Here, for your motivational perusal, is a story in which I channel my finest LinkedIn impression to tell you what my 10 year old’s meltdown taught me about B2B sales writing.
For the last couple of weeks, my youngest has been practicing drawing one of his favourite manga characters. Somewhere along the way, he suddenly tipped from the pure exhilaration of creation to an aggressive ambition to be, in the parlance of the youth, GOATed.
But! Being the greatest of all time is not a straightforward task. He couldn’t get his drawing right. He’d been trying for hours, days, but one particular line eluded him and all of a sudden it was too much. He lost all semblance of patience. He couldn’t stay regulated. He hurled his notepad across the room, shouted in frustration and eventually broke down in tears.
I told him that it really sucks when you can’t do it the way you want but that you just have to keep trying. This, of course, elicited more rage. Because as we all know, when you are convinced that you are the worst at your chosen craft, there’s no being told otherwise.
Sure, I could talk about The Taste Gap, or give him my now well worn pep talk on imposter syndrome, or utilise the whole 15ish years of Writers’ HQ experience helping all you guys keep creating. But sometimes there’s just nothing you can say.
Plus, I’m a massive hypocrite. The rage he experienced was all too familiar. I have had some spectacular tantrums and despondent flails over not being able to make stuff the way I want to make it. I have a sneaky suspicion you can relate, too.
Developmental psychologist Ellen Winner talks about the ‘rage to master’. A phenomenon she observed in gifted children – a single minded, obsessive dedication to developing their skill and knowledge of their particular interest. It seems to me that the rage to master isn’t just limited to gifted children. It’s actually not a special thing that only some people have at all. It comes pre-installed at birth for all of us – it’s the thing that keeps us getting back up, even when we smack our faces on the floor, until we master the whole walking thing. It’s the thing that keeps us mama-mama-mama-ing all the way until we’ve mastered how to eloquently make the case for why our parents should definitely let us stay out all night on a school night.
Once we’ve mastered these basic developmental milestones, that urge gets redirected somewhere else. In special interests or vocations or what writers call writing a novel – the somewhat delusional obsession, sometimes over a period of years, that drives us to create entirely made up people and worlds because… errr… just because.
Here’s the other thing that comes pre-installed with all womb-fresh humans: art.
The first thing we do is create. Before we can read, before we can write, when we can barely even speak, we pick up a crayon and scribble. We smack a rock against another rock to make marks. We pile blocks together to create new, different piles of blocks.
At first, the simple joy of discovery and exploration and creation is what drives us. And then we begin to turn outwards, understanding that we exist in a grander context, that the fact of our being is dependent on more connections and coincidences and consciousnesses than we can ever understand, that art explains something to us that words alone can’t. And so we are driven to create more things, better things, things that communicate and feel and share in a way we haven’t understood before. In a way that allows us to see and be seen.
So you’re 10 years old or 30 years old or 50 years old and you’re busy trying to see and be seen. You’re doing big, important human things. Things you’re driven to by some ancient urge deep inside you. You hit a block and get frustrated. You think you must be terrible at all this because otherwise why would you struggle? And then you think that you will never see or be seen, that you are somehow failing on a fundamental human level, and this is a huge threat to your entire being, so you feel angry. And then, maybe, it’s too much, so you torpedo it all. You give up.
Woops.
Listen. Look. You are getting frustrated because you love it, not because you are bad at it. These are two very different things.
In this story, my 10 year old eventually ate some food, stared at a screen, ran around in the sunshine, played with some friends, read a book, pottered around a bit, then picked up his drawing and carried on. He’ll be the GOAT yet.
Don’t sabotage yourself because you misunderstand your own frustration.
Take a break. Have a snack and a nap. Come back to it fresh.
It really sucks when you can’t do it the way you want. But you just have to keep trying.