Many creators have this experience. And for a long time I thought it was evoked by the creative moment, that it was the luck of the muse, that it was from the act of making music together, the interaction, the way a great musician can blow the minds of the other musicians, who then reciprocate by exploding into new and greater heights.

Now, after all these years, I’ve come to a different conclusion than the one I had as a musician. The spirit of the creative process can come at any time, all the time, in fact. It does not have to be evoked, nor does it have to feel like magic. Rather, it is sensed as doing something real, something authentic, something fantastic yet ordinary at once.

Because there is such a dramatic power in the act of spontaneous improvisation, it was easy for me to think that playing music induced the spirit, since you need to be focused at every moment to play. That alone generates electricity. And then, when the musicians are playing something you’ve never heard before, could never even imagine before they played it, well, it can have that energy that is not unlike being around the birth of a child. Something new has entered the world.

But spirit can take many forms and have a wide range of expressions. It can be there in the quiet moments when you are working out just the right words for a blog. It can be there when you are working your tail off to develop a business idea or reach a market. It can be there when you’re not looking but while your mind is creatively inventing a new process to accomplish an outcome you are working to create. And, as I’ve come to learn, it does not spook easily.

And you might think, how do I know if the spirit is there if it can be expressed in so many ways? By contrast. When it is not there, you feel like you’re going through the motions, but without involvement, without connection, without care. Perhaps another way to say this is without love.

In the creative process, love is generative in that we can love the creation before it exists. As I’ve said in the past, the filmmaker loves the film before it exists, the architect loves the building before it is built, the chef loves the dish before it is made.

This does not mean you always love the process. Much of the time, discipline involves doing things we might not like doing. Some people think that discipline is forcing yourself into doing these things. Willpower, manipulation, and intimidating yourself into ‘good behavior’ never work for very long. They are not sustainable. You can’t build an orientation of true discipline that way. Yet, the advice many give us is to do just that.

Generative love evokes the spirit of the creative process, the human spirit at its best, and maybe even more than that. Sometimes it’s hard to describe. One thing that’ll kill it is when you forget or lose touch with your desire to see the creation exist.

You can’t invest your life spirit in a compromise. And it is not a compromise to make the secondary choices you may have to make to support your creative process, even when you hate taking the necessary action steps. It is not a compromise to do the hard work, learn what you need to learn, develop the skills you may need but don’t have yet. It may not always be fun, but the spirit will still be there throughout the process. Easy or difficult, fun or a pain, throughout the good, the bad, and the ugly, that experience of connection, involvement, of being true to yourself and true to your creation will permeate everything you are doing.

What is going on? It is you, being a creator, which, by that fact alone, evokes the type of spirit I’m talking about no matter what the circumstances you are in.

In the 19th century, artists commonly talked about “tricking the muse,” which was their way of trying to explain why sometimes they would be better than other times. In the 20th century, with people like Constantin Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg, the creative process changed from something you had to trick to something that was consistent and reliable, something that would never fail you. When you are creating, the spirit will be there in abundance.

Before I get into that, there are subtexts to the terms nationalists and globalists. Too often, the term “globalist” has been code for “Jewish globalists,” a myth that Jews have a plot to run the world through financial manipulations. This fraudulent myth was invented in Russia in 1903 designed to inflame anti-Semitic prejudice. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was a hoax document that was reported to be the minutes of a late 19th century meeting where Jewish leaders conspired to subvert the morals of Gentiles by controlling the press and world economics.

The Nazis used the “Protocols” as propaganda against Jews. And neo-Nazis have adopted it as one of the reasons they are anti-Semitic. The tragedy in Pittsburg last week was the manifestation of this myth in which a white supremacist gunned down 11 innocent people, most of them elderly, to stop, he said, Jewish support of immigrants, who, in his sick mind, where coming to slaughter “his people.” It is hard for me to write about this because it so hurts my heart.

Of course the term nationalism is a loaded word. If we connect other words to the term, like “white” or “social” we get some of the most egregious evil in human history.

There is nothing wrong with appreciating the unique qualities of a nation. There is nothing wrong with trying to support the health and well-being of a nation. But that is not nationalism. According to the dictionary, nationalism is “an extreme form marked by feelings of superiority over other countries.”

Beyond the historic context of the terms, let’s look at the logic. What so called “globalists” actually think is that, in modern times, the world is inextricably connected together in such a way that it is to the benefit of every country to understand the system dynamics of that fact.

If China pollutes the atmosphere, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and other neighbors breathe the air. If, collectively, all the countries of the world pollute the atmosphere, every country will be subject to the negative consequences. We live in a world together on a single planet. We ignore that fact to our own national peril.

But there is another reason to think globally, and that is what I think of as a collective creative process. Before World War Two, nationalism and isolationism made the war more possible. After the war, various countries, through the leadership of Harry Truman and George Marshall, began to work together on their collective interest, which were aligned with their national interests.

This was not something that was designed to rid countries of their unique qualities or national identity, but for enlightened self-interest. Pure self-interest will drive people to do what is in their local and narrow best interest, but often detrimental to their overall best interest.

Enlightened self-interest leads us to think about what is in our overall best interest. We pay taxes so our snow gets removed from our streets, the rubbish gets collected, and the country is protected from enemies and health threats. We’d rather not pay taxes. But if we had to pay for removing our own snow, taking care of our own trash, and protecting our safety from potential enemies, we’d have a lot of trouble pulling it all off.

But beyond protection, enlightened self-interest generates the possibility of joining together with others to create a better world for everyone. In the best expression of democracy, people become a community of creators.

The fact is we live in a world in which there are many countries. We might try to ignore that fact, or understand the great possibilities it represents in how we can work together for our collective benefit. Business is enhanced, culture expands, and civilization advances.

How do we set the long-term direction? Well imagine it’s like having a GPS for the creative process. The first thing you set is your destination. Where do you want to be in five years, ten years, 20 years?

For many people there is what we could call a life-style/ career conflict. To pursue their career ambitions they need to live in an area they don’t particularly like, and if it weren’t for their careers, they wouldn’t live there. For others, life style is more important than career, so their career possibilities are limited by where they live.

There is no right answer except that your decision should reflect your longer-term goals and aspirations.

Remember that part of your job as a creator is to make the strategic secondary choices that support your primary choices. And only you can determine what you will make primary. But once you have made a primary choice, most other supportive choices are pretty self-evident.

Once you set your long-term goals, it is important to review your shorter-term goals and see where they stand. There will only be one of three possibilities: They will support them, the will be neutral, or they will contradict your long-term goals.

Of course the best of all possibilities is that they support your longer-term goals. And there may be some short-term goals that you haven’t thought of yet; goals that would help the longer term cause. Often there might be learning goals, skills goals, or experience goals that would be helpful in supporting longer-range aspirations.

And too often, we don’t think in those terms. But back to our creative GPS, once you set in your destination, you are given a few different paths, avoid toll roads, fastest way, most highways, and so on. What is the best way to achieve your long-term goals? Often the bigger and more important things in life involve some form of strategic planning, so you don’t happen to wonder into them, but you systematically take all the needed steps to first build the foundation, and then the later steps that give you the support you need.

We are talking about goals that often take years to accomplish. And you’re not just waiting around. You are building toward them over years of smaller goals that give you what you need, put you in the right and best position, and teach you what you need to know once you are there.
And how many of these long-term goals might you have? Well there is the inner goal, how you experience life, and that one can be achieved fairly quickly and then be in place during the entire trip. And the outer goals are a series of little success stories as you build a pattern of success. That doesn’t mean that everything you will try will work. But it does mean that you will work out how to learn and develop by every new creative process in which you engage.

And you will have aspects of longer-term goals that will be aligned: health, lifestyle, career, financial, creative, relationships, involvement with life and so on. But you’ve got to set the creative GPS with a clear destination. You won’t know the details, but you can get a sense of the overview and the overall destination. That’s all you need, as long as that is clear.

With that type of clarity, conflicts of longer-term goals hardly ever appear. And if they do, they can be sorted out by determining hierarchy. What is more important, and what is less important. Once you have made that choice everything else just falls into place.

