Imagination You Can See

Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

Can you tell me how to get to a place where the ideas in your head show up on a screen?

Can you tell me how to get from thought to the physical manifestation of that thought?

I look at Sesame Street and I see imagination. I see physical things that started as ideas, or dreams. I am watching one (or a few, now) man's ideas completed. Start to finish.

Can someone tell me how to get there? My biggest problem is getting from idea-in-head to idea-in-hand. I have, at last count, 1,268 ideas a day. Of those 1,268 ideas, I'd say about 1% of them actually get finished. Actually get from inside my head to in front of my eyes.

Is it about time? Is it a work ethic issue? Is it about ability? No, I don't think so.

I think it's about control.

See, when you have an idea, or a thought, or a mental invention, it's yours. Yours. No one else can see, REALLY, exactly what it is. You can explain it, you can draw it, you can spell it out, but it's like trying to describe a dream you had last night to someone else.

No, it was like a floating disk, and I was standing on it, and there were these people all around, but they really weren't PEOPLE, they were more like animals, and the next thing I knew I was in my house, but it wasn't really my house, but I KNEW it was my house...

Um. What?

YOU can see it, but they can't. It's your brain. It's the movie in your mind. Same goes for ideas. They're yours, and most often, the fight is to get that idea into physical form, and even THEN, sometimes it's not exactly how you envisioned it. And you want me to let other people do it?

Are you insane?

It's about control. And I've found that releasing that control is the key to getting ideas from my head into my hand. No, it's not exactly how I would do it, that line is a little crooked, that color is a little off, that could've been acted better...but you know what?

It's in my hand now.

It's not in my head any more. For creative people, I think it's so important to fight for your ideas, but on the flip side of that, I believe that it's equally important to not let "credit" drive "control". I'm pretty opinionated, and have no problem expressing that opinion; but I'm now learning that I don't need to be the one to do everything. In fact, the few things that I've let go of have turned out better than I could've ever hoped, or better than if I would've done them myself.

So, how do you get to Sesame Street?

By being okay with someone else's hand in your puppet.