Creative Wannabe

I’m a guitar player. I don’t say that with any intention of projecting coolness but simply to draw a comparison. I’d go through phases of feeling really good about my abilities, getting loads of compliments and feeling like anyone should feel honored to receive a lesson from me (just being honest). I could do this for a solid year before realizing that I wasn’t getting any better. I was writing a bunch of stuff that sounded the same (though some have made careers doing this…ehhhemm…Nickelback…pardon me), playing the same licks in every song and at the end of the day, reinforcing my own prejudices. I’m convinced I could’ve done that for years while everyone else passed me up. Someone bailed me out, though. The name isn’t important—

We’ll refer to him as “better than me”. This guy made me realize how good I could be. He made me try to emulate his style, stretching my comfort zone. His abilities challenged me to practice the same lick over and over again until I could do it almost as well as he could.

Play with someone better than you are.

I still play but have since lost my commitment and am being passed up by 14 year olds, but the idea continues to resonate ever since. Sure, we can learn from our own client experiences, busted projects and tanked pitches, but if we’re not interacting with and learning from someone better, we’re interpreting those experiences through our own subjective goggles. We can call it mentorship, but I’m really talking about something much less formal. It’s not meeting once a week to discuss your experiences and get advice (though I’m a huge advocate of that as well); it’s identifying people who are better than you and watching and interacting with them…asking them questions…trying to understand why they made certain decisions…maybe even openly disagreeing with them to prolong the discussion.

They probably won’t even know how much you’re learning from them. “Better than me” certainly has no idea how much better of a guitar player he made me.