Why We Have More Courage to Create in the Middle Years

Image: thomastolkien.wordpress.com

“This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. My God! How did I get here?” - David Byrne, “Once in a Lifetime”

“In the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in the dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.”
– Dante

To stand at the edge of your creative capacity when you’re 40-something or 50-something feels both awe-inspiring and terrifying. In a word, sublime.

At least that’s the description I hear and read among the people whom I interview, study, and work with.

The 40-something art critic who dares to publish the break-through book brewing for 15 years - although fellow art critics are ready for the attack.

The 40-something marketing exec who hazards putting himself “out there” to create a brand and books that lead a conversation about principled leadership.

The 40-something designer who risks shame and humiliation by shaping and telling the story she must tell in her first memoir - that became a bestseller.

The 50-something corporate consultant who stands up for his desire to learn how to become a novelist or the corporate consultant who makes choices to launch her own brand, write her first screenplay, and spread her insights on marketing.

This generation isn’t the first to take creative risks. But, for better and worse, an increasing number of people in the middle decades are stepping out of the amateur bubble and claiming their creative space. Why? Why are more people in their 40s, 50, and 60s in the early 21st century rising to their creative calling and producing valuable work?

The answer might have to do with the very factors that make taking the leap challenging to begin with.

Why Creativity Intimidates Creative People
Admitting your own creative genius - and I cautiously use that overused phrase - can be intimidating. I’m not talking about big-“C” creativity of a few outlier geniuses, but I’m also not talking about dabbling or hobbying. I refer specifically to creativity as the act of applying the imagination in novel, beneficial ways.

Creativity is a biological and spiritual impulse that arises out of our innate restlessness to make things new, better, beautiful, and true.

Some of us cannot not create in everything we do. It’s just what we’ve been doing and how we’ve approached everything in our lives for as long as we can remember.

But others of us have not. In the cases I’m referring to, these are people who accept at last they’re not dabbling or creating in a self-contained vacuum but within or on the fringes of a field with its own lineage of creators. Or they’re at last ready to innovate within their existing field and make their work, their organization, and their livelihood even better by applying their imagination.

When you acknowledge to yourself and others that you’re stepping into a new creative field or that you’re inventing your own field, that’s intimidating. You’ve just admitted you think you might have something to offer. You’ve admitted you might fail and look foolish - while others are watching.

You’ve also admitted you might have some things to learn - which means you might not know what you’re doing. You’re stepping into what I call the Apprenticeship Arena.

It’s hard enough to admit you don’t know what you’re doing when you’re an insecure, cocky 20-something. But it’s even harder to admit when, in your 40s or 50s, you’ve reached a level of proficiency, if not mastery, in one field. You’re recognized in that original field. People come to you for your expertise. And now - boom - in this other field you’re in terra incognito.

When you stop dabbling with your garage project and step into the Apprentice Arena in a whole new field when you’re 46 or 58, that’s when you stand on the Cliff of the Sublime.

And you’re taking these creative risks all while you’re likely contending with other existential shifts (relationship & career shifts), cultural shifts (economy shifts; the brave new digital world), and physiological shifts (“What’s going on with my body and brain??”).

Why, given how intimidating it is to admit your creative genius and how topsy-turvy other factors of your life and world might be, are you doing this? Now? And why are so many people of your generation doing so?

Doubt Catalyzes Us
That very intimidating feeling might be helpful. A healthy dosage of doubt can catalyze us in our middle years.

In his seminal studies of accomplished creative people in various fields, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi observes the motivating feeling state that keep creatives engaged - without guarantee of fame or fortune.

The motivating activities didn’t involve luxury vacations, drugs, or alcohol. Instead, they “often involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.” (Creativity, 110).

The unknown itself - what we might accomplish, who we might become on the creative quest, how our creative medicine might truly move other people, and, yes, how we might utterly flop on our faces - exhilarates us to keep learning and testing out.

It’s the middle-aged apprentice who does not feel some doubt whom I worry about. Why? How can an absolute certainty in your own subjective, creative realm of knowing actually hinder your creative quest?

In Mary Field Belenky’s seminal work in Women’s Ways of Knowing, for instance, she observes how many women in their middle years start to trust their “inner voice.” For the first time in their adult lives, they recognize they have an inner knowing. Prizing this subjective knowledge becomes so powerful that they become almost strident in their rejection of what they perceive as patriarchal, masculine conscious reasoning.

