THE WHEEL OF CREATIVITY

Four Secrets to Make a Dream into Reality

Today, up the coastline from Nice, the Palais des Festivals is hosting the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This year, close to 30,000 people are attending from all over the world. Of the 4,300 films submitted, 138 will be screened at the show. Only the best of the best are accepted.

From screenwriters to actors, from directors to editors, Cannes is a celebration of creative talent. It is also an auction block for creative product. Deals are conjured over drinks in the Majestic bar, and films are bartered at poolside parties up and down the Croisette.

The red carpet is the diamond in the cinematic crown. But the crown itself is carved behind the scenes, through lifetimes of hard work, lucky breaks, and shrewd business dealings. Real people doing real jobs for real money, most of whom began their journeys with a dream.

Where’s Your Hero?

We live in a world of opposites. Top and bottom. Success and failure. Dreams and reality. Film stars seem to bridge these opposites, making not only their own dreams real, but ours as well. This is why we adore them, and why we love to tear them down. When you make someone else responsible for your dreams coming true, you will eventually resent them for not being you.

The cure is to take the wheel of your own life. But how?

Secrets of Transformation

Creativity is more than product. It is process as well, though this is unlikely to win awards. The brilliance of a perfect product can blind; and real, daily life can seem quite dull by contrast. But you also bridge two worlds, making your own dreams real… or not. What does it take to transform a dream into reality?

1. Vision. For decades, I have listened to creative people struggle with these contrasts. Before they put pen to paper, they flash forward to the awards and the critics. If they are not “the most extraordinarily gifted writer since Hemingway,” they cannot bear to write the next word. Those who succeed learn to detach from these objectified projections and return to their own creative vision.
2. Courage. Creativity involves taking risks. Sometimes our dreams come true. Sometimes they don’t. The products we create have a lifespan, usually fairly short in comparison to the lifetime of work required. And then we set out again. The process itself transforms us in ways that last a lifetime.
3. Faith. In every creative cycle, there are those times when nothing appears to be happening. Creative work goes underground; and we must wait, deal with our anxieties, and continue to care for ourselves as creators, even though there are no outward signs of success.
4. Discipline. While the creative process beings with a vision, it culminates in discipline. “Overnight successes” usually occur after decades of resilience. Every step along the way shows us our blind spots as well as our strengths, and reinforces the truth of our life purpose.

These four secrets reflect the four quarters of The Wheel of Creativity:  Vision, Exploration, Incubation and Cultivation. Each plays an integral part in the creative process.

Some days are easier than others.

This week I received a call for help. The woman on the phone had taken a leap of faith with her work, producing a set of products on spec for a new client. She had invested a great deal of time and money in these products. More importantly, she had invested her dream. This morning, she got the call to come pick them up… all of them. She was devastated, and understandably so.

Sometimes we invest in things that do not pay off the way we think they should. This doesn’t happen in dreams, but it certainly does in reality. What we envision, though it calls us to leave the shore, may not be our actual destination. It’s crucial to hold the wheel lightly, and welcome Life as our collaborator.

The Wheel of Creativity draws a distinction between the Forms of life and the Essence, between the products we create and the energy that imbues them with light. It is possible to have one without the other, but the integration of the two is what moves us most, again and again. It is what the creative process of personal transformation is about.

My woman caller and all of us seeking to live our lives creatively move continuously between form and essence. Each has its part in the process. And forms can be very distracting. Disappointments are opportunities to detach from the forms and return to the essence, the creative energy that is always flowing through us.

This week, millions will enjoy the thrill of Cannes’ celebration, as our favorite stars light the red carpet for us. But, let’s remember that their creative products come through the process, just like ours. Our red carpets may not be in Cannes, but we will walk them because we have taken the journey to get there. If we think the product will save us, we are wrong. We are saved, or not, by the process itself. The product is simply the proof.

Questions? Thoughts? Post them on The Wheel of Creativity Facebook page, and I will respond.

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What has Life given you today to create with?

Last week, as I left the sushi takeaway near my flat, I stepped out onto the sidewalk and turned toward home. Suddenly I realized, out of the corner of my eye I had glimpsed something extraordinary. I turned back to see a tiny bird’s nest in the middle of the sidewalk. No bird in sight. I had almost missed it.

