Are You A Creator Or A Repeater?

Are you a creator or a repeater? Are you one of those amazing people who grasp ideas quickly? Who we can rely on for detailed knowledge and understanding? Whose communication skills are excellent? We need you. There are so many people who need to hear what you know repeated often and with passion. Many of us learn from you that way.

The world needs subject matter experts: repeaters.

I have a colleague who’s an expert repeater and certification collector, and whose clients enjoy a smorgasbord of treatment options. It’s impressive. My friend’s clients are well served. But I wonder, at the core, what are my colleague’s foundational convictions? Isn’t a certification just some kind of license to repeat what you’ve learned at some level of quality?

We need repeaters like this, especially in the medical, legal, research, transportation, and other professions. People on that path take good care of the rest of us. But the rote repetition of what’s known, as it turns out, doesn’t fare well in a worldwide crisis.

A crisis that shakes the core of our beliefs puts every aspect of our meaning under assault.

A crisis of our belief systems and meaning

All of us assemble our belief systems, convictions — and sometimes our meaning — through acquisition. Beliefs we inherit came to us in this way. By that, I mean that most of us would consider it a great privilege to hang out with or sit at the feet of our most revered teacher given the chance. We revere the original wisdom-bringers who predeceased us. Thanks to them, we have come by their wisdom through a lineage of acquisition.

Therefore, it may be vital to discern the difference between thought leaders who repeat (at best) or steal (at worst) the wisdom which they didn’t acquire honestly, and truly inspired voices that resonate more deeply within us.?

For example, don’t we respond more sympathetically to leaders whose obvious adversity is connected to their belief system? We want to know what motivates a para-Olympic athlete and share some of that with them. Perhaps we are hardwired to give a higher authenticity score to those with obvious “success in the face of....”

But there’s trouble with this hard wiring. Thanks to our present worldwide existential threat, many of us are finding cracks in the foundations of our convictions. The repeaters are starting to all sound the same, and some of their threadbare traveling cloaks and crooked pointy hats look like costumes borrowed from a real wizard. The building blocks of their success were real, but without genuine mortar holding them together, what their acolytes have learned about success isn’t durable.

What do we do?

Ways we move out of crisis

Many of us take the easy way out. We dial down our need for wisdom that challenges us. There are plenty of YouTube influencers, and the temptation is strong to dip a toe in QAnon or become a Catfish voyeur. For creators, this rush to the bottom is a tragedy: what used to seem smart-ish and engaging now feels intellectually unapproachable, and the urge to dumb things down to retain audience share overrides inspiration in the name of survival.

Others will cling to the shaky, hoping that their favorite repeaters will, after all, still be right once the dust settles. Creators don’t fit in here, either.

Still others will cling to the traditional, long-lineage fundamental belief systems...even though the systems have evolved slowly away from their foundational ancient wisdom to fuel terrorist threats at worst or theocratic magical thinking at best.?

From exercise to diet to the intellectual to the artistic, from individual health to international cooperation, most of what we call civilization rests on the shifting foundation of ancient belief, morphing slowly as it’s believers themselves evolve over centuries. Creators offer novelty, sometimes swaying the repetition of civilization in one way or another.

Our foundation

Good work is being done — work that is necessary to the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health we need worldwide. Religions, best business practices, the martial arts, consciousness, Alcoholics Anonymous, Rotary, political belief systems and economic theories, science...it’s all good.?

Entrepreneurs, motivators, leaders: all standing on foundational wisdom whether their meaning is in creation, inspiration, or guidance. It works pretty well. Until times like these when it suddenly isn’t enough. When the old way of doing things suddenly feels repetitive and uninspiring.

At times like these, the search begins for a more authentic voice - the one that speaks in harmony with the heart and gut as well as the head. A voice that doesn’t need a funnel to be focused. A voice that doesn’t need search engine optimization to be found. The opposite voice of psychobabble, pseudoscience, paranoia, and/or conspiracy theory.

Voices for and of our age

We search for people somehow built for our age who, unlike tried and true repeaters, speak with voices that we recognize as genuine and authentic. In their voices, ancient wisdom can be heard more widely and understood more deeply:

• The Dali Lama, down to the present incarnation, has always been an authentic voice for love and compassion in every exchange, from intimacy between people to cooperation between nations.
• Thomas Paine, author of “Common Sense,” has many modern disciples as well as predecessors. Paine’s voice resonated with 18th-Century American colonists. Do you hear today's voices for common sense as spoken by Derek Sivers, Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, Pulo Coehlo, and Maya Angelou? Others?
• There is a movement within the Christian church to understand the teachings of Jesus as Jesus himself delivered them in the 1st Century. It’s a search for and discipleship of the authentic Jesus. One modern voice calling us to understand Christ in this way is pastor and teacher Dave Brisbin.
• Ryan Holiday has introduced many of us - and reacquainted many more - with the Stoic teachings of Epictetus, which also resonate in the voice of Tim Ferriss.
• Poet David Whyte has become, perhaps not coincidentally, the leader of a worldwide audience eager for practices of full presence and authentic mindfulness. It’s a cross-discipline and cross-cultural audience, and it exists within many foundational belief systems, from the entirely atheistic to the spiritually contemplative. Whyte’s poetry is a traveling cloak that blends the sacredness of nature and the paradoxical wisdom of the Tao.

Why all the interest now?

The bottom line

The point is to know, for ourselves, the particular blend of repeater and creator that makes us go. To know when to dial back our need to repeat, and dial up our need to create. To find ourselves on that spectrum and take ownership of how we move around within it. To step back from the security of our beliefs and our work and allow a childlike curiosity to reanimate our play, or to put aside childish things and see ourselves clearly in the mirror for the very first time.

The truly great, inspirational, genuine, deeply-resonant voices often encourage us to explore our own interior awareness more fully. They invite us to risk our core beliefs. They speak as survivors of a process that will repeat over and over for any of us who dare to look behind the curtain. Often, they share personal experiences of the terror behind that curtain combined with the peace and strength that resulted from their shadow journey. They help acolytes find and sing in their own individual authentic voices — to create the next generation of qualified repeaters or inspire a new lineage of creators.

The invitation

Where are you on the scale between repeater and creator? Where do you want to be? Are you flexible enough to sway between the two, or are you fighting full immersion in one or the other? Are your beliefs and teachers supportive of you? What is the biggest invitation you have right now? How will you RSVP on the gold-embossed reply card? Will you tick the box that says “regrets” or accept the offer to rediscover yourself? Bring a guest?

Either way, you’re in good company. And that’s the point, isn’t it? We don’t have to be all in together — all red or all blue, all believers or all pagans, all capitalists or all socialists — to progress together. It’s enough for me to know that you are thinking about it. If we travel together for a time, that’s good, too.

In the exit tunnel from one of my favorite Disneyland adventure rides is an old sponsor's slogan, left there for whatever reason. It's a timeless challenge:

"True rewards await those who choose wisely."

What will you choose?