Right now I’m sitting in an Airbnb in Porto with the windows open, listening to the shrieks of excited teens in the streets below while the sun sets over the city.
And I am pissed.
We got up at 5am for our flight to Porto this morning. Traipsed around the charming city all day, sweaty and exhausted, eagerly anticipating a hot shower. Except.
There are no towels in the apartment.
The Airbnb management company responded promptly and professionally. They asked me to please check the cabinets and closets to confirm there are no towels, and tell them how many we need.
I had already scoured the apartment, including the drawers under the TV, on the off chance they might contain teeny, tiny towels.
I confirmed: there are no towels.
“I haved notified the relevant team and once we have updates, we will inform you as soon as possible.”
This was hours ago.
Meanwhile, we’ve eaten ramen and returned to our clean, but towel-less, apartment.
I’m not feeling reasonable anymore.
Grrrrrrrr.
And now I’m trying to write an email that somehow inspires or at least entertains, when I really feel like throwing a tantrum.
Grrrrrrr.
I will attempt to segue from my grumping into a video I came across a few weeks ago.
“Forget Ambition: A Case for Hopeless Creativity.”
It explored the strange, unpredictable paths of people like Bryan Cranston and David Lynch.
Bryan Cranston’s career started with advertisements for hemorrhoid cream before landing a bit part on an X-Files episode. Then randomly, ten years later, a writer from the episode remembered him and cast him as the lead in Breaking Bad.
Iconic filmmaker David Lynch spent years scraping by while making Eraserhead, working strange jobs and barely surviving financially while creating deeply weird art nobody knew what to do with.
The point of the video wasn’t:
“Believe in yourself and never give up!”
The message was simpler and far less fluffy.
You don’t control when your work connects. You can’t predict which action will change your life. You don’t have any control over the timing.
The one thing you can control:
You can keep creating anyway.
“You never know how or even if each piece of work you do will pay off later down the line, but you have to stay in the game to get those pieces of luck that make a successful career,” Lewis says in his video.
Create what you love. Love what you create. Share it and keep going.
Too many people secretly postpone their lives while waiting for some external confirmation that what they’re creating is worthy.
(I know I did.)
But happiness can’t be found in success, and your creative path will never satisfy if you’re chasing happiness.
So if you want to create something, do it without attachment. Don’t expect it to be an overnight success. It probably won’t be.
But do it anyway, and do it with love.
And maybe this towel situation is somehow relevant.
Life is not arranging itself to my preferences right now.
I’m tired. My shoulder hurts. I’m grumping about towels.
And yet, I show up and write anyway.
That’s the real path of creation.
An interesting development:
The creator of this video, Lewis Woods, admitted that he’d wanted to make YouTube videos for years before he finally began.
And interestingly enough, I found his video because another creator, Josh Spector, linked to it from his newsletter.
In under a month, Lewis’ channel went from 500 subscribers to almost 9,000, with over 300,000 views and 930 comments on this video since its publication.
It’s not a perfect video, but it exists. And it resonated with people enough that they shared it. Who knows what opportunities will find Lewis as a result?
I think that’s an invitation.
Create what you love. Share before you feel ready.
Let it be imperfect. Let it reach people however it reaches them (or not).
And meanwhile, enjoy your life.
Not later when you have the audience, the clients and the impact.
Now.
Here’s the video, if you’d like to take a peek:
Yours in love and play,
Steph 🐲❤️
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