Instead I turned back, picked it up, and held it carefully between two fingers. The walk home, with this tiny treasure in my hand, was an impromptu lesson in how precious life can be, and how easily we can miss it.

I found a nest once before, on the driveway of our house in England, where it now sits on our living room bookcase. This is a very different place. Trees – aside from the stereotypical scattered palms – are less common here. The raw materials available to birds here are different.

Today’s nest is smaller. Both nests are uniquely beautiful. But this one is made almost entirely of feathers, with only a small internal structure of twigs to hold them in place.

As I walked home, I couldn’t help thinking that while the twigs provide a delicate structure for the nest, the bird who built this nest then plucked her own soft feathers to complete it. That spoke to me. What she created had her in it. And the words rose spontaneously within me, “Feather your nest.”

Birds must use the materials at hand to make their nests. They use what’s around them and weave it all together with elements of themselves. It’s their nature. They migrate. They settle. They nest. They create a family. They let it go. And then they do the same thing again, year after year.

I am fond of saying, when speaking with people about the Wheel of Creativity, that our circumstances are the raw materials with which we create our lives. My circumstances are different than yours. They are different than they were a year ago. And we all have our preferences.

Some circumstances may produce more comfortable nests than others. But each year, each day, each moment, it is in your human nature to create something new… to feel the longing, to build the nest, to give birth to something new, to set it free, and then to move on to the next thing. This is the natural creative cycle of life.

All we have to do is look to Nature to know that we are creative, and to understand how to live creatively. To my knowledge, birds do not argue with Nature. They do not wait for perfection. They feel the calling. They start the family. They build the nest. They do the work. They set their children free. And they sing.

Life wants you to create. Life is constantly seeking to perpetuate itself through you. You may prefer to wait until things are just so before you act. But in the end, if you are to have a nest in your life, you will create it.

What a privilege, this experience of being alive. What materials has life given you to make your nest today? What will you add of yourself to make the world a more beautiful place?

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Marketing guru Seth Godin is talking about Tribes. And so were we, yesterday at the professional women’s networking meeting I attended, where the topic was Co-creation.

According to Seth, “A tribe is a group of people, connected to each other, connected to a leader and connected to an idea.” His book, and the topic. came up at our table.

I got to thinking. And my thoughts formed around three main ideas:

1. Belonging.

My concept of a tribe, developed through my life, has been that it was something one was born into, something you were part of without doing anything, just because of who you were. It gave context to the individual, the couple, the family and the community. It gave a sense of security and belonging.

Having been a student of Latin in my younger years, I like to know the origins of words. The origins of this word, to my surprise, indicate that it was used to distinguish and separate one group of people from another.

The English word tribe comes from the old French tribu, which comes from the Latin tribus. And tribus refers to the original three-part division of ethnic groups within the Roman State: the Latins, the Sabines and the Etruscans.

Thus, the tribe that joins us with some must also separate us from others. We belong with one group because we are unlike another. I question that.

2. Technology.

My father was born in 1910. He saw the introduction of the automobile in the small Virginia town where he grew up. He went to school sitting on the back of his father’s delivery cart, which was drawn by a horse. When I was a child, he used to say to me, “Our greatest problem as a society is that we are too mobile.”

As cars became buses and trucks and airplanes, my father watched the glue that once held his society together drying up and flaking away. The social structures it had held – family, worship, local communities – started to come apart at the seams. People moved for better opportunities and left their tribes behind them.

It’s perhaps just as well that he didn’t live to see the World Wide Web, the Internet, email or social media. The expansion continues. And, as Nobel prize-winning scientists are proving, the expansion of the universe is not slowing down; it is speeding up.

The physical and geographical walls that separated us are coming down. Unlike my father, I don’t think this is a bad thing. But the expansion of the world we live in is destabilizing, and learning to cope with it requires consciousness and creativity. This is where Seth’s subtitle rings so true, “We need you to lead us.”

3. The Global Tribe.

This weekend, I met an international high school teacher. He spoke of some of his students, young men addicted to video war games. Without the skills to express themselves in the world, “They are,” he observed, “angry.” And who can blame them? Expression – an essential part of the creative process – is not about art; it is about living. When life energy – especially powerful in young men and women – has no creative outlet, it becomes destructive.