Not too many billion-dollar companies have a moral compass. The usual corporate rule of thumb is to avoid controversy at all costs. But Nike is a company that stands for something. First and foremost, it stands for sports. I’ve worked with Nike, and, from an inside vantage point, they see sports as a civilizing force. Now they have created a new campaign that celebrates Colin Kaepernick’s stand against police violence on unarmed innocent young black men.

About Colin Kaepernick, his protest has been unfairly redefined as a protest against the flag, against the military, against mom and apple pie. It is easy to redefine something. You just lie about what someone says and what that person means. In fact, the real corruption of politics today is that lying has become standard operating practice. Objective reality is under attack. That means the decisions that many people make are not based on facts but impressions, mostly impressions designed to manipulate issues of identity. You can fool some of the people all of the time.

Of course, the big lie is nothing new. It takes a big lie to wipe out truth. Little lies don’t do the job. It has to be so outrageous and bizarre that the subconscious mind says, “It must be true. No one would believe this crazy thing that is so easily checked and disproved. So there’s got to be something too it.”

What is THE truth about Colin Kaepernick? First he sat on the bench while the national anthem was played. He did this for one reason, and one reason only. As has been said over and over, to call attention to the violent pattern of unarmed young black men being shot to death by police. He is using his public position to highlight this particular type of injustice. He found out that the act of sitting on the bench did have an implied subtext of disrespect for the flag. Once he found that out, he sought out Army Special Forces veteran Nate Boyer, who told him that kneeling on one knee, within the military, is seen as a sign of respect for a fallen comrade.

That’s it, no matter how the President tries to redefine it. Why would anyone try to redefine this very clear symbol of protest against injustice? To polarize people. To try to create a false controversy. To try to create an “us against them” mentality. Who is “us” and who is “them?” Comes down to race. Period.
Kaepernick is against the pattern of innocent black kids being killed by police, who then seem to get away with it. Who is in favor of innocent kids being killed? Doesn’t Kaepernick have the authority to say why he is doing what he is doing? Who gets to say that he doesn’t? Who gets to say that YOU are not the total and final authority of what you say and do and why you are saying and doing it? NO ONE but you has that authority. This principle holds true in this case as well.

Here is what Kaepernick has said:
“I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. I have family, I have friends that have gone and fought for this country. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone.”

Of course, Kaepernick has paid a price for his kneel. He could have shut up and made a fortune. But, that would be a Faustian bargain, something some of our current politicians are happy to make.

Here is how Encyclopedia Britannica defines the term:

“Faustian bargain, a pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or the soul, for some worldly or material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches. The term refers to the legend of Faust (or Faustus, or Doctor Faustus), a character in German folklore and literature, who agrees to surrender his soul to an evil spirit (in some treatments, Mephistopheles, or Mephisto, a representative of Satan) after a certain period of time in exchange for otherwise unattainable knowledge and magical powers that give him access to all the world’s pleasures. A Faustian bargain is made with a power that the bargainer recognizes as evil or amoral. Faustian bargains are by their nature tragic or self-defeating for the person who makes them, because what is surrendered is ultimately far more valuable than what is obtained, whether or not the bargainer appreciates that fact.”

I applaud Colin Kaepernick. To me, he shows strength of character for a noble cause. His actions are a profile in courage. I think those who criticize him can legitimately do so ONLY when they tell the truth about what and why he has taken a knee. If you distort what he is about, anything else you say is not to be taken seriously. Why should it?

And then there is Nike. I want to thank the company for the leadership role they have taken on. They knew there would be backlash. They knew some customers would leave the brand. But that didn’t matter. In a similar way that the Disney Corporation said no to the threats of some right wing Christian groups who tried to conduct a boycott against Disney World because they had an annual gay pride day, Nike has taken a stand for what is right rather than what is convenient. We seldom see such clarity of values from corporations.

(Robert Fritz)

This is the most widely cited quote of mine. So let me say a few things about the thought.

Since the time we were young, we have been taught to limit our aspirations. The question, “What do you want?” is translated into, “Given your limitations, what do you want?”

When we ask people what they want, too often they are a lost. It isn’t that they don’t want things. It is that they have absolutely no idea how to think about the subject. On the one hand, they can only think in terms of what seems possible, reasonable, or available.

