Struggles of the Creative, or just a Lack of Tenacity?

I will never be a Mozart. I have come to terms with this and have realized that my continual need to change may not be a bad thing so long as I know what to do with it. Nevertheless, I ended up watching this TEDx talk by Angela Lee Duckworth, questioning whether my desire to move on before my 10 years of constant work and study takes me to the pre-determined "mastery" stage is really ok. In a New York Times article, one quote was really poking me in the brain as I wrestle with the question of whether it's more important to stick with something I have lost interest in or knowing when to throw in the towel:

People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”

This is something I struggle with. In college I ended up with my major because I decided I didn't really like taking tests and visual communications was just one of the many things I was interested in. By the end of my five years of college I was so ready to move on to something else that I really didn't quite know what to do. I knew I wouldn't do advertising - three years of vis-comm classes taught me that - and since film/video was an area we merely dabbled in and I found that I enjoyed, I wound up searching for jobs in the post-production field. Fortunately I landed a job doing what I wanted.

I said I'd give the job two years. After that amount of time I could start looking for other jobs if I wanted, but I felt like I needed to at least give it that. Reality hit when I was rejected for a job I really wanted, then was told I wasn't ready to pursue a master's degree by the one person who would make that decision should I apply, after which my art was rejected from a couple of juried exhibitions. Don't get me wrong, I did get some encouragement from other places, but this succession of rejections were like pouring salt on open wounds. *They* say that rejection is what we need for growth, so I keep trying to make sure that's true.

Amidst all this self-doubt and worry, I searched out lots of self-help books on making career and life choices. There was one book that really sang to my innermost questioning: The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One by Margaret Lobenstine. (From her site, you can download the first chapter of this book and related articles.) In this book she talks about being on a scale with Mozart on one end and Ben Franklin on the other. I would venture to guess I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't lack the ability to follow through, but I also lose interest after reaching a certain level of accomplishment. As she put it, renaissance souls like the uphill climb, or as I would say, the act of learning. Oft-times when I have a real hard-core goal that I'm after (getting good grades in school, finishing college, saving money for something I really want, etc), I can maintain the grit so long as that goal continues to be desirable. Once my interest starts waning, so does my tenacity.

I think it's definitely time to set some "hard-core" goals. Rather than new years resolutions, I'm taking up all the advice I keep reading about setting some year-long goals and stepping stones to those goals. Now let's just see how well those stick!

Note: I began this post in October 2011...

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