How to Generate an Unshakeable Faith in Your Creative Ability

I'm selling synthetic faith.

Happy Saturday Morning. Pause the cartoons because we’re talking about faith.

Let’s dive in.

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Imagine one day, when humanity is at war with an alien race, we’ll devise “faith machines” to make us believe it’s possible to win.

The aliens are four years away, and they’re far more advanced. The chances of survival are slim. Pretty much zero.

You go into the Shrine (by choice), and a quantum computer scans your brain. It takes the belief that “humanity will prevail” and connects it to your limbic system. That way, you retain all of your knowledge about how unlikely victory is. You just “feel” that winning is inevitable.

Scientists and strategists now work towards possible solutions. The ones who opted for “synthetic faith” don’t know the answer either, but they have a deep, unshakeable feeling they will find a way.

Sure enough, like Luke destroying the Death Star, one scientist uses his faith to manage a one-in-a-million victory.

Synthetic faith saves humanity.

You Need Faith For Everything

You need faith to go to the grocery store.

You have no idea if your invisible money will still be worth something, if people will continue to choose to drive in their lane, or if we’re still in agreement about murder laws. Yet, we all get up every day and do what we need to do. It’s a synthetic miracle.

For the most part, we have faith in the things that everyone else has faith in (sometimes even that feels slippery). However, through that collective faith, we managed to erect societies of hundreds of millions of apes. Not bad.

Without these bare-minimum faith structures, we would devolve into chaos pretty quickly.

That’s pretty neat—but that’s not what you care about. Unless you’re totally embittered, you want something more than the bare minimum.

We can take this faith mechanism and use it to do incredible things.

How to Tap Into The Faith Mechanism

I described synthetic faith in the opening story. That’s exactly what meditators have been trying to do for thousands of years.

In the East, they meditate to realize that reality is Maya (illusion). The only thing that’s real is the self, which has very little to do with you. When you realize that, you can choose to believe anything in Maya.

In the West, we pray for faith that God’s will be done. In other words, something bigger is always going on, and we need to relax our egos to see it.

Through the sheer passage of time, these ideas have become old-sounding and weirdly irrelevant. But they’re not. They’re incredibly useful. And they’re pretty simple.

To “meditate” simply means to “become familiar with.” And to pray is just to ask a question (without assuming the answer). We do that all the time. We just need to become a little more intentional.

Unless you invent the faith machine, you gotta pray and meditate to generate synthetic faith in your creative ability.

How Faith Is Made

Just go for a walk.

Find some downtime where things are quiet. Ask yourself, “What am I doing to stand in the way of my creative success?” Genuinely want to hear the answer (and not how it’s other people’s fault). Give the answer a week or so to arrive. Know that your subconscious is working on it.

Or, sit down without any distractions for a while (AKA meditate).

There are knots in your “soul” standing exactly in the way of what you want (creative success). Those places in you, which you’re avoiding by never having a moment of quiet, are exactly the places that you need to explore.

You make your faith by exploring and slowly untieing the knots.

It’s a bit of a slow process, but it’s way easier than writing 5,000 words a day to “force” success. You can’t force people to be interested in your creations. You can negotiate with yourself, though.

Good luck and talk to you next week,

Taylor

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P.S.

The story from the opening is from this (great) book. It’s the second in the series.

Here’s what I’m reading:

The Dark Forest (Sci-fi)

rebelEducator (Twitter)

Rhythm of War (Fantasy)

Quotes I’m pondering:

“Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.” — Carl Jung

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” — Blase Pascal

“When I read a good book I wish that life were 3000 years long.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson