Sexy as your protestant work ethic may be, hard work doesn't teach you how to surrender.

This limits your creativity.

"Everywhere. . . the really creative acts are represented as those deriving from some sort of dying to the world and what happens in the interval of the hero's nonentity, so that he comes back as one reborn, made great and filled with creative power"

- J Campbell

Before the hero revives the world they must travel into their own (psychological) depths and defeat their own demons.

By doing so they facilitate the birth of something new.

And I think there's a lesson in there about the limitations of trying to white-knuckle your own creative process.

At some point, girding your loins just ain't enough.

Though the mechanics of why that is are still not 100p clear to me, I think we intuitively get that.

We understand self-destructive practices, psychological barriers, hang-ups, and opportunities we fail to give ourselves.

And I think we get that hard work alone doesn't cut it.

And my area of familiarity, creativity, it seems like white-knuckling falls short because it fails to admit that creativity is mediated by your own (under-examined) psychology.

So white-knuckling is like trying to wack the head of the Hydra

Thanks to @tracyplaces and @Jeanvaljean689 for inspiring this line of thinking. I'm trying to write a short piece on it but, as the thinking is still fuzzy, I thought I'd expose the ideas to some daylight via this thread.

Inspo-post below: https://twitter.com/tracyplaces/status/1307466676682842113

If any of this is unclear - I'd appreciate you letting me know! It'll save me from writing a bad essay.

If you just want to congratulate me for working the phrase "girding your loins" into an tweet thread - that's acceptable as well.