Everything you need is already inside

Still from Nike Commercial ‘Courage’

As a copywriter I’ve always been obsessed with Nike headlines. I always refer to this line that some Wieden+Kennedy copywriter probably came up with on his lunch break. It’s become more than a headline to me. I use it in strategy decks, meetings, I refer to it in my own life.

And still I read productivity books like I’m looking for the perfect prism through which to see the words I already know — perhaps from a new angle that will finally play the magic chord to please the lord in my mind and set me off into the most productive phase of my life.

I bought a tattered old copy of Robert Greene’s book Mastery years ago, because he was a mentor of Ryan Holiday, whom I'd grown to admire very much for his own attempts at mastering stoicism and being a dad. I finally cracked it yesterday and was struck by this quote by Emerson in the introduction:

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’ve always been a late bloomer. I was 27 when I graduated college. I started in advertising at 28. Started screenwriting at 33 and I’ll let you know when that pans out. Mastery takes time, but it’s the act of doing the work that will take us there, not reading about it. Trust yourself. Be brave. Enjoy the books, the rumination on the human brain and the life of an artist, but don’t confuse it with creation.