For most of my life, I have danced to the beat of a different drummer. I’ve long known that something inside me is a little different from others, but I’ve just never been able to put my finger on it.
You see, I don’t really like kudos, you know, the atta boys, the you done goods, you’re amazing, you’re so talented, and so forth. You get the idea. I have never relished any of those moments. Often, quite to the contrary. I shy away from them and if I can’t escape rthem entirely, I have learned with great difficultly to learn to say “thank you” without a ton of explanation that the plaudits don’t really matter a bit to me.
Oh, yes. I can hear you right now. “You’re full of it, Robb. Everyone loves to be acknowledged for doing something amazing, either professionally or personally.”
Well, I guess you don’t know me very well I’m the guy that doesn’t even like my own birthday parties. I don’t like being the center of attention, unless I’m pirating, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
As I have said many times in my life, I absolutely love to pull rabbits out of hats when I have no rabbits and no hats. I get a big kick out of it. It satisfies me like nothing else on earth. It’s a drug. I don’t need anyone else’s approval. It’s all about my own validation. In this regard I am judge and jury.
I didn’t really know that it was about validation until last week. My friend Maury thanked me profusely for fixing his Mac. He had forgotten how to login to it and I worked the problem inside out for a bit and found a way in. He was so happy. When he said thank you, I turned away and blushed a bit. It was awkward.
Why? Because while it’s nice people appreciate anything I do, my true joy is the validation that I did something cool. I challenged myself in the moment and I pulled it off. I pulled the handle and got three cherries.
This has been part of me for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I grew up playing mostly by myself. I was my own best friend and for hours and days upon end, I would create stuff from the damdest things; things totally unrelated to one another, or at least, it seemed to others.
As I write this, I think back to all the stuff I’ve done over the years, from building a cottage for Brigadoon in high school and running a fictitious person for office to crafting a tank out of a 1962 Ford Galaxie and talking people into giving me tens of thousands of dollars to put on a pirate show.
Even now, I find great joy in constructing the state’s website for under a thousand dollars, saving taxpayers $99,000 in design costs. As I told Kat just today, if I had the $50 million the state of New York had, I would find far more joy creating an amazing marketing campaign that only cost $1 million and handing back the other $49 million than I ever could hiring Robert DeNiro to direct the TV spots and blowing the whole budget.
Where’s the challenge to your talent there? Sure, you may win awards, but even the awards I have won haven’t provided me the satisfaction validation does, even for the smallest thing I do in my life.
I guess it goes back to being a kid. Being the fourth born boy, it was darned hard to get acknowledgement for anything I did. I desperately wanted validation, but my brothers would never give me the satisfaction and my mother was too busy taking care of a deathly ill husband and trying to make ends meet on welfare. She didn’t have a lot of time to validate me as a person, so I learned to do it myself.
That has been my motivation since. Even pirating, applause isn’t where the fun is for me. Most of the times I don’t think I deserve it. But give me a moment where I can be in control of the environment – bring smiles to people, make someone laugh, or best of all, make them the center of attention – and I am in heaven. I feel validated on an addictive, amazingly fulfilling level.
This inwardly turned validation has its downsides, of course. I probably suffered a bit of career retardation because of this love of (or need for) self-validation. For the longest time I didn’t value my own talent or skill in my profession, charging far less than I should have during those many years as a freelancer or running my own business. I would think, “Come on, anyone can do this. It’s nothing special.”
Well, it was. I should have valued my work much more than I did, for as I have come to find out over the last three years, I have a bit of a gift.
This discovery doesn’t feed my ego. I’m not sure true creatives can have an ego in the traditional sense, unless they have no real talent and use their ego to create their own self-importance. As a creative, you’re always searching for those moments when something you did validates you as a human being, as a performer, or an artist.
I guess that’s why a lot of creatives never listen to what the critics say. They don’t care if their “art” is accepted widely by the public. They may never make it big or even make a sale in their life; it doesn’t diminish who they are or their work because they are validated on a very personal level by the challenge of the work itself.
It’s not always about the magic trick that thrills the audience. Sometimes it’s the fact that you found a rabbit where there shouldn’t have been one or you mastered the trick to your own delight. The applause is nice, but it’s not what motivated you to master the trick or to push the limits of what you know or think you can do. You do it because it validates who you are, or who you hope to become.
It’s a cool feeling owning what motivates you in life. It makes me feel validated. 🙂
In the Emerald City, dancing to the beat of a different drummer and liking it,
– Robb