On the other hand, they are looking for something that will enrich their lives, enable them to become more involved, and fulfill the promise they intuitively understand and for which they long. Something they can’t seem to find by discovery or revelation or from goal setting courses or from the self-help world.

If you limit your choices, all that is left is a compromise, one that is incapable of inspiring the type of deeper involvement that most people crave. Another one of my quotes that seems to be everywhere in the world of the Internet these days can be considered the other part of the first one: You can’t invest your life spirit in a compromise.

Here are a few tips about how to become clear:

1. Separate what you want from what you think is possible

In fact, you don’t know what is possible, only what seem probable. If you begin to censor yourself before you even have a proper discussion with yourself, you are going to end up limiting yourself to only those things that seem doable. You are light-years away from thinking in terms of what you truly want. From this limited menu, there may not be much you actually want to order. No wonder it would be hard to know what you want when this were the case. Whatever you are left with is pretty unappetizing. Do NOT consider if what you want is possible when thinking about it. We divide and think: first a truthful understanding of what we truly want to create in our lives; then considerations about the strategy that might enable us to create it.

2. Rethink everything

We have all made certain promises to ourselves when we were young. We may have changed our minds. We are not stuck with some idea we had years ago. It is best to enter into a conversation with yourself with a clean slate, turning over a new leaf, a fresh start.

3. Start small

Most people are not in the habit of thinking about what they want. They react or respond to the circumstances they find themselves in, and so they can only think situationally. The best way to learn anything is to start small, build muscles and stamina, and create a body of experience. Make sure that these small things are really things you want. Get into the habit of checking with yourself about that.

4. Don’t think in terms of payoffs.

Too often, people are not able to think about what they really want because they expect the result to do things like make them happy, give them satisfaction, enlightenment, and a host of other payoffs. This burdens your ability to think in terms of what you want because you are speculating about the chances of the payoff being significant. Once you think in terms of the outcomes you want and not the payoff, you are free to get involved on the good days and the bad days. Remember, your emotional experiences are like the weather: sometimes it rains and sometimes it’s sunny. Don’t think in terms of consistent emotions. Think in terms of only one question: what do I really want?

So, if you limit yourself to what seems possible or reasonable, all that is left is compromise, and you can’t invest your life-spirit into a compromise. This is more than a good quote. It is a principle that, once taken on, can enable you to organize your life around your highest aspirations and deepest values.

Our own spring can happen at any time of the calendar year. But it is always following by a period of withdrawal. Winter leads into spring. What is going on during the moments in our life in which we retreat? We often think of those periods as something to be avoided, something bad, something to overcome.

But without these periods, nothing new can grow. Growth is more than renewal. It is a type of transcendence in which something is given a new chance to begin over, to re-think one’s life, to find new impetus, to find new interests, to, no matter what the past has been, to begin with a clean sheet of paper, a new canvas, a new chance.

But renewal is more than the chance to begin again. It is the drive to make the most of the possibility. From where does this drive come? From our human instinct to create. It is the essence of our dynamic urge, to make something new, to explore unseen territory, to engage life to the fullest.

Regeneration is almost always propelled from its opposite. It is a type of death followed by a type of resurrection. And the sequence does not have to be juxtaposed chronologically. Winter may have been spread out over years, life had seem to drift to limitation or burden or malaise or encumbrances of various sorts. And then, maybe out of nowhere, spring emerges suddenly and a new chapter opens to you.

But, for this type of regeneration to lead somewhere, it must have an object of its desire, so to speak. Just the same way the expression goes “In spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” so in this type of spring, the object of thoughts is also love, but not the romantic kind, the creative kind. There is something new we want to create, something we haven’t created or done before, and because of this, the full cycle of regeneration takes its place in your life.

You don’t learn unless you are turning that learning into action. Those who look for new ideas, concepts, theories, and “information,” often have the notion that it is knowing something that changes things.

I challenge that notion. It is hardly ever the case in real life. For years, people knew of the dangers of smoking, but they continued to smoke, even after all of the dire warnings were put on the cigarette packs.
But a lot of people who are veterans of the self-help world have been told that insight, revelation, awareness and understanding are all you need to change your life patterns. If you thought that were the case, you would run around looking for more and more “information” while consistently missing the point of it all.

