It’s not easy or comfortable to switch from a lifetime of compliance and convenience to work with a new rhythm, a new set of principles, and a new way of being in the world. That discomfort is a good sign. It means that you’re beginning to see the pattern.

Better clients demand better work. Better clients want you to push the envelope, win awards, and challenge their expectations. Better clients pay on time. Better clients talk about you and your work. But finding better clients isn’t easy, partly because we don’t trust ourselves enough to imagine that we deserve them. Every gig-economy hustler who’s

Let’s call it art. The human act of doing something that might not work, something generous, something that will make a difference. The emotional act of doing personal, self-directed work to make a change that we can be proud of.

that difficult work is all inauthentic. It’s work we do precisely because we don’t feel like it in the short run. It’s the choice to do something for long-term reasons, not because we’re having a tantrum. Inauthentic means effective, reasoned, intentional. It means it’s not personal, it’s generous. The hack can’t do this. The professional can

Anchors can drag us down. That’s their job on a boat. But for a creative person, an anchor can also be a beacon, the thing we work toward, relentlessly. Not because it’s perfect. But because it’s 11:30. We promised. The process, not the outcome. That’s the heart of our practice. Good process leads to good outcomes.

Now that you’re in charge, there are three simple ways you can make that change with more focus, energy, and success. First, you can embrace the fact that you can, in fact, trust the process and repeat the practice often enough to get unstuck. Second, you can focus on the few, not everyone. And third, you can bring intention to your work, making

Go too far to please the audience and you become a hack. Lose your point of view, lose your reason for doing the work, become a hack. Focus only on the results, become a hack. On the other hand, if you ignore what you see and simply create for yourself, you’ve walked away from empathy. If there is no change, there is no art. The professional

Suddenly, you don’t always get what was guaranteed. And the tasks you’re asked to do just aren’t as engaging as you’d like them to be. The emptiness of the bargain is now obvious: you were busy sacrificing your heart and your soul for prizes, but the prizes aren’t coming as regularly as promised.

We are in free fall. Always. Attachment pushes us to grab ahold of something. Attachment is about seeking a place to hide in a world that offers us little solace. But of course, the bad news is that there is no foundation. We’re always falling. The good news is that there’s nothing to hold onto. As soon as we stop looking for something to grab, our