fbpx

We are stardust, did you know that?  And that’s not just Joni Mitchell telling us in song, but Neil deGrasse Tyson, an Astrophysicist who said it.  We are “…all the atoms in the universe.”  So, if we are truly stardust, then what is holding us back?  What are we afraid of?  We are literally made of stardust, anything is possible.

The atoms in our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these rich ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago.  For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world.  We are chemically connected to all the molecules on Earth and we are atomically connected to all the atoms in the universe.  We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.
Neil deGrasse Tyson

Looking for that motivation?  Looking for the creative spark?  That divine inspiration to keep going on your passion project?  Then look no further than yourself, it’s already in you.  You are the stars and nothing should hold you back from reaching for them.  Still not sure what to do?  Here are some steps to follow.

This post contains affiliate links, which means I receive a small amount of money if you make a purchase using this link

Make Room For It

If you truly want something (that book, that gallery showing, that…) then make room for it.  And I don’t mean by dedicating a specific space in your house for it.  I mean by making room in your life for it.  You need to make room in your life for what is important to you.  So get up earlier.  Use your lunch hour.  Turn off the TV.  Use your commute time.  If you aren’t trying these things…how important is it really?

When I was working full-time, I would get up extra early to work on this blog.  Now that I’m no longer working, I still get up early to work on this blog and now I have additional time to do more.  It’s important to me, I make the time for it.

Find Your Time

Finding your time to work is different than making room for it.  The best time to work would be during your peak productive times–those times when you’re energy is high and you really feel able to tackle anything.  Too bad we don’t always get that luxury of matching our passion projects with our peak productive times.  Sometimes we have to work at a different job or take care of the kids during our peak energy times.

What do you do then?  Use the time that you have.  I used to be a night owl.  I would stay up to all hours of the night and had a hard time getting up early.  Then I came across Julie Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way.  This book introduced me to Morning Pages, writing three pages of whatever comes into your head as a way to clear the garbage out for the day.  In order to get all three pages done before work, which was the point, to do it first, I had to get up earlier than I was used to.  I didn’t take to this new schedule right away, it took time.  But, eventually, I turned myself into a morning person who gets up and writes first thing…well, after coffee.

So when is your best time, your peak productive hours?  Are you a morning person?  A night person or an early afternoon person?  Pay attention to how you feel while you’re working.  If you’re gung-ho and charging through your work at 10:00 am, then that’s a peak time for you.  And you might notice that you have two or three peak times, either of equal or varying strengths.  My peak time is early morning from about 5:30 am to 10 or 10:30 am.  It’s where I try to do most of my writing.  I peak again later in the evening from about 6:00 pm to about 7:30 or 8:00 pm.  But this second time period is not as strong, so I might work on secondary things related to my blog like creating images or reworking an old blog post.

Put Your Butt In The Chair

That’s right.  It’s time to put your butt in the chair to start writing.  Or put your butt in front of the canvas to start painting or put your butt wherever it needs to be in order to work on your project.

Here’s the important part of that, you have to put your butt in the chair and start working.  But don’t expect what you do to be brilliant right away, in fact, it will probably suck, especially if this is the first time that you put your butt in the chair.  It will suck…AND THAT’S OK!!  Truly.  The most important part of this step is that you put your butt in the chair and start.  We all have to start at our beginning and usually, that is a sloppy, messy place.  Think about when you’ve gone to see a play or a movie.  You didn’t see their first practice.  You see the play after they’ve practiced for weeks.  You watch the movie that took thousands of takes and was edited together to leave out the bad scenes and only keep the good ones.  No movie is completely done on one take, the very first time.

So why are you expecting to put your butt in your seat and be brilliant the first time out?  Why?  Because I told you that you were stardust?  You are stardust, but everyone needs to be polished first in order to be brilliant.  And the only way to do that is to practice, to keep trying, to keep doing it over and over again.

Rinse and Repeat

What I laid out seems simple enough.  Make the time in your life, find your peak productive time and start doing it.  But it’s so hard for some people to take that first step and even harder to keep going.  But you will. Because when you are being creative at work, you’re being passionate about your work.  And when you are passionate about your work, you are leading with your heart.  And when that happens—it doesn’t even feel like work at all.

So you will keep going.  You know why?  Because you ARE STARDUST!