If you Build it They Will Come

If you build it, they will come – this is what my Spirit Guide told me more than 20 years ago and it’s an expression that I’ve always held close to my heart. It’s about believing in yourself enough to know that anything you create will generate interest from outside of yourself.

Vulnerability is an extremely important part of creativity. Vulnerability is such a hard word for us all! It is very personal, very open, but absolutely essential to our creative process, regardless of the medium. Vulnerability ensures that we are honest as we have to infuse what is uniquely us into our work. It lays us bare and invites both opinion and criticism. Brene Brown says that vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.

I am so inclined to agree with her. The ability to be vulnerable is something that we all grapple with every day. Our fears of rejection play such a huge role in us stifling our vulnerability. We would rather be seen as strong and together and in control. For me this is merely a defense mechanism that we adopt to ensure that we don’t have to face rejection, disappointment and the opinion of others which may or may not result in us feeling undeserving of appreciation and acceptance. We keep ourselves small so that we only get seen enough for people to know that we exist instead of stepping out into the light and letting the world know who we are!

This has been such a huge lesson for me and it is only recently that I have come to understand how much I have deprived myself of, through my fear of being vulnerable. The interesting aha moment was when I finally realized too that people see me so differently to how I have always seen myself. So now, I accept the compliments and I pat myself on the back. I celebrate my achievements. I celebrate the awesomeness of myself and when I find myself doubting, I pick myself up by the bootstraps and give myself a good telling off!

I truly believe that we should all be strutting our stuff – every moment of every day! Don’t be scared to stand and shout from the rooftops how amazing you are. Because actually you are amazing – we all are! We are perfect pure emanations and extensions of our Creator, who is nothing but awesome – how can we be anything else.

In that famous commencement address by Steve Jobs in 2005, he talks about being fired from Apple and he says : I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

So my dear friends, from today lets all strut our stuff and never ever settle. I want to hear from you, how changing your opinion of yourself, how you allowing yourself to be vulnerable and not settling, changes your life.