Today, we’re doing a special episode for Valentine’s Day. I want to take this as an opportunity to introduce you to my all-time favorite technique. I call it a technique because you can choose to pick it up or put it down whenever you like, but it’s really a lot more than that. When applied to its fullest, this is more about giving you a new way to look at life. A new default setting to apply when things get bad. In this episode, we’ll be talking some about external creativity, but we’ll spend a lot of time on personal creativity, which if you’ve followed our past episodes, deals with internal creativity. It’s about changing ourselves rather than the outside world.
This ideas is called Amor Fati. Amor Fati translates into the “Love of fate.” Whatever happens in life, wherever you find yourself right now or tomorrow, love it. Getting angry at the world is useless. It does nothing to change the world and it makes you miserable in the process. Loving your fate doesn’t change the world either, but its not supposed to. It’s suppose to change you. And if you practice it consistently, it will.
I love Amor Fati. Once a week, I’ll choose some behavior or strategy to practice throughout the entire week. Amor Fati is by far my favorite. When I spend an entire week trying to apply Amor Fati, I become both happier and more creative in the process… and not by a little. It’s a huge difference.
As a creative person, Amor Fati makes you a better problem solver. Creativity is one of the most energy-intensive activities for the human brain. To be creative, your brain needs to override the normal, patterned way of thinking. Trying to connect new ideas together is not easy.
Anger and fear are also energy intensive activities for the brain. Since emotions like anger and fear are tied to survival, since they’re a part of our DNA, the brain is very willing to spend energy on them. This means your brain is willing to go broke by holding onto these emotions. To your brain, letting go of fear prematurely could mean physical death. This is a survival mechanism that is encoded into the brain. Fear is encoded into the brain because people who experience fear of the unknown are less likely to do something that’ll get them killed. The caveman that walked too far away from his tribe became vulnerable to being eaten by wild animals. Fear and anxiety helped early humans survive. Like it or not, modern humans still have to put up with these evolutionary traits left over from early humanity.
Let’s bring it back to creativity. Because anger and fear have such high priority in the brain, it becomes very difficult to divert attention away from the source of your fear. Intense anger is like a black hole in the brain, constantly sucking your attention towards it. Needless to say, it’s difficult to be creative if you can’t keep your attention on the task in front of you. Anger pulls attention away, but it pulls it in directions that are unproductive for creativity and stressful for you. Put this together and you see how costly holding onto emotions like anger and fear really is.
Amor Fati cuts through this problem. Loving your fate short-circuits the process of becoming angry or fearful. You can’t hold both contradictory emotions in your body at the same time. You can either love what’s happening or be afraid of it, but you cannot be both at the same time. The brain simply isn’t set up that way.
Practicing Amor Fati throughout a week makes it more likely that you will respond to misfortune with positive, productive emotions instead of getting sucked into imagining the worst. You won’t win every time, but over the course of the week, your default response will change.
When problems arise, as they certainly will, we respond with Amor Fati, we respond by loving it. Just like every problem is an opportunity for creative people to innovate, every personal problem is an opportunity for you to grow.
For me, waiting for elevators is a great way to practice. Once you hit the elevator button, everything else is out of your control. There’s literally nothing you can do to make it go any faster. Your brain has evolved to jump directly to what you lose by waiting. You think “I’m going to be late” or “I’m not where I want to be.” This is a minor form of fear. You’re still focused on what you’re losing.
Will you choose to hold onto anger or impatience? Would the world notice or care if you do? Of course not. Change your focus using Amor Fati. It’s true that you’re losing time, but it’s equally true that life is forcing you to slow down a bit, and perhaps that’s what you really need. The longer you have to wait, the more time you have to love this moment. You wouldn’t have chosen to wait for the elevator, but since you have to do it anyway, you might as well feel good.
Growing up as an improvisational comedian, the phrase “Yes, and…” is very important to me. “Yes, and…” is a mantra for improvisational comedians. It’s the number one rule for improv comedy. When you do improvisational comedy, you’re essentially writing a short play in front of the audience. There’s no script. There’s only acting and reacting as a scene evolves. Whatever happens on stage, say “Yes” to it. Accept it. Then follow it up with “and…” to build off of it. This one rule makes improvisational comedy work. Without it, everything crumbles to the ground.
The next time you’re confronted with a problem, respond with “Yes, and…” Respond with Amor Fati. The rude person honking in traffic is there to teach you not to worry about other people’s opinions. The long line at the store is there to teach you to slow down.
Whatever happens this weekend, love it. If it’s a problem that requires action then you can still take that action, but do it from a position of strength. Don’t let the emotional brain hijack your thinking. Don’t act out of fear. Love where you are. Take action based on where you want to go, not what you want to avoid. Loving your fate doesn’t mean only loving your creativity. It means loving the moments between them as well. If you do that, you’ll be more energized when you return. I won’t allow your brain to spend all your mental energy worrying about what has happened or what might happened. The mental energy will powerfully shape how you create later on. As creative people, we love solving problems. Amor Fati offers you a path to solve problems without losing yourself in the process.
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