“A few of the women...were stubbornly committed to their view of things and unwilling to expose themselves to alternative conceptions. Although they might have described themselves as generous and caring, they could be, in fact, impatient and dismissive of other people’s interpretations.” (2)

(This phenomenon is not isolated to women, by the way. I suffered it myself when in my twenties, fresh out of grad school, and I had at last discovered I had a mind and inner authority worth listening to. It took me another 10 years to integrate that inner knowing with other ways of knowing.)

The impassioned creative with a sliver of doubt may be more likely to have the fire to excel and serve her patch of the planet than the self-delusional amateur who’s confident she’s a brilliant but misunderstood genius.

Take-away: Champion your doubt and let it catalyze you.

Disruptions Catalyze Us
When I talk with thought leaders and groups about the Tracking Wonder Quest, we talk about Disruption Moments. Disruption moments are when a turn of events or a major turn in thinking sends a character on an extraordinary quest to change. It’s not unlike what mythology scholar Joseph Campbell called Crossing the Threshold.

A tornado spins Dorothy out of Kansas and changes her attitudes toward home and belonging.

Killing a drunk guy who could not take “No” for an answer sends Thelma and Louise on a life-changing road trip that changes Thelma’s docile persona into a bold, gun-wielding woman who ultimately can stand up for what she believes in.

If disruption can catalyze us to create bold new projects in our middle years, then being in our 40s, 50s, and 60s in the early 21st century affords us plenty of opportunities to be hurled on a quest of creative change.

In 2007-08, a global tornado ripped through the black-and-white world of corporate loyalty. Tens of thousands of people were spun into whole new realities. As a consequence, numerous people have since mustered their creative wits and found their own innate intelligence, heart, and courage - something that might not have happened had they stayed in their cubicles.

Take-away: Make a hardship or seeming crash into an opportunity to fly.

The digital agora and technology explosion of the past two decades has both disrupted and empowered people in their middle years. The people I talk and work with are both fascinated and confounded by their digital opportunities - websites, online teaching & learning, information access, video conferencing, digital publishing & music-making & design-making, virtual teams, online branding and engagement - to take charge of their creative path, work, and careers.

They’re not interested in getting rich or famous. They’re interested in how this curious digital world can help them 1) enter a creative field, 2) learn, hone, and master their stuff, 3) and get their creative medicine out to their patch of the planet.

Take-away: See the opportunities available to you to both to hone the skills of your field and to captivate and elevate a new audience, your patch of the planet.

And what about that changing body and brain? This is the elephant in the creativity consultant’s room. Recent advances in psychology - and the consistent dissemination of this research - might be helping us reframe what it means to be a creative 40-something, 50-something, or 60-something.

As I’ve written elsewhere, “The youthful brain is faster but...not necessarily better.” Psychologist Sherry Willis has tracked the cognitive performance of over 6,000 healthy men and women. Whereas the twenty-something brain generally do process information more efficiently, they do not do so necessarily more effectively.

“When it comes to verbal memory, spatial orientation, inductive reasoning, and vocabulary,” as I wrote in this piece, “this group’s 45-year-old selves way outperform their 25-year-old selves. Peak performance in these areas occurs between 40 and 65, according to Willis in her book Life in the Middle.” The study is the Seattle Longitudinal Study.

Neuroscientist Fred Gage of the Saulk Institute plays racketball because he knows something. Getting his heart beating, his body sweating, and his brain focused on intensive, enjoyable activity is not only good for his middle-aged brain. It actually creates new brain cells.

When Gage concluded as much in 1999, he himself risked being ostracized from a field full of hard-lined materialist skeptics who had long-held biases toward any talk about human beings’ ability to create new brain cells after, say, 24 years old. But Gage’s conclusions and his correlations between aerobic exercise, neurogenesis, and increased creativity helped spawn a wave of research.

John Ratey of Harvard Medical School has followed up on and shaped much of this research into a compelling new story about who we are as middle-aged physical creatures in Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.

Take-away: Exercise the elephant. Whereas you might feel that your fleshy mobile home is falling apart, it is actually capable of being renovated in service of your summer or autumn season’s creative work.

Here You Are
You are in the middle of the digital age and a fluctuating economy, and possibly in the middle of your life, your creative business, or a project that matters.

When in the middle, it’s easy to get off-track and lost. But there’s no shame in getting lost and no shame in asking for directions.

Have heart. Be brave. Muster the courage to create.

We have a lot of work to do.