came to understand that I was on the brink of one last phase in the creative journey – the phase I talked about earlier, where change becomes transformation. This was about the time I took my first drink of the Magic Elixir. At first, I didn't get much out of it than a throat scorching, but as the weeks and months unfolded, the Holy Grail's power began to reveal itself. Here's what it eventually taught me.

When we first get started, we experience inspiration mostly as aspiration. We want something outside of ourselves that we don't already have, and we want it badly enough to take bold, indefensible, unaccountable risks. We RSVP to inspiration's invitation, get drunk on mania, and put ourselves and our money and our relationships on the line. We stash our Shtick and start tearing down status quo brick by brick and trick by trick. We root out the pockets of resistance and fear and self-sabotage from our souls, and embrace life as a crash dummy.

We do all that, and we change a lot, not because we're trying to change, but just because we keep showing up in an environment that demands it. And as we change, we drag our organizations and institutions along with us. They have to come along, because we created them in our own image, and when we change, so do they.

Along the way, the Big Idea that started it all keeps sliding out of focus, losing its place at the center. It's still burning in our hearts, but the coals keep getting weaker and so banked in ash that one day we find we can scoop them up in our bare hands and not get burnt. Every now and then something will happen that blows over the coals and the dream comes back like a sad memory, but most of the time the prospect of our dream ever coming true is as hopeless and burnt out as we feel.

The impossibility of what we were attempting used to fuel our creativity, but now it just fills us with despair. Our Big Idea loses relevance and meaning; our passion wanes, our dreams become weary, cold, and dead. By all appearances, our grand wakeup call was nothing more than some kind of inexplicable cosmic enticement whose main purpose was to make us willing to take care of some long-overdue soul housecleaning. We did that, and now the gig is up. Time to go back to Plan B. Trouble is, there's some kind of force field around it that won't let us go back, no matter how much we whine and pound and plead.

That's how it feels, but that's not what's going on. True – by every reasonable standard of measurement, our dream is dead. There's no denying that, and it's better not to try. Let's just concede the point, the way we did at first, when we were wrestling with whether we might be crazy to give our dream a shot. But just because we concede the point doesn't mean there's no life left in our dream. It may look dead to any reasonable person, but we made the choice not to be that person, remember? Meanwhile, the creative process is still alive and well and operating on levels that reasonableness knows nothing about.

Turns out we weren't really out to change the world after all. Our grand vision wasn't about saving the world, it was about saving ourselves. We didn't have a calling or a destiny or any of those other things that used to fill us with self-righteous zeal. Those feelings were just the con that got us into the game, kept us doling out the silver dollars until we went broke.

No, our real challenge was not to change our world or ultimately even ourselves, it was to become the people capable of thinking and being and doing the new thing we aspired to do back when mania first got its hooks into us. Our challenge wasn't to make our dream happen, it was to embody it. Now, our only hope of getting what we want is to stop exhausting ourselves and all our ego-based resources trying to force our dream through the Gap, and simply become the change we wish to make. And the only way to do that is to be transformed.

Getting through the Gap was good, and surviving all our personal follies was necessary, but neither will get us to the end of the line. The ultimate destination of the creative journey is personal transformation, and all our learning new beliefs and behaviors, accepting full responsibility, not quitting, and all the other lessons of the Gap were vital to the process, but ultimately not sufficient.

The Gap's work is now finished. Its final revelation was to pull back the veil and reveal the last barrier, the ultimate Gatekeeper we have to get past before we can have and do and be what we want. That last Gatekeeper is none other than ourselves. We are the final foe, the last conquest, and we're going to need something more powerful even than the Gap to meet this last challenge.

We're going to need a crucible.

### 99.9% Pure

The crucible is the ultimate place of being stuck and unable, where the crush of internal and external pressures compresses until the heat is so hot that everything in us and around us that doesn't serve our inspired vision is vaporized, and all that's left is the white hot center of essence.

What we lose in the crucible's heat and pressure is ego. No more fixes and work-arounds; it's finally time for ego to release its hold on us. Until ego dies, our dreams will not come true, because until then we will not yet be capable of embodying them.

