Thursday, [12:01] AM
Dear Friend,
There’s a Frank Zappa album called Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar!
Notice Frank didn’t say “Shut up and play your guitar WELL”…
…Or “Shut up and play your guitar using all the correct harmonic knowledge and theory you’ve spent a lifetime learning”…
… He simply said…
“PLAY!”
The very second you start worrying about playing as well as possible… or being “the best” (an impossible goal) the activity is no longer play. It puts forces into motion that completely sabotage and suppress your true abilities.
Athletes call it choking, aptly named because your creativity, spontaneity, skills and ability are denied the vital “oxygen” they need to thrive and survive.
The faster you can free yourself from over analysis, self editing, self criticism, perfectionism… and all the other different forms in which self hate manifests itself, the faster you can operate at the very peak of your creative abilities… effortlessly.
When you give yourself the freedom to do something badly… free from the pressure of needing to perform well… that’s when effortless excellence begins.
Things begin to come together in ways you never could have imagined.
Your hands dance over the fretboard and beautiful music comes out.
Or in the case of copywriters and entrepreneurs, your hands dance over the keyboard typing words, phrases and irresistible offers… while it feels like you’re just in the background observing a master creating a masterpiece.
You ARE observing a master at work creating his next masterpiece. But the amazing thing is…
The master is YOU!
If you’ve got an engineering masterpiece built for speed like the Ferrari, you don’t need to concern yourself with every process, function and moving part in that vehicle. You just need to put the pedal the metal and allow that beautiful machine to function at its peak like it was created to do.
The good news is, you DO have a Ferrari… but it hasn’t been operating anywhere NEAR the speeds it’s capable of…
Because you’ve been driving
with your brakes on!
Take the damn brakes off and let your Ferrari FLY like it’s supposed to.
You knew how to do it when you were a child… before the adults programmed it out of you. And if you’ve done it before, you can do it again.
There comes a time when you need to forget all the theory, formulas and structure… and give yourself the freedom to simply play.
Only then will your true genius be revealed.
All the best,