My tribe, I recognized as a teenager, built a box to keep us “safe.” That box was an ideological (religious) viewpoint that separated us from all those who did not believe what we did. People were classified as either X or nonX. That was how my tribe saw the world, so it’s what I learned too. After enough attempts to see outside that box, I eventually caught a glimpse of a world where boxes could be broken down and ideas expressed with respect and compassion. And that has moved me through life ever since.

Many people never leave their tribe, so perhaps they don’t feel the vacancy I have. Yet technology is breaking down barriers, so that even those who never leave – from the backwoods of Texas to the deserts of Libya – see different ways to live. But without a common idea, these differences too often breed animosity and hate. It’s time to ride the tide of our expanding universe, and expand our thinking as well.

Hollywood said it first in 1938:  “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” I will always have my history. But I don’t have to continue to create my life from it. Especially as I see the splendor of life’s diversity throughout the world, I realize what a poverty that would be. For me, having come from where I did, I prefer to find the lowest common denominator of tribal belonging.

Webster defines tribe as “a group of persons having a common character, occupation, or interest.” Of all the biological life forms on Earth today, there is none more like a woman than a man, none more like a Republican than a Democrat, none more like Muslim than a Christian. Can we open up to rediscover our human heritage outside our tribes of origin? What if we could co-create a global tribe based on common character rather than intolerable differences? What kind of future might our young men (and young women) inherit then?

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Last week, while I was in London for the London Book Fair, I had the joy of a rare evening with my lovely step-daughter over sushi in Notting Hill. We talked about a lot of things, but what I want to share here is the point at which our conversation turned toward education.

Regi teaches young people. She has always been interested in the Wheel of Creativity; but through teaching, her interest has taken on a professional slant. She sees the Wheel as a tool for young people to make life make a little more sense. And that, as you can imagine, delights me.

The next day at the book fair I met with a senior manager of a creative social network for young people. Movellas is an online community where (mostly) young people publish stories they’ve written, read each others’ stories, and give and receive feedback. Thousands of young people from different countries show up there; and from what I’ve seen, they are highly engaged.

The same theme came up in both meetings. In order to succeed in the contemporary world, young people need more than knowledge. They need understanding – about how life works – and wisdom – about how to get through it in one piece. While schools are organized and standardized to teach the former, they aren’t necessarily set up to teach the latter two.

So I was intrigued to come across an article this month in the New York Times about Manhattan’s Blue School, where students from pre-school through third grade learn differently, where openness to new ideas is a top priority. According to journalist Jenny Anderson, “Periods of reflection are built into the day for students and teachers alike, because reflection helps executive function — the ability to process information in an orderly way, focus on tasks and exhibit self-control.”

It’s not really their fault. Schools have traditionally existed to teach the three R’s:  reading, writing and arithmetic. Students must pass tests to progress, and the passing of those tests now organizes the curricula. Anderson’s article quotes neuropsychiatrist and advisor to the school Daniel J. Siegel, who believes that schools should also be teaching “the three other R’s:  reflection, relationships and resilience.”

Education today is intensely active; but activity is only half the equation; receptivity is the other half. According to the Wheel of Creativity, the creative process is the marriage of the two.

Personally, I wonder if school is really the best place for the other three R’s, which sound to me a lot more social than institutional. First, there’s the cost. Parents of Blue School students pay close to $32,000 a year for tuition. Second, there is the growing pressure to educate children to be able to compete in an increasingly competitive job market. And third, well maybe there are other, more inspiring ways to learn them.

A chasm has developed in learning, and understanding and wisdom have fallen in. To fill the gap, young people turn primarily to each other, occasionally to their parents, and rarely to a trusted advisor. They need to learn to think and feel and navigate life for themselves. And they need clear, inspiring and creative tools to do so. Maybe Blue School gives them a head start. Maybe Movellas gives them a place to learn from each others’ stories. Maybe the Wheel of Creativity gives them a compass they can use for life.

What are you teaching your children to prepare them for life? Share your secrets here.

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Five years before the release of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Eat Pray Love, I left the USA on a journey of my own, a six-week solo tour of Europe. It was Autumn 2001. In the aftermath of September 11, the world had stopped in its tracks. And so did I, in the South of France. I swam in the Mediterranean, made friends with strangers, sketched and wrote. The soothing sensuality of the French Riviera began to loosen the grip of my American ambition. My life as I knew it was transformed.

