Tag: even better

Still practising at 90

Posted on by philipdodson

There was a quote I read today where the legendary cellist Pablo Casals was asked why he continued to practice at age 90. He replied, “because I think I’m making progress”.

Our lives are not a series of one-off things that we do for a little bit and then stop. It is a journey and an adventure, where we continue in the moment to take steps and there does not have to be a final destination. We are obsessed with a start and an end. An art is, whatever your thing is, is for life.

We can always learn and get even better, of course, it is not about perfection, it is about continuing the exploration of our ‘art’, whatever that is. It could be making cakes, writing a book, painting, building a house, teaching, training or playing the cello. It is all an art and each one of us has a unique gift…a gift that we can give away to the world if we choose to.

We are all artists and the joy is in the continual practice and exploration of our unique gift…sharing our light for others takes practice, even at 90.

Do bad work

Posted on by philipdodson

Do bad work, it is the only way we get to good work.

If we are too frightened to do anything as we fear it will not be perfect, then we will never get to doing work that matters, we will never learn and improve, and we will never do even better.

We will hide behind perfection and fear, we will not show up and we will make excuses as to why we can not do.

Doing is a thing of this moment and it requires us to step away from thought, from the mind and its sabotaging fears. We have to be vulnerable enough to try and trying means we will not be sure of the outcome, so we just have to do and that will mean some bad work and that’s OK. When we do things that fail or are not right then we learn and we do even better next time.

If we keep doing the bad, then the good comes, if we never do the bad, we never get to the good. Being prepared to do without concern, means we will get better and better. We will overcome the fear of doing and that is the breakthrough, that is the key to unlocking our true potential to create our very best work.

Keep doing the bad work and being brave enough to share it. Sooner rather than later, we get to even better work. The more we keep going the even better the work gets. It removes the block, it takes away the fear and builds a habit of being vulnerable enough to share the best we can do right now. As we ship more and more of what we can do we learn and improve.

Or we can stay stuck with fear, too frightened to do and then we’ll never learn, we’ll just hide behind perfectionism and put our shields up to prevent any exposure to risk. We will not reach our true potential because we didn’t show, we didn’t take the plunge, we stayed safe and avoided uncertainty.

Bad is good.