NORTHERN PLANNER

Creativity, ideas, work that makes you proud. The enemies are legion. To defeat them you need acknowledge they exist first. 

They are:

1. Long deadlines. Nothing sharpens a quill like feeling as if time is running out. Nothing stops decisions like more time. 
2. Short-cuts and impatience. Excellence requires effort, you can't get to wonderful without breaking through OK. 
3. Distractions. You're at your most potent in the Flow state, thinking without thinking. Slack, WhatsApp, 'got a sec?' all get in the way. 
4. Fear. It's easier not to try because failure, rejection, they all sting. The people that really change things have been hurt multiple times, they’ve learned to love the scars of war wounds, still afraid, yet do it anyway because when you’re scared you’re on to something.
5. Chasing popularity. People find new thinking uncomfortable, they hate change, more afraid than you are. Find a way to disagree, but try not to be too disagreeable. I never said this was easy. 
6. Not wanting to judged in case you look stupid. When pour all of yourself into your work, it's not just the work being judged, you are asking for approval of you. Fortune favours the brave. 
7. Setting out to please everyone rather than striking a chord with someone. This a short-cut to the kind of output that doesn't offend anyone because they are utterly indifferent to it.
8. Decisions by committee. The short-cut to getting nothing nothing done of worth.  Be a benign dictator, or a quiet rebel (I'm both, I don’t get that either). 
9. Allowing a culture that sees failure as, well, failure.  You need to embrace failure to know what doesn't work, greatness is much more about the process elimination than the great are willing to tell you. It doesn’t look as grand. 
10. Ego. You are not all powerful, you are good, but until you can accept what your weaknesses are, you can't work on them and find wonderful. Ego means you can't accept feedback – you need someone else someone to tell you where you're going wrong. There is a fine line between this and committee, but I think we're agreeing none of this is easy.  Nothing worthwhile is. 
11. Trying to follow a formula, yours or someone else's. This is short to cut to making the same as everyone else. 
12. Not asking the right questions. The status quo exists because no one questions it enough. 
13. Not asking the hard questions. This is part of fear, we hate asking questions we fear the answer to. The answers can hurt, but at least you know. This goes for far more than work by the way. Be prepared to bleed. 
14. Caring what other people will think. Get the feedback, love the feedback, but make up your own mind. Don't second guess everyone, the toughest committee is the one in your mind. 
15. Did I mention fear?