Be Who You Are Or You'll Never Be Anybody
Your unique imperfections aren't a liability. They're your salvation.
“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in”.
—Leonard Cohen
In advertising, we call it the authentic truth. That nugget of no-bullshit honesty that lies at the beating heart of a brand. We talk about it. We will stop at nothing to dig it out, hold it up to the light and hang every creative bone in our body on that one precious crumb of an idea.
But here’s the thing. How many of us are ready to do the same with our own truth. Who we are. Why we see the world the way we do. Where we come from. Why we vote the way we do. Why we didn’t slug that asshole in 6th grade when he called us Porky Pig on account of our stutter.
Here’s Mark Fenske from last Thursday.
“This is me. A Michigan-football-watching, deep-fried-turkey-eating, flannel-shirt-is-a-coat man of the prairie. A barn-sized door-filler from the offensive tackle-producing breadbasket of the country. The kind of guy who wants another turkey on the BBQ while the first one is in the deep fryer. Just in case. When I sit down to write, beer and sausage is what flows in my head. If I try not to be who I am, if I try to be someone cooler or slimmer or better dressed, am I going to be able to feed the pen that sits at the end of my hand waiting for ideas? There’ll be nothing. Nothing human or new anyway. There’ll just be that nasty-faced bugaboo that doesn’t like me like I am, staring back at me with an empty expression that says, ‘Go find something to say from somewhere else, buddy, ’cause what you got in here we don’t like.’”
Me, I wasn’t the kind of kid who wanted another turkey on the barbecue. I was the kid who stuttered so bad, he sometimes seemed to be having a grand mal seizure when he was up in front of the class desperately struggling to get his oral report on Charlemagne over and done with. I was that kid. Which would have been bad enough if I’d outgrown it by the time I got to college. But no. It stuck with me like a shitty penny. Eventually, it did leave me for some other poor bastard. I was grateful. But it left its scars. Scars that I now realize had a big hand in shaping my life as a creative.
What I went through in those years was soul crushing. I was an island in the river. My broken voice was my Alcatraz. A silent prison from which I so desperately wanted — needed— to escape. It was a meat grinder, tearing apart my confidence day after miserable day. I was a tragically imperfect creature and you couldn’t convince me otherwise. Little did I know that my genes were changing. My brain was gathering itself for what was to come.
"Imperfection is the fertile ground where creativity thrives”. This is Veronique Vienne, author of The Art Of Imperfection. “When we embrace imperfection, we give ourselves permission to explore new avenues and take risks. It's in our imperfections that we find our true voice, unencumbered by the weight of perfectionism. Let us celebrate the imperfect, for it is the wellspring of creativity that enriches our lives and inspires our souls."
Creativity flourishes in the freedom of imperfection, where mistakes are seen as opportunities and experimentation leads to discovery. Please. Let’s stop turning a blind eye to all the stuff that makes us different. Let’s accept who and what we are, warts and all. Warts aren’t bad. Warts are freedom.