As weeks turned to years, I made a dramatic discovery, at the intersection of The Hero’s Journey and The Artist’s Way. It was a new application of an ancient invention, used throughout history to describe the journey of life. It was the Wheel of Creativity. In Helen Keller’s famous words, “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” The Wheel of Creativity®:  Taking Your Place in the Adventure of Life offers readers a map for the adventure.

What began for me in 2001 as a six-week European “walkabout” led me to a new life in three countries, a quantum leap in my business, and a magical first marriage at 52. I am living the adventure. Everyone can. While it need not be geographical, it is always transformational.

The ultimate creative adventure is being alive. Far deeper than the work of a professional elite or the amateur pastime of the masses, creativity is a force as natural as breathing. Either we learn to allow it to flow, or it costs us our lives.

The Wheel of Creativity® identifies 12 stages of the creative process in the form of a wheel, revealing the unique experience of each stage, and the task required to reap its reward. This book unveils an ancient roadmap, rooted in world traditions, tribal wisdom and natural law, and grounded in the contemporary life experiences of people in all walks of life, as well as my own. With tools to clear blocks, capitalize on strengths and take effective action, readers learn how to create the lives they love from the lives they have today.

These principles are universal. Each time I share them, I see people recognize themselves in the Wheel, learn to trust the process again, and retake the wheel of their lives. That is why I have written this book.

Right now I am in London at the 2012 London Book Fair. The message so far that struck me the most was that the center of creativity is no longer centralized, but now sits at the edge of society. People are doing it for themselves. So, if you think you need an authority to validate what you dream to do, forget about it. Just do it.

Why stop with the Eat Pray Love fantasy when you can create your own real-life adventure?

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It’s Easter Sunday. My step kids have gone home. And my husband is at sea. So I decided to get myself up from the computer where I’ve been spending a lot of time lately and go for a walk.

I took my iPod to keep me company and stave off those lonely holiday blues. But no sooner had I closed the door behind me than Life grabbed me by the senses. I was so impressed; I could not put the earbuds in my ears.

So off I went, down the quiet tree-covered lane I like to walk, with Life as my close companion, resurrecting me by the senses, restoring my connection with it in the creativity of Nature all around me.

Life’s raw improvisation, as I moved through it, was more exciting than any creative composition I had heard before. A few notes…

• Birds with such beautiful voices they could have taught me to sing
• Winter-stricken trees dressing up in new Spring greens and pastels
• The deep green bush sharing its pink camellias with the sidewalk below
• The little two-seater prop plane flying along the beach
• The man in the red sweatshirt who turned onto the lane ahead of me
• Five boys on bicycles discovering the depths of new voices
• Crossing the street, an untended green belt between me and the beach
• Meandering paths through mossy mounds of earth slightly lower than me
• A mini-prairie covered with bushes bursting with tiny yellow flowers whose scent reminded me of my childhood in Texas
• The sounds of hard wheels hitting the steel waves of the local skateboard park
• Stripes of colorful beach huts framing the seaside just beyond
• Then the sea, its perpetual percussion stirring up stones on the beach
• The long, wide beach at low tide, sandy patches stripped bare of stone by the waves
• Seagulls returning to the water, squawking at me for disturbing their peace
• A dozen smaller birds, for whom I was an excuse to catch the wind one more time, flying and soaring longer than was necessary
• The thundering roar of the roller coaster at the local Family Fun Fair
• The chute flying ahead on the beach, telling me there was at least one kite surfer out today
• The rich carpet of fresh green grass as I turned back toward home.

Another lane, with different birds, different trees, different flowers; and the story was the same. Life was beckoning me to live it, to feel it with all my senses, to appreciate the incredible richness of this moment. I could not have been lonely if I tried.

Wherever you are today, whomever you’re with (or not with), your world is equally as rich, your senses equally as hungry. So just for this day, step back from the computer, leave the iPod at home, and let Life in… in… in, to resurrect your senses with all that’s around you, and reconnect you with Life itself.

Happy Easter.

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Four years ago today, I donned a long ivory dress, mounted a horse named Convict and rode across a wide Texas pasture to the man I was about to marry. Our loved ones gathered around us , and we said our vows beneath an ancient Bois d’Arc tree on a dear friend’s farm. That day will forever be etched in my heart. I was 52 years old, and it was my first and only wedding.

