The Right Questions with James Victore
The Right Questions is designed to help you get paid to do what you love and stay sane in the process.
The Right Questions with James Victore
Episode 70: Fear Kills Play
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
If you are a stuck or frustrated creative and want to get paid to do what you love, let's talk. https://yourworkisagift.com/coaching
A single line in a museum—“My kid could do that”—can sound like a verdict on art and creativity.
We turn that line on its head and ask the better question: if your kid tried, why won’t you? From a thirty-second drawing exercise that dissolves a room of suits into laughter to the quiet ways fear sneaks into our choices, we trace how rules, judgment, and conformity choke the creative impulse and how to get it back.
Like this? Join us on Substack and subscribe to get the podcast and all my other work delivered straight to your inbox.
Follow me on Instagram (@jamesvictore) for all my big ideas and inspiration!
All right, here we go. This is the right questions, and I'm your beautiful host, James Victory. You know, I read something the other day that just drives me crazy when I hear this stuff. It's one of those, it's one of those myths. It's one of those lies that we keep associating with creativity, like the myth of uh the starving artist, right? Um, and this one was someone looking at a beautiful piece of art in a museum and saying, My kid could do that. And here's the truth: your kid could do that, but you can't. And that's the huge difference. Listen, when I do a workshop in a room full of suits, I ask, who here can draw? And I'm met with befuddled, surprised looks and fear. They're all looking at each other like, what the world, what do we do now? And then I give them a simple 30-second drawing assignment. That's it, 30 seconds. And when they're done, I ask them to show their work to each other. And boom, the room explodes with laughter. That's it, that is it. I scream, that is why we play for the laughter and fun and joy it brings. And this, this is why we should play all the time in our work and in our lives. Now, if this were a room full of kids, I would be met with cheers and gung-ho excitement, right? Just from the start. They'd be asking me, can we draw dinosaurs? Can we draw what we want? Can we draw right? So are kids just more creative than adults? And why is it hard for adults to play? And why are kids so damn good at it? I don't think the question is about kids being more creative. I think the right question is how do we become less creative? And what can we do about it? Kids are not more creative than adults. They are just not as full of fear. Kids haven't learned the rules yet. And ignorance of the rules is a fabulous tool. The the filmmaking genius Orson Wells, he in an interview admitted that ignorance ignorance fueled his masterpiece of a film, Citizen Kane. He didn't know what couldn't be done with a film camera. So he went and did it. And he had a cameraman who just said, okay, boss, let's try that. Without preconceived notions about how things are supposed to look or feel or work, we're much more likely to just make shit up for a living. And here's the thing, we're social animals and we're bound by societal norms and expectations. We want to fit in. But conformity is the enemy of creativity. Creativity demands that you stand out. Even when I taught at the university level, when I taught at art school basically, I remember my students wanting to know the right answer instead of searching to find their answer. We don't trust ourselves and we worry about consequences, making mistakes, and being judged. Fear, fear stops us from experimenting and exploring radical or even the wrongest ideas. I've worked with too many clients who hire me for out-of-the-box thinking. But in the end, they feel very safe in their boxes. Because large clients don't. They do not want to stand out. Listen, once I literally heard from a middle manager of a large company, and he said, We want to do cutting-edge forward-thinking work. We just don't want to be the first to do it. On the individual level, it works like that too. We're less creative because we're afraid. We don't allow ourselves to play. We're afraid of being messy. We're afraid no one will like it or like us or buy it. We're afraid that we're not good enough, it's not good enough, or we'll look silly, or we're just afraid of looking good. We're afraid of standing out. We've acquired a lot of fear that stands in the way of us playing and making and creating beautiful things and beautiful lives for ourselves. But we have to get back to that play and fun that brought us here in the first place and trust that. Really trust it. Because besides trust, you really have nothing. You really have nothing. Trust is the lifeblood of good work. Kids trust themselves until they learn not to, until they learn the rules, and that other people are supposed to be in charge. My beautiful, beautiful people, the only right answer is yours. You have to trust that. I love ya. I'll talk to you later. Bye bye.