Fairy Tales

On my desk calendar, I pulled off June 30th to reveal July 1st. The calendar read: "We make our own fairy tales."

I said, yes we do. And I thought about my writing projects over the years — my screenplays, my novels. These were my fairy tales. What makes them mine is that I wrote them.

Internally, I don't always believe that. I tell myself the sales chart determines my fairy tales. But the truth is, it doesn't. Metrics don't assign value to your individual talent.

Yes, it would be nice to have millions of streams of my music, or to sell millions of copies of my books, or to have millions of readers of my blog. I don't have that. But those are just metrics.

The choice before me — before all of us — is this: I can be sad, wish for more followers, more money, realize it hasn't come, and stop creating. Or I can keep showing up each day and keep creating. Metrics or no metrics, I choose to keep showing up, and to keep making my own fairy tales.

What would you keep creating even if the metrics never improved — and what does that tell you about why you started in the first place?