From The Archives: Transforming limitations, Turning I Can't To I Can

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

What if the limitations you believe define you are actually your greatest opportunities for success?

On this episode of "The Right Questions," we explore how external influences shape our fears and self-doubts from an early age. Through captivating metaphors and real-life scenarios, we uncover how to challenge and reject these limiting beliefs, driving you to embrace your full potential. By shedding these self-imposed barriers, you can shift your focus to doing what you love and getting paid for it, all while maintaining your sanity.

This is fresh from the archives, where we bring back episodes from the past and let them shine once again. Enjoy! 

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!

Transcript

Getting Paid Without Losing Yourself

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, here we go. Howdy, this is the right questions. The podcast that helps you get paid to do what you love and stay sane in the process. And that's the question, isn't it? How do I stay sane in the process? I just want to get paid to do what I love. I just want to do what I love and then get paid for it. But the staying sane is the problem, right? There's all these things come up because creativity comes with this baggage. It often comes with baggage. Some of it we will get into here. But most of the baggage, what we have to understand, is not ours. We picked it up off the carousel, we brought it home, pretending, and then we started wearing the shit. It's not yours. Take it back. Put it back on the carousel. Let the rightful owner take it. We don't need that baggage, baby. Um, you know, the only problems I want you to have, I want you guys to I want the I want the right questions to basically be. I'm answering one goddamn question every week. And the question goes like this James, I followed your rules, I follow the steps, I followed your wisdom. Now what do I do with all these piles of cash? That's the only problem I want you to have. So this is the right questions with me, the king, James Victory. We do have a question this week, and it comes from our, our, our, um, what do I say? Uh a true follower, a true believer, and a great guy to boot, Ray. And Ray wrote in, he wrote in, uh basically he wrote in a very nice letter to us. And at the end of it, he says, he's talking about, he's talking about um the PDF that I send out. And he says, the item that was most resonant was the issue of limitations. It might be helpful, he says, to explore an episode that addresses in detail how we interrogate our perceived limitations to identify where we have simply talked ourselves out of possibilities. I've been thinking about the I can't that I have embraced. Thanks, Ray. And yes, you are spot on, Ray Mofo. Yeah,

Returning Baggage That Is Not Yours

SPEAKER_00 2:35

the ones you have embraced. Ha. Okay, let's get into this. So, as Ray says, we've embraced limitations, which is crazy, right? Right? You're a uh let's say you're in high school and you're on the track team. I don't know, I'm just picking something out of the freaking blue here. You're on the track team and you're about to do go through a race, and there is a booth off to the side uh in the middle of the track. There's a booth that all the athletes can go to. It's not mandatory. It is not mandatory, it's just there. It's just there. And it's limitations. It's like you can run the mile with your hands tied behind your back, or you can um pick up um uh if you're doing the uh the high jump, you can pick up uh this bag of pebbles and put them in your shoes, right? We can accept these limitations. They're not mandatory. They're just like, hey, I thought that'd be fun. I'll do like I'll like race the mile, you know, with my hands tied behind my bike. Right? They're embrace there there are limitations that we're braced. Limitations are given to us. We don't own them, they are not ours. Your limitations are not yours. I find myself going over this a lot. And the reason is it needs to be gone over a lot and said again and again. And what needs to be said again and again is this you are fucked up. We all are. We've all embraced at some point in our lives, you know, some some in the crib, some um early on when we were growing up, oh Jimmy, be careful, be careful, please don't hurt yourself. So, of course, you grow up very cautious. Or or uh in high school, people start teasing you about your nose or your butt, so of course that becomes a thing. Or in college or in uh your first job, you get the shittiest boss in the world, and now like you're hobbled. He's given you some limitation. Like, that's not how we do things around here, little girl. Right? This bullshit. So you're fucked up because we all are. We're handed some malarkey and other people's crazy ideals and crappy attitude, or their anger, or their lack of sensitivity. Or how about this? They taught us impatience when they were trying to teach us to fish. So your fears and your self-doubt, they're they're all someone else's fears. Someone else's limitations. They were probably trying to protect you all well and good, just trying to keep you in the fold, as they say. But they were handed to you. Your limitations were handed to you by people in your past, some caregiver or teacher or some dumbass uncle who basically just gave you bad intel. And since then, these have become the pre-recorded voices of failure, of of of procrastination, of stopping before you start. The pre-recorded voices of failure and limitations that we listen to. The ones we have to tell to fuck off. Right? The voices that tell you you're bad at math. Well, I I have my own business, but it doesn't go very well because I'm not good at dealing with money. No. The reality,