Think about this in terms of how we learn music. The information you may get at your piano lesson is only as good as it leads to practice. And your practice is only as good as it leads to your ability to play. No amount of insight about the theory of playing the piano will enable you to play if you don’t practice.

Very nice people with good values and high aspirations, who are hard working and industrious, often find that their best efforts do not lead to the final outcomes they want. Is it fate? Is it some deep-seated psychological conflict? Are some people simply luckier than others?

While it can seem like there is something in the stars, the real answer to understanding this phenomenon is much closer to home than most people think. It is right there in the structures in their lives. And this is the reason that understanding structural dynamics is critical if you want to create the life you want.

What is essential to know is this: the underlying structure of anything will determine its behavior.

Think about that for a moment. This insight explains so much. It explains why some people find themselves in oscillating patterns in which success is followed (predictably) by a reversal that takes them away from the outcomes they’ve worked so hard to achieve, and some people are able to create what they want and have that success become the platform for future success.

This is not how most people think. They think situationally. Structure is invisible to them, so they are left with the usual empty declarations: you need more willpower, you need to believe in yourself, you need to clean up your past, you need to surrender, you need to breath differently, you need a positive attitude, you need to love yourself, you need to eat brown rice, etc. When you understand how the structural dynamics works in people’s lives, you would find these bromides laughable. It is like saying you need to think positively about gravity so it will do what it does or not do what it does.

Structure is physics, it is nature, it is how everything works from music to aerodynamics to computers to cars to screenplays to… well, everything.

Structure typically produces two types of behavior: oscillating and advancement. That means your life will fall into one of these two camps. Everyone has examples of both. But the most important question is where do you spend most of your time? If it is an oscillation structure, your successes are not sustainable any more than jumping up in the air will lead to staying in the air.

Look, structure isn’t everything, but it is in everything, including your life. Years ago I made a film about the Fibonacci series, a mathematical proportion that is found throughout nature and art. The last two shots in the film are a spiraled nautilus shell dissolving into a spiraled galaxy, and the structure is identical in the small shell and the vast galaxy. We may not ever know the mysteries of the universe, but one thing we can know for sure, there is structure in the universe. Everywhere in the universe.

Like it or not, you live within a structure. And, if you are like most people, the structure you live in does you no good. Not to say that everything is bad. Just to say that your best efforts will be thwarted. This it is nothing personal anymore than not being able to float in contradiction to the laws of gravity is personal.

It is hard to do science without the math, and trying to create your life without a basic understanding of structure is also hard. All of the doisms of how you should behave not withstanding, any advice which is structurally unsound will not work no matter how good it looks on paper. You can’t fool Mother Structure. If you are in a rocking chair, your movement forward will be followed by movement backward.

There is nothing wrong with the rocking chair. It is simply the wrong structure if you happen to want to go somewhere.
What a waste of time, trying this or that in the wrong structure. Most of what is offered in self-help supports an oscillating structure, not an advancing one.

If you are in an oscillating structure, you can’t get very far. If you are in a rocking chair, you may be able to move ahead little by little, but you will not go where you want to go. It will feel like pushing boulders up hill. Hard to accomplish and impossible to sustain. Mother structure can work with you, but you have to work with her, not against her. Otherwise, expect that boulder to run right over you as it heads for the lowest ground. That’s the path of least resistance. That is where energy finds it easiest to go.

This is not a problem to solve. Why try to fix something that is not broken? There is nothing wrong with a rocking chair. It is simply the wrong structure unless you want to go back and forth. It is important to gain a fundamental understanding of how things work or don’t work so you can work with the forces in play in your life, not against them.

No matter what you say, what you think, how sincere and pure you are, if your life is in a rocking chair, and you want to move ahead, seeking to create your highest aspirations, organizing your life around those things that matter most to you, you will be unable to succeed in the end. You can’t get there from here. First you must change the underlying structure you are in. First you must go somewhere else. And that is the point.

So, while we teach the creative process, we also understand it is not the creative process alone that will lead to success. It is a combination of the creative process and the structural dynamics that can make such a profound difference in people’s lives as it has time and again.