Our dreams and passions and Big Ideas derive from the deepest depths of our souls and beyond – from the portals where our souls touch eternity. To realize them, our creative spirit must match the spirit of the new thing we intend to create. The crucible is where the match is made, where everything that doesn't serve our transcendent vision vanishes, so that the infinite dream which is us can emerge. Until then, we are only trying to stay asleep so that our weak and blurry dreams will remain a pleasant diversion in the fog and the darkness of our numbed and semi-conscious lives.

In the early days of producing the show, a friend gave me a prophetic and portentous gift: a silver coin with a 99.9% purity rating. It spoke of what I was in for, and challenged me to stay in the process long enough to get all the way through. "Meltdown is coming," the gift said. "That will be the end of your journey, of all your heroic striving and aspiring and effort. And then, once you've reached that end, you can truly begin."

My personal crucible started with my second accident – the bike crash. Body separated from soul, and soul from body. It would take time for them to be rejoined – time I didn't think I had, for a process that took way too long and wouldn't let me out early. The last of the exits was closed forever, and the heat was on.

I have since learned that this place of utter stuckness and hopelessness is the place of greatest creativity and opportunity. It doesn't feel that way, but it is, and if we knew that, we would celebrate it wildly. It is here that the creative process begins its own race for the curtain, and we can't slow it down no matter how much dissonance we've got left inside of us. The brakes don't work anymore – the lines have bled dry. The impossible is about to become possible, forever and indelibly, because the purest essence of our vision and our creative selves is about to emerge. We are about to become the people we must be, capable of living the lives we must live, in order for our dreams to come true.

Our dreams will come true because we will come true – pure and purified in the fires of creation.

### Life in the Nebula

What lies beyond meltdown?

The end of ego.

The end of The Way Things Are.

The end of reason and rationalizing, knowledge and understanding.

An open door, one that needs no Great Gatekeeper to open.

The beginning of all things new.

The lives we lived and the people we used to be don't matter anymore. They are over, overthrown by the revolution of our hearts. We're new, living in a new universe of our own making.

We got here because our ego-driven fears became less important than the thing that consumed our passions. We took back _all_ the power we'd given up to The Way Things Are, and invested it instead into our inspired vision. We became less so our vision could become more. And in the crucible of our undoing, our vision was finally created in its purest form – the one that could live within the newness we've become.

It was all or nothing, and when all became nothing, nothing became all.

This is creation's gift to us. We receive it because we're willing to crash one last time, not into the brick wall of another external challenge but into the cosmic rubble created from our personal Big Bang – the gas and energies that didn't congeal into matter or dissipate off into space, that still swirled around us in an invisible cloud of hazard. It was a place of impenetrable mystery, where we fell through the holes in all of our plans and theories, expectations and predictions. And on we fell, through the oracle's unsolvable riddles and conundrums, until finally we were made whole in the paradoxes of our inability and nobility, our smallness and strength.

This is where reason and metaphor end and make believe becomes real. Pretense and cleverness, confusion and blindness, compromise and slavery, frustration and lack... all these are consumed, and all that remains is the pure essence of truth – our truth, our one essential unique creative truth.

It is in this turmoil that new stars are born, and we must welcome this rage if we would create the newness we want.

Welcome to life in the nebula.

Where stars are born.

### March to Mordor

What does meltdown feel like?

It feels like that last march to Mordor that gave our show its name. Meltdown is the last battle, the last hopeless stand, where our only hope is in hope itself, and there _is_ no hope. Few come this far, fewer go further, and almost none make it back to tell us about it.

I would sugarcoat it if I could, but I won't. There's real risk in living the creative life. Not everybody who gets this far makes it out. To make our dream finally come true, we must, can, and will be the exception.

The final path to hope is hopeless. Every step takes us further into the impossible and inevitable. Forget trying to imagine Paradise anymore – all we can see are the gaping throats of dragons over the edge of the charted world, and we're about to throw ourselves into them.