How Fearful Voices Get Installed

SPEAKER_00 6:05

math was just never presented to you. Handling money was never presented to you correctly or logically or in a meaningful way. So you we keep getting in trouble. We keep stumbling over ourselves, and we say, well, I'm just not good at math. It's not true. Being not good at math is not a genetic trait. It just means you ain't learned it properly, son. You see? For me, reading and writing, forget about math, yeah. For me, reading and writing was like that. I hated it. Now I consider now I like proudly put author. I feel like a fucking charlatan, an imposter, right? I put author in my uh in my bio. You know, writing was almost presented as something difficult that I'm not gonna like, and I just have to suffer through. You gotta write one page, right? You remember that? Writing one page, and you'd write you'd write huge letters. Try to get just figure out creatively, brilliant, you're creative. I I applaud you, but how to not do it, how to do it without doing it. I never even knew how I was supposed to learn. Or how about this, that I could actually have fun and enjoy it, even though I tried again and again. I'm like, where how do I fit into this? How do I get in there? I remember in middle school, I think I had to either had to or I chose to write about Shakespeare. And I referred to good old Willy Shakespeare, using those words, good old Willie. And I got a talking to about respect. Respect for William Shakespeare. Really? Really? I'm fucking trying to create over here. Don't give me your respect for dead people, bullshit. Come on. Don't tell me good old Willie Shakespeare didn't have a sense of humor. I read his stuff, or at least tried to get through it. I don't know what language that's in. Sounds funny to me. Listen, here it is. You are clear of heart, and you have the best of intentions. You only want to make what's in your mind, make what's in your heart, do the work that you love. Create the things you see, your vision, make them real and palatable, and sell them. You don't carry any original sin. That's some boogeyman shit made up to make you feel small and submissive, and I am sorry and not sorry. You know, you carry fear and self-doubt and procrastination. But it's not your fault. It really isn't. You didn't deserve it. But here it is. It's up to you to fix it. It's up to you to fix it, to become conscious of these things, right? To think about the I can'ts, I can't do this, I can't do that, that you have embraced, and to figure out how to tell the voices in your head to fuck off. So the good news is that you have no limitations at all. Zero. You really do. You really do. But you have a mindset. That's what you have. You have a mindset, and a mindset can be changed. Um your mindset is basically a system of thoughts, and you can change your thought, right? You can have different thoughts. Oh, I thought that was sharp. Look at that, it's not. Right? You can change your thoughts. You can change your mind. But you have a mindset that sometimes whispers,

Mindset Shifts That Break I Can’t

SPEAKER_00 10:07

I can't. You can't. You can't get paid for that. Nobody wants that. But that's a lie. And it's not your voice. So you gotta not listen to that shit. But you have a mind. And how about this? What about this? Think about this. You ever thought about this? I think about this. What if your mind was developmentally changed? What if you had your your your limitations chemically removed? What if you could move forward with no anchor drag dragging behind? What if you could run freely with no weighted vest or no blinders on? And here I enter former teenager, because she's like 20 now, and climate activist, Greta Thunberg. You've heard of her, right? Greta Thunberg, and I'm using air quotes again, suffers, I'm using that again, air quotes, suffers from Asperger's and OCD and selective mutism, right? So her senses are interrupted. So therefore, she doesn't have the fears and stoppages that you have. She says, she says that at once, at one time, she felt that her Asperger's and OCD were limitations. But she doesn't see it as an illness. She sees it as a superpower. It frees her from the worries and bullshit that we have. She don't give a damn. She doesn't accept the limitations that we do. She says, I think I see a better way. I'm gonna carry this through. She gets an idea in her head and follows it to its conclusion. That's beautiful. It's also dangerous, which is beautiful, because creativity is dangerous. It's supposed to be. That's its job. It's true that there are incredibly special and talented people out there. Moy, we'll use the word gifted. I think you are gifted. Ray, Dan, Steve, Suzanne, everybody out there. I think you're all gifted, quite frankly, and super talented. But there are geniuses out of the people who are just like, they're they're born to do their job physically or mentally. There's like Michael Jordan or Albert Einstein, you know, folks who are given some magical fairy dust at birth, and who are just, quite frankly, lucky to have followed down that path professionally. There are other ways that that Einstein could have fallen, right? With the wrong parents or a school that actually did understand him. Or Michael Jordan could not have had the family that he had to support, or he might have been born in a different neighborhood, right? Just these different things that happen to us. So we're lucky that we can do these things and and and all the stars align. But I am sure there are hundreds of Michael Jordan's or good old Alberts, good old Alberts out there who just didn't get or make or were never given the chance. So their gifts never developed. Most of who we see as the greats are just people. They're just people, and we see it in their lives. We watch these billionaires. I follow a couple of billionaires on on Instagram, and I see how flawed and how I'm like, oh my god, he's just human. He poops. Oh my god, she made a blunder. They're just human. They're just people, just like us, just like you. They've made or created chances for themselves. Um, they've failed. They have limitations, sure, but they found ways around them. They tried to, they don't accept the that they can't. Here's a beautiful example. Here's a beautiful example where there are other situations besides us. Check this out.

