what’s your measure of success?

I’m a praise junkie.

I know it. And I don’t like it about myself. It makes me hesitant and slow to act, as I second guess myself and the work I want to create and put out into the world. Because needing praise skews how you measure success, as you start to equate popularity with worth. Starting out with the expectation that your work needs to be liked just adds to the tyranny of the blank page. And I don’t think procrastination fully covers the avoidance and ‘not doing’ it causes.

Years ago, I did a creative writing course. For 8 Saturdays in early Spring, I cycled over to Charing Cross and sat round a long table on an upper floor at the Groucho Club with a bunch of other people who were exploring the idea of writing. I remember struggling with one exercise and the tutor saying it was common for people who wrote for a living to find themselves stuck. Her words come back to me every now and then, and I’ve come to realise that a working life spent writing to a tight brief can clip your creative wings. When you come to believe that ‘good’ looks like a smiling client who can see their needs and desires fulfilled in the words you have crafted, it can close off a part of you. Don’t get me wrong, this work is a skill. And I’m proud of my ability to do it. But what I now realise is that I also need to know how to create work that pleases me. To start playing with that idea and to experience pleasing myself so I can feel how that shifts my mind, and ability.

And to hold me to account, I have this observation from Dr Cornel West (Google him and lose yourself down a beautiful rabbit hole of love, risk, social justice, music, commitment, wit, philosophical insight and, as he puts it, the funk of life). Talking in his Masterclass on love, Dr West closes with a reminder not to do something just because it’s popular. Curtis Mayfield, he points out, never won a Grammy, yet Milli Vanilli won 2!!! ‘When you attempt to be the best that you can be, don’t worry about popularity. Be committed to integrity, honesty, generosity and decency. And if you end up being popular, hope and prayer you’re popular for the right reasons.’

Those are words to live and work by…

Portraits of Dr Cornel West are by Sebastian Kim and appeared in Interview magazine