We thought we passed the point of no return long ago. We didn't. There's one more. The last one. The ultimate point of no return. When we pass it, we vanish entirely. We breathe ego's last gasping breaths, heading for the ultimate showdown for the ultimate stakes, challenging the reign of The Way Things Are one last time.

We only take the march to Mordor if there is no other option. And even then, we realize there is no way we can win. Our only hope is to buy time to see whether hope will take advantage of this one last chance we've given it to come through for us.

As the dwarf Gimli said as the march to Mordor was being decided, "Certainty of death... small chance of success... well, what are we waiting for?"

What are we waiting for?

For ourselves – for the emergence of the new person we must become for our dreams to come true. That person lives only at the end of the person we are now, and it's time we reached that end. That's why we're going to Mordor. It's time to die, because dying is the only hope we have of finding the life we want.

We can keep moving, or we can die.

As it turns out, we will do both.

### Extremis

The last creative act is to die – to self, even to our dream. Only then do we free it to live on its own, independent from us. Psychology calls that differentiation – it's what adolescents do when they move into the reality of self apart from their families of origin. It's the same for our creative ideas. We've brought them as far as we can. Now they'll have to make their own way in the world. We have to let them go.

When we reach and finally pass through this phase, it means we and they are ready to emerge. The chrysalis has been breached. It's the beginning of our final emergence. And our final healing.

Our dreams want us to have what we desire, yes, but more than that they want us to heal, to be rid of what's in the way of us.

We think circumstances or lack of qualifications or opportunities stand in our way, but they don't. Ultimately, it's only ourselves – those thick layers of ego that enshroud our existence with living death and stand in the way of realizing our essential existence.

We've been getting hints of this ever since we entered the Gap, way back when. We just didn't know the process was going to be so completely, utterly thorough. It's all that, and more. It has to be, otherwise we won't be able to live with our dreams when they finally come true. We'd wreck them if they did.

Terminally ill people and animals sometimes have miraculous rallies right before the end. They rise from sleep and weariness, show up at the meal. It looks like a miracle, but it's not; they're still going to die. What we're seeing is the last marshaling of the life force before it leaves. They had a burst of energy because they needed it to make the final journey.

This is what happens to us when our creative journey gains full strength as a Hero's Journey. We reach the end more times than we can count, until finally we accept the inevitability of our end. We make one last rally, not because we think it will help, but because our energy rises up to meet our end. We take the march to Mordor, where we plan to fight as if our lives might still depend on it, even though we know they don't.

Then – and only then – do we finally die to our dreams to the extent we must in order for them to live on their own, apart from us. And at that point, all we can hope is that, having found their own way, they will return one day to give life back to us.

In this final paradox and irony, we are ready to know as never before that glorious sense of oneness and wholeness that mania promised us in the beginning. We can never truly let our dreams go ever again, because they are now fully embodied in us. They arose from the core of self we never knew existed, and now we are there with them, in the hiddenness and mystery, where they will remain as long as we do.

### Metamorphosis

For a long time I believed that, when we are filled with inspiration and move in pursuit of our passion, inspiration would become our champion, fight for us, come crashing in and invade our darkness and vanquish all resistance.

Now that I understand the Gap and the Crucible, I don't believe that anymore. Instead, I believe that inspiration and resistance co-exist, that they create the Gap and the Crucible together, that without resistance there can be no refinement, that the friction of inspiration moving against resistance is what makes the Crucible hot enough to burn away everything but essence.

In that way of thinking, we don't eliminate resistance, and don't want to. Instead, we eliminate its source – which, we now know, lies within ourselves. In order to do the impossible, we need to journey past ability and resourcefulness, consciousness and conscience, to the point where there's no journeying left to do, where all that's left is to initiate our own metamorphosis. We must spin the cocoon around ourselves, and make our transformation inevitable.

The caterpillar-to-butterfly metaphor is so profound and perfect that it feels like just another dose of sugary greeting card optimism, but real metamorphosis has no sweetness and light about it. The moment when the caterpillar is finally enclosed in its shroud is the moment when we can be certain there will be nothing left of it when it when the butterfly finally emerges, and tracing the molecular bond between what it was and what it becomes will always be cause for awe.