Greta Thunberg And Fearless Follow Through

SPEAKER_00 14:35

It's well known that the Renaissance, the Renaissance, occurred, right? And that had massively gifted and talented artists and architects and stonemasons, and they roamed the Italian landscape like giant dinosaurs. But what's not shared as wild widely is the reason for the Renaissance. The reason that these that these creatures existed. And the reason is that the Renaissance was funded, funded financially by the Medici family of bankers. Right? The Medici, God bless them, had a vision, a mission for the arts and for philosophy, and saw art as education. So under their patronage, artists, like you and I, were asked to illustrate philosophical truths about the importance of kindness and compassion and community. They promoted, they promoted in their work serenity and glorified the best qualities of statesmanship and good leadership. Because that's what their supporters, their patrons, paid for. So these guys were given, these people were given a lot of elbow room to create. These are very romantic ideals, right? That that a client would come to you and say, I want to replace all the billboards in in New York or California. I want to replace them all. We're just going to pay. We're going to outbid everybody. And we're going to illustrate philosophical truths about the importance of kindness. How awesome is that? With you, with designers, with illustrators, with artists, these beautiful romantic ideals. Where are these fucking bankers today? I ask you. Find them. Send them my way. You know, I know I can change the world. Give me a budget, I can change the world. I've done a pretty good job of changing my own little corner with zero budget. So don't tell me I can't. No one fucking tells me I can't. No one tells you you can't. So what distinguishes the Renaissance is not, is not a freakish wealth of artistic skill. You know, there's Leonardo and Michelangelo and Donatello and all the other turtles. So it's not the wealth, it's an intensely clear vision of what art should be. And someone to guide and pay for that talent. That's how it worked.

The Renaissance Was A Funding Problem

SPEAKER_00 17:40

The Renaissance would never be remembered if it's if if it was just if it was just a bunch of guys who simply made piles of cash. Right? No one cares about that. The real source of the of the importance and the glory of the Renaissance was of imagination and intelligence and vision. The vision of the well the wealthy bankers of the Medici family. The Renaissance, you could call it the age of heroic advertising, right? With paintings and buildings and sculptures. But the focus was not on selling consumer goods. It was on selling beauty and truth and wisdom. And to whom? To the public. That's why the cities were so beautiful. They wanted happy people. They wanted happy people visiting these beautiful piazzas. So they put sculptures in the middle and a fountain and surround it with beautiful buildings. Nobody thinks like that anymore. You know, we get people at guys at Apple who try to who try to um create, or some of these bigger corporations, they try to create a um an atmosphere where you're very, very, very happy to work there. So you will work really fucking long hours. It's a trap, people. It's a trap. It's not, it is not to to glorify the the the human knowledge and your existence and make you think of higher virtues and ideals. It's just to get you to work harder. So the focus was not on consumer goods, it was on selling beauty and truth and wisdom. So these guys were talented Shua, like me, as talented as I am. Well, Michelangelo can draw like a motherfucker, I'll tell you what. But given the time and given the amount of freedom we can all learn, right? Hell, Michelangelo himself, Michelangelo, the the turtle, I think he wears the blue mask, who we consider obvious, obviously, obviously touched by God, right? That's what we think. He wrote in his journals if people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all. And he didn't actually write that because he wrote in Italian, but that's what he says. If you knew how hard he worked, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all. You may not even want his job. So he wrote a very funny and self-satirical poem, basically complaining. So don't tell me I can't. Those fateful words. Because to me, it seems like the difference between a mental game or a practical game. That's the big difference. Can you get over the mental game and get into the practical game? And the mental game is letting your mind and your thoughts win by stopping you, by giving you excuses or hesitancy or self-doubt. Or setting out some practical steps. Baby steps. Baby