I have asked myself at times, and certainly others have asked me, how this happened to me. I’ve come up with all kinds of answers over the years, such as:

• I was in the right place at the right time.
• I worked on myself to be open.
• I had finally accepted that I might never get married.
• I felt good about myself when we met.
• I was just a very fortunate girl.

They are all true, in a way; and none is the complete answer. So, let me offer another possibility, from the Wheel of Creativity.

A year before my husband and I began dating, I met a different man. I knew it would not be a permanent relationship, and I guessed it would end in pain. I knew I could be either the woman who stayed safely on the side of the precipice or the woman who jumped. For 25 years I had kept my heart safe. This time I jumped. It was then I chose the mantra:  “Don’t say no to love.”

I had opened my heart, and that changed everything. So, a few months later, when my husband first invited me into a relationship, it was with an open heart that I responded. My mantra gave me my yes. And “I do” gave me all the days of our lives. I didn’t imagine it could get better than that, but it has.

The title of this blog has two meanings for me today.

1. First, it connotes commitment. Embrace the package, do the work, and never give up. That much I knew when I said, “I do.” Committing your life to something changes the game completely. That day four years ago was just the beginning.
2. Second, it describes the unit of measure in which this commitment is carried out… one day at a time. This I’m learning as I go. Some days are easier than others, but I do my best. We both do. And that changes the rules of the game.

The Wheel of Creativity teaches that the quality of your days is determined by your responses to what they bring. The past, present and future are the byproducts. Whether it’s a relationship, a home, a project or a job you’re after, they all are grown within you, and blossom in the world around you.

Every single day presents you with thousands of choices. How you make them – consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or by default, with courage or fear – is the process by which you create your life.  Commit to something. Follow it through. And it will transform you.

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In case you EVER think your life doesn’t matter, or that the place you hold in the world is not important, or that the people around you don’t need YOU, please read on. What you create with the ingredients in your life is unique to you. And in some mysterious way, it nourishes everyone you meet.

This morning, I am baking banana bread. It’s in the oven now, the counters are clean and the dishes are washed; so I’m taking these moments to post a new blog. Banana bread is one of my ‘specialties’; and whenever we have overripe bananas around the house, I always try to use them up in this way. I hate to see anything not complete its purpose in the world.

This morning, when wiping down the black granite countertop, I thought (as I always do now) of my husband’s Auntie Mary. Mary told me with some intensity, “NEVER use water to wipe down a counter with flour on it; it will turn to glue. Always use a paper towel.” I always do. And I always think of her.

I had an Aunt Mary too. They both had tough lives, with numerous sticky patches and tough nuts to crack; but they were both as full of life and joy and determination as I might ever hope to be.

The last time Ian’s aunt was in our home in England was one month after we were married and just after her husband had died. She was lost, grief-stricken, and fragile. So I asked her to teach me about baking.

As she rolled the dough out on the countertop, in her inimitable way, Mary described her first baking experience. She was 20 years old, newly married, and just arrived in the rural English farming community where her Bill was a tenant farmer. She was visiting one of the local ladies one day, and ignorantly asked where she was supposed to buy bread.

“BUY BREAD?!” came the rough response. And the woman pulled out 20 lb. sacks of flour, threw heaps onto the butcher-block and put Mary to work. Even that day in our kitchen, she didn’t use thermometers to tell the temperature; she put her hand in the oven and felt it.

Mary and Bill spent 60 years together, farming their living out of the Earth. I met Bill once, and he was a force to be reckoned with. Ian describes him best when he tells how Bill had all his teeth pulled in one sitting without anesthetic. Mary was his helpmeet.

They never had children, so their niece and nephew were especially important to them. As a woman without children of my own, I can imagine Mary wondering if she was going to leave anything in the world as a legacy. She did.

I’m sharing here a bit of video with you from that day, so that you can meet Mary for yourself. She taught me to make scones, and this is an extract from her lesson. Honestly, if she had lived longer, I would have figured out how to get her her own TV show. You’ll see what I mean.

What does all this have to do with you then?

Every one of us in life has a variety of ingredients in our cupboard:  talents, sensitivities, experiences, insecurities, the stuff we make our lives of. Knowing what to do with them makes the difference between glue on the counter and a lovely harvest of scones. It is the people we know along the way who teach us what to do, sometimes through their wisdom, sometimes by making us find ours.

Take your place. Share yourself. Bake the bread of life.

