On Speed and Permission
An email from a friend has me thinking about speed this morning, and how I make my projects so quickly. (You'd all probably stop liking me for good if you knew that this feels rather slow to me.) I do have some moves around speed, and here's one I'll share with you before I take a little internet holiday:
Waiting for permission slows everything down.
I used to wait for permission a lot. I still wait now, but for other things, like my time or my moment. But that's different from waiting for approval, or admission to a money-making machine (aka industry). It's different than waiting for someone to swoop you out of a slush pile and send you more than a letter of admiration.
We spend a lot of time and energy waiting for validation, waiting for someone to certify our talent so we'll finally believe it for ourselves. Waiting for an engraved invitation to arrive on our doorstep before we do what we really want to do.
So what could you move forward on, if you stopped waiting for permission and simply wrote the words you can hear are missing? If you simply made the thing you want to see exist in the world? If you considered that the idea itself IS the engraved invitation, and you are free to accept or decline?
It is deeply satisfying to do the work I want to do in the world, right now. There's no place I'm trying to 'get to' or arrive. No middle men green-lighting or red-lighting. There's just me, making the work that's mine to make, and there's the people who need it, finding it. We're finding each other, no permission required.