Which is why "metamorphosis" is as scary a word as "revolution" or "manifesto," and we do well not to use it glibly. We don't get metamorphosis with an aggressive and willful grab, but from a faith in our inspired vision that won't be denied, and a willingness to believe that the bond between ourselves and our vision will be forged in the cocoon's darkness and mystery. Yet that faith, too, vanishes in the crucible's final heat until from the dark and emptiness our dreams rise again – visible, powerful, compelling, gaining strength until finally...

We are light enough to fly.

### The Eagles Are Coming!

We used to crawl; now we fly.

We used to bow to The Way Things Are; now we laugh at it.

We used to fear death, now we use the massive force of creative destruction to sling ourselves out into the unexplored regions of the universe.

People who've marched on Mordor are like that.

We are like that, because we did it, too.

It was all for a good cause.

We were the good cause – the one worth fighting for.

Was it worth it? Were we worth it?

Yes. We know that, because in the end, the eagles came to fight for us.

Aragorn's army fights before the Black Gates, and looks up to see the eagles attacking their enemies. The gods have awakened for them.

And now, at this point in our journey, they have awakened for us as well.

Ironically, knowing nothing of the creative process, I had unwittingly presaged all of what I've talked about in this book when I first created _Not This Day!_ The story arc in our show is the same as the process I've been describing.

Unlike the movie that inspired its name, our show doesn't end with a cataclysmic victory for the good guys. Evil isn't vanquished in a massive lava flow, it's just pushed back a little.

The creative process doesn't always need thumping big victories. We win when we create at all, because whenever we create we shift the balance ever so much, make just enough room for ourselves to take our personal stand for courage and hope. Even that much opens new universes of possibility. Light only needs a crack to eliminate darkness.

Life, faith, hope... courage in the presence of fear and death... that's what _Not This Day!_ gives us in the end – no more, but certainly no less. Is that good enough?

It is in my book.

It's intense, all this spiritual imagery, all this talk about gods, faith, death, life, metamorphosis. It's embarrassing to the reasonable side of us, makes us laugh nervously and look down and away. We don't use words like that because we think life on this level is optional, just as we once thought things like self-awareness and waking up and taking full responsibility for our lives were optional.

We thought that way because The Way Things Are had dumbed us down into a level of acquiescence that worked most of the time – is that such a bad thing?

Only if we think that allowing our essential life to go unlived isn't such a bad thing.

We know better. By now, if we know nothing else, we know better. We know that, for us at least, life at this level is no longer optional. We must have it, must live this way, and never live any other way, ever again. We will create our lives on this level, and go on creating them. We will create like God, and we will say of our Creation that it is good.

The power we wanted all along is finally ours; we have taken it all back, and we have only to open our mouths and declare it to be so. That is why the gods arose and fought for us: to free us to tell our own stories, in our voices, and in our own ways. Aspiration has met inspiration, and now the circle of our journey is whole, perfect, and complete.

We are ready, now, to tell our inspired stories from the place of our deepest truth.

### STORIES AND LEGENDS:

Life is a Story: _Make it a Good One_

A bookseller friend uses the title of this chapter as a slogan for his store. He's onto something that's much bigger than a good book (as big as that is!). He's onto the inherent worthiness of story, and its transcendent power in our lives.

To set out to create anything is to set a story in motion. To tell our own story is transformative – for us and for our world. We just need to make it a good one.

The best stories defy our need for control. They're full of blind alleys, confusing twists, thematic nuances.

They're also honest. They don't tolerate what doesn't fit. They're quick to hit the delete button when a character is out of character, or when a theme is forced and pedantic.

And they're not just about overcoming obstacles and winning rewards, they're also about what happens on the inside. A story's no good if the characters never change. One-dimensional heroes are boring. We want them to face their demons and become something new, and we want to believe what they become, whether we still like them or not.

