Please Don't Be a Slave to Experts in Your Creative Life

There's an expert out there to tell you how to do just about anything in your creative life.

From how to mix your paint or develop your plot to how to get a billion Instagram followers or sell 10K paintings a month.

Now, I'm not saying that it isn't wonderful to learn from other people who know more than we do. Because it is.

And I'm certainly not saying that learning isn't a tremendous thing per se. Because it is. In fact, I think we should go on doing it until the day we pass gracefully into the next world!

Nor am I saying that we should re-invent the wheel when someone else has already smoothed out all the hitches and made it road-worthy already.

But you know what? We don't have to listen to any 'experts' if their ideas don't resonate with us. Especially if they tell us that they've got the ONE method that really works.

​Not only is it impossible for there to be only one way of doing things, but their 'foolproof' plan won't necessarily work for us anyway. Because each one of us is a completely different little world unto ourselves. And that's a marvellous thing!

​It's marvellous because it means we can go off and devise any plan that suits us to do the stuff we want or need to do. We can cobble together nuggets of wisdom from all our favourite experts without following any single plan at all. We can have the best of all their worlds and still create our very own. We can mix and match ideas and cross-fertilise situations to our heart's content.
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Forging your own path is powerful

When we make our own path, instead of looking for shortcuts, we come to own and love our work and our particular, quirky way of doing things. We make connections between things that other people don't make. We build systems that work fantastically for our own specific circumstances, and develop tools that reflect our own individual needs.

And guess what? When we forge our own path, it only makes us stand out more from our peers in whatever we do. It makes our creative voice stronger. It helps us resonate more with our tribe.

So next time an expert claims you need their system to get something done. Take a breath. Stand back. Ask yourself if maybe you already know how to do this thing yourself. Or whether you already have an embryo of a plan? Or whether it might simply be fun to figure out the path for yourself...

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