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Day 12. Harvest. Station 12 is the final station in the Wheel of Creativity and the conclusion of your creative journey.

I am writing this post on Christmas Day. Around the world, people of all cultures celebrate the birth of a man called Jesus, born to lowly parents in the Middle East some 2,000 years ago. Whether you worship Jesus as the Son of God, honor him as a great prophet, or question his existence, the message of his birth offers us all a powerful promise.

This morning I was thinking of Jesus, not the God but the baby. Conceived out-of-wedlock to a young Jewish girl, nourished at her tender breast as any other child, Jesus was completely dependent at his birth. Jesus’ role in the world might never have reached beyond his village, had he (and others) not recognized the divinity within him.

Despite what has been written (authorized and unauthorized) about him, we cannot know what Jesus thought and felt in the quiet moments. We know him by his actions. What he did with his short life of 33 years changed the course of human history.

The Christmas promise I see today is that we are all here for a purpose! Our reach in the world can be small or great, depending on who we say we are. Certainly our touch has never been more needed.

In Station 12, your creative journey reaches its conclusion. You will make many creative journeys in your lifetime. There are many even in one day. Your relationships, your health, your work in the world, your influence, your pleasure are all your creations. You can make them deliberately or by default. The choice is yours.

Harvest is where you finally reap the fruit of your labor. Here, the Hunger that drew you into the Wheel is finally fulfilled. Not only have you created something that nourishes you, but it can also nourish your world. You have come full circle, and now it’s time to return home.

Your gift to the world is ready to harvest. Don’t neglect it! If an agricultural crop is not harvested, it rots. The creative harvest is no different. In order to complete the creative cycle, you have to make the cut, sever ties, and let the new thing go free.

Sometimes it’s hard to detach, knowing that others must interpret (and misinterpret) your creation in order to make it meaningful. But the task of Station 12 is release. And in the end, you come to see how your original longing has given purpose to your life. It is a very satisfying completion to your journey.

Tips to get the most from Station 12:

• Acknowledge the link between your Hunger and your Harvest.
• Feed yourself first and share the harvest.
• Recognize that another creative cycle is already in motion, but take time to celebrate your achievement.

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Station 11 is Pruning. It follows Nurturing in the Cultivation quarter. While Station 10 was the mothering energy of the Wheel – tender and protective – Station 11 is the fathering energy. Once the new thing has matured enough to be ready, here it is trained to maximize its gifts.

While I was first developing the concept for this station, I was living in the South of France. One sunny day, I went to a café on the village square for an espresso. I was contemplating these two concepts when I overhead a loud American man speaking from across the square. I was a bit embarrassed until, to my amazement, I heard his story:

“When I was a boy I raised homing pigeons. The mother and father would take turns in the nest until the eggs hatched. Then the mother would take over as the babies learned to fly. Every day they’d go out and come back and she was waiting for them… until one day, when the baby bird arrived, it was the father instead…” [he threw his hand in front of his body violently]… “saying, ‘That’s it now. Go out and make a family for yourself and live your life.” I had the comparison I was looking for.

The task of Station 11 is discipline, and its reward is mastery. As the Essence of the new thing is realized in Form, everything that is not essential must be cut away. Whether it is the chisel for the stone sculptor, the secateurs for the gardener, or the editor for the author, there is much work to be done here. And it is tiring.

In an interview I did with author and dancer Toni Bentley on her creative process, Ms. Bentley read from her first book, Winter Season, about her experience as a dancer with George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet. She described her work with Balanchine as “the end of a dream and the beginning of reality.”

My own experience has been a maturing process in itself. Aside from my work, the place where I experience my creative process most directly is in my music, especially in singing. The quality of the sound I am able to produce is completely different now than it was even five years ago. The change has only come with consistent training.

Tips to get the most from Station 11:

• Give it time. Don’t try to rush the process of perfection.
• Create a routine and do what you love first. It is the pinnacle of your life.
• Get support. Have a community you can trust to give you honest feedback.
• Become accountable. Find someone you trust to push you and keep you in check.

Artist or athlete, entrepreneur or student, discipline is a friend to all those who succeed. A lot of time is spent here in order to achieve mastery; then the result seems natural and effortless. There are no shortcuts here for sustainable reliable performance. When the technique is there and the body developed, it is the letting go that produces the most beautiful sound. And that takes us to Station 12.

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