I came across the story when I was reading over Christmas, and this is a not-unfamiliar tale of people who create things.
I remember reading about Paul Weller when he wrote 'Town Called Malice' for The Jam (one of my favourite songs of all time) in about 30 minutes after a night out when he got inspiration, having had real difficulty songwriting for a while.
But the story about Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark is an extraordinary tale.
He had written almost 70 songs for his album, but his producer was telling him that there just wasn't the best one, the opening single, the one they needed to close the album off, and he was totally p*ssed off.
They made him go away to write another song, so he wrote a song about how p*ssed off he was about writing songs and about how he did not want to write any more songs, which became one of his most famous songs.
Seth Godin talks about the fact that there is no such thing as writer's block, and when I met him for the only time (and horribly embarrassed myself), I got a carpenter's pencil with that written on it, and it is stuck on the wall in my office.
Whenever you think that you don't have the ability to keep doing something, just do a little bit more.
A long time ago, in another millennium, almost 40 years ago, I used to be a basketball player (did I tell you about it?).
I got to quite a decent level of basketball, but mostly, that was because of John Ward. He was my coach and the assistant head teacher at my secondary school.
John used to tell us, as basketball players, that the most important thing was shooting. That was the most important thing to practise,e and so when he started a training session, he would say,y What's is the most important thing to practise in basketball?" and we would all reply Shooting". He would then say "What's the next most important thing?" and we would say "shooting".
He would say, "When you're absolutely fed up, and your fingers are bleeding, and you can hardly lift your arms, what do you do next?" and we would say ", Shoot".
Talent is one thing.
Super, good, Amazing if you've got it.
For the rest of us, Keep going.
Keeping going is almost just as good.
Blog Post Number - 3685
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