Practical Steps Beat The Mental Game

SPEAKER_00 21:05

steps, baby, baby steps. Setting out some practical steps and following them. That's what it is. Being patient on yourself, being kind to yourself, telling those thoughts of I can't to just fuck off. And following some practical steps. Creativity is so weighted down by fear. We wake every morning creatively hungry with a song in our hearts and an idea about how to change the world. And then we set out to disprove ourselves. And we come up with a laundry lifts list of why we suck and why it won't work. There's not enough time. I don't have the skills or tools. Oh, I just don't have the discipline. Oh, I've got family. I got kids. I can't do that. It's all about fear. And these are just blocking our making. These are Block us, right? I'm here to tell you and myself. I mean, that's why I do this, right? I mean, I wrote Feck Perfection. Hey, by the way, if you don't have Fact Perfection, you should really buy it. I would suggest it. Go to yourworkasagift.com and hit the book and uh and and and buy it. And then uh um I'll sign it to you and I'll, you know, I'll write something really proverbial or philosophical. The reason why I do this is so I can help myself, right? So the only limitations that you and I have are the ones we accept, or the ones we made up, or the ones we've embraced, and the ones we harp on, that's the thing. We keep repeating it over and over, and it becomes a habit. So this is a new habit that we have to break. It's all it is. We all we have to do is change our thoughts, change our mind, create a new mindset. That's how it works. So we make up something that we we make it up that we can't do something, right? And then what happens is we hammer that down with too many nails. So it just can't be removed. I can't. I just can't. It would be really hard for me because I have all these, wait, I've got all these, I got this bag of good excuses, James. You can't take those away from me. So we hammer that idea down by repeating it to ourselves. When I was 18, my very first boss was a designer and a sign painter and a violin maker and a canoe builder. He was a real Renaissance man of sorts, with very few limitations. Uh, and you could not dissuade him or deter him from anything, right? You couldn't tell him he couldn't do something. He just went and did it. He like, he he, you know, he wanted a violin, so he freaking made one. He was like, Birch bark canoe, I saw a picture of one. I think I'm gonna make one. Made a birch bark canoe and then went fishing. Should have seen his house. He built it himself. Frickin' amazing. I remember once he told me, listen, just go do stuff. If someone, if some client comes to you and says, Can you paint gold leaf on glass? That's what I need. He said, say yes. And then go straight to the library. Oh, by the way, um, the library is a big place with books that have you know information on pretty much everything. It's kind of like a like a um a big fat Google. So he said, go straight to the library, read about it, show up the next day and do it. Right? Do it. Step up to the plate. Step up to the plate. Don't say I can't. Step up to the plate and fucking swing. Keep your eye on the ball, which means consistency, and swing.

Say Yes Then Learn Fast

SPEAKER_00 24:56

And I'm gonna leave you with um this little reminder um about the early American folk tale. I thought it was a book. I thought it started as a book, it became a book. It's an early American folk tale to teach children the value of optimism and hard work, right? Beautiful uh American ideals, optimism and hard work. And it's called The Little Engine That Could. Right? I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. And when he gets to the top and he comes over that crest, he says, I know I can, I know I can, I know I can, because you can. There's zero reason you cannot. Don't ever tell yourself or anyone else that you can't do something, and tell those voices in your head to fuck off. I'm James Victory. This is the right questions. Listen, I want to hear from you guys. Send in your questions. Go to howdy at your work is a gift.com, send in your questions. I want to help you. I'm good at my job, right? I love you guys. Good job showing up, good job learning. I know I can. I know I can. I know I can. That's all you have to know. You guys are awesome. I know I can. And you know what? I actually, for you, I know you can too. So let's do this thing. Adios, bye bye. Talk to you later.