We like all that when the story is about someone else, but when it's about us, all that honesty, all those endless challenges and complexity, and all that facing internal demons wears us down, tempts us to quit. Maybe we couldn't control everything when we were safely within ego's protection, but at least we knew how things were supposed to work. Now we're never sure. We're on the ultimate out-of-control joyride. We're characters in a story that someone else is writing, doing our best to cope with all the new predicaments, but we really don't know how it's going to turn out.

Fortunately, when we enter the Gap, we're in the hands of a master storyteller. The Gap makes sure we feel out of control, throws us predicaments and conflicts galore, and demands that honesty rules the day. And it knows that, when it hands us off to the Crucible, we will emerge so changed that no one will complain the outcome was contrived.

All that is a sure thing if we just stay in the story. A story lasts as long as we keep telling it, and as long as we do that, we and our stories will be created together. As one is given life, so is the other.

People used to ask me, " _Not This Day!_ is your story, isn't it?"

Yes it was.

And yes it is.

And yes it still is.

The show came from the core of my being, from a place beyond ego. Creating it required me to enter that core, and as I did so and deepened, so did the show. We grew together, so that neither would be finished until both of us became far more than we were when we began.

That story is still going on.

It's worth repeating: producing _Not This Day!_ wasn't about saving the world, or even changing it. Turns out we didn't need Revolution Man on our team after all, didn't need to talk about manifestos and revolutions. Those were just themes in a great story, and it would have been enough just to tell the story and let all the rest take care of itself.

That's also why I didn't need a calling – some kind of celestial stamp of approval – to produce the show, as I thought at first. And why I didn't need to justify what I'd paid for the Pearl of Great Price or any of the other excesses I undertook on the show's behalf.

None of us do. We make enough of a difference in the world just by having the courage to respond to inspiration's call, endure the Gap and the Crucible, and get to the point where ego is so stripped away that we can truly Create Like God – at the level of essence. Time will take care of the larger impact, if there is to be any.

And finally, that's why, larger impact or not, our stories also don't need big thumping triumphant endings. That we dare to tell them at all is big and thumping and triumphant enough. And, no worry, we'll be transformed just like any memorable character is supposed to be, because personal transformation is not just for the enlightened, consciousness-raising few, it's essential to every person's pursuit of their Big Idea. And that makes for a good story, all by itself.

The only catch is, we have to live our stories.

And keep living them, no matter what.

It takes faith to begin a great story, and more faith to stay in it, especially when it's not working out the way we planned. But no matter, thanks to mania, we keep getting carried away, keep saying we can't quit now, the story's just getting good.

So good, it's about to become a legend.

### Legends

In theater, every show has its own special catastrophes. It's always something: sets collapse, circuits blow, equipment fails, rigging tangles, performers get sick or have car accidents on opening night.... These things enrich the show, make it unique. They become the legend in which memories of the show are captured.

_La_ _Fraternité_ knows what I'm talking about. Ask insiders about a show, and they don't talk about what the audience saw. They don't tell you the story; they tell you the legend.

It works the same way for us when we pursue our dreams and visions and Big Ideas. At some point, the stories of how we did that become bigger, more all-encompassing. The stuff that goes into our 53-page postmortems becomes less and less important, and is replaced by a wider, broader, deeper, vaster meaning that confers a higher and nobler status on what just happened. Our stories become heroic quests, epic journeys of Everyman that shine a light on the higher human good all of us serve when we set out to do the impossible.

Legends inspire awe and remembrance. They make the catastrophes worth it, make us willing to do it all over again.

Live a great story, that's good.

Live a legend, that's why we were put on this earth.

Legends are the stuff of heroes and honor, and if we have persevered this far, we have earned the telling of ours.

### Life Beyond Reason

In the early days, one of my sisters asked what the book I was writing was about. I emailed her some chapters. She emailed back, "Did you really cash in your IRA's?" I had to laugh. You have no idea, I thought. Yes I did, and that was just a token, a minor episode in a much grander story – a much more foolish, outlandish, unreasonable story.

It's worth repeating one last time: inspired people live unreasonably, beyond the reach of what is known, out here in the mystery, beyond our habitual limits of fear and its servant ego. We make our homes where The Way Things Are has been dethroned, out where there is only chaos, waiting for our creative command to organize it. We must live here; it is the only place where we can create, and create we must.

