Subtlety
It takes courage to build subtlety into your song, project, approach, career, offering to the marketplace.
Subtlety takes patience to make.
Subtlety is often tedious.
Subtlety is expensive.
Subtlety is risky because it won’t be noticed by most people.
It’s hard to measure the effectiveness of your subtlety.
You’ll never feel like you get enough credit for the effort and creativity it took to add subtlety.
Subtlety gives something to be discovered by those who want to dig deeper.
Subtlety often comes in the form of layers.
Taking the time to build in subtle layers ensures your thing is more than meets the eye. And something like that is worth offering to the world.
Committing To The Clean Up
That’s the hard part of play dough.
It’s also the hard part of throwing a party or putting on a show or reorganizing the kitchen cabinets.
So when we say yes to those things we know the full spectrum of what we’re committing to do. The hard part isn’t a surprise. The hard part is what makes us make a conscious choice rather than a frivolous one. To do it on purpose.
Cutting Through
The Outsiders
I’ve listened to a lot of interview podcasts, you probably have too. Most of the time the interviewer is asking about the guest’s story…how they got to where they are.
One commonality to every one of those interviews is that no one ever claims to have been an insider…rather, everyone talks about how they’ve always felt like an outsider.
(Even after having success, they still feel like an outsider, like an imposter.)
So if that’s the way you feel too, you join the ranks of some pretty good company.
But feeling like an insider or outsider (and oscillating between the two) pales in importance to simply deciding to do the work and deciding to make an important contribution.
How Many People Are Famous?
It’s a good question. Not because the actual answer is necessarily important or interesting…but because it immediately points to other thoughts and questions…
What does it mean to be famous?
You can be famous to one group of people and not another.
What’s the minimum threshold to be called famous?
There are probably levels of fame...something like: local celeb, pretty famous, super famous, worldwide superstar.
Who decides when someone is famous?
In order for you to be famous, does someone have to be removed from fame?
What’s the maximum amount of people who could be famous at once before the next most popular person is simply popular but not famous?
All of these off-shoot questions that arise when you ask people ‘How many people are famous’…the core question they actually want to contemplate and come to an answer about is, ‘Can I be famous too’. And that is always an interesting conversation.