It's not easy to explain. This is the realm of myth and metaphor, poetry and symbol, where there's no logic or proportion, only mysteries and riddles and puzzles. The truth we're trying to express is our creative truth, and we must leave behind reason and order and syntax in order to express it.

No wonder the people who knew us _when_ can't understand. They think we're still the person who, like them, knew what was possible and what wasn't, and was smart enough to know the difference and stay committed to the Reasonable Man's Safety Code.

Until one day we did the unthinkable: we put fear behind us and gave the impossible a try. And then we kept trying, going way too far and way too long, until one day they didn't recognize us anymore.

And still we went on. To live meant to have it – that one undeniable thing we were created to do and be and have, that one undeniable thing only we could create. We defied the law of The Way Things Are and dared to create, and keep creating until, in a new universe of our own making, we made the impossible possible. We created it, gave it life.

At the expense of our own.

And when we did that, we gave ourselves new life as well.

That story is our legend.

Now we sit in a council circle with _La_ _Fraternité,_ listening as they speak in low tones, drawing each of us into the creative truths they have brought back from their journeys behind the veil... until the moment we have imagined and longed for and dreaded is at hand.

The talking stick has come all the way around the circle, and now it's our turn. All heads turn to us. They quiet themselves, lean in and listen. They want to hear, to know, to travel with us to the place beyond fear where we now live. They have been there and must always be there – beyond the veil where we too have been – and right now, in this moment, _we_ are the only way they can get back. We are their doorway, and what lies beyond that doorway is all that matters to them. To get back, they must pass through us, must pass through our story, admit our legend into their roll of honor, confer on us our badge of solitary courage.

Their eyes glow in the fire as they turn to us, and we see their expectation, their desperate need, their hunger and thirst. Our pounding hearts remind us that we _belong_ here with them, for we, too, have a legend to tell.

Finally we speak. We tell them our legend, in our way, in our own voice. They lean in further, and we realize we're whispering, speaking with awe, as if our story is not our own, but the story of a god. As they listen, they begin to sway and murmur and chant, and the circle is transfixed and transported, until all hearts are full and all of us are inspired again, filled again with the god Mania, and ready again to speak new universes into existence.

Where we began, we now end: in the grip of inspiration and its madness. We have come to this place again...

Out here, where life is beyond reason.

### Epilogue

As of this writing, _Not This Day!_ hasn't been back onstage since the Sneak Peek. And yet...

Hundreds of people just like you have already seen it – not onstage, but in your lives, and the lives around you. You've seen it because you've lived it.

We've switched roles. I'm no longer the producer, hoping to inspire you with a great show. You are the show, and I'm the audience.

And I'm inspired.

You inspire me.

You embrace the shattering awareness that something else is possible. You pursue your passions and dreams and big ideas. You break through the numbness, blindness, and muteness that enslaves the human heart. You step courageously toward wakefulness and life. You suffer the Gap and endure the Crucible. You tell your stories and legends.

You're not a fan club, because fan clubs don't last. You are _La_ _Fraternité:_ the ones who will do the impossible, the ones for whom the gods will come and fight.

And you do it all under the banner of Mania.

We are Maniacs together, telling new stories, creating new legends. And we will be there when the curtain rises on them.

There are two ways to die: to stop living, and to be reborn. The first is an end, the second is both an end and a beginning. To begin is to create, and inspiration's invitation to create is the only calling and destiny we need. From the place of inspired beginning, we create new life. The old, the dead and dying, what we once accepted as The Way Things Are... all of that passes away, and the new, the dreams we now embody, takes its place. We know life, and life more abundantly, both for the first time and as if we always have.

May you live and die well,

and be reborn,

in the service of all your impossibilities.

###

### ABOUT THE AUTHOR, LINKS

Kevin Rhodes left a successful long-term law practice to scratch a creative itch and lived to tell about it... barely. He has blogged extensively and written several books about his unique journey to wellness, including how he deals with primary progressive MS through an aggressive regime of exercise, diet, and mental conditioning.

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