Creative exhaustion, it’s a term I use in my mentoring work to explain when you do this work of owning your genius. And when you have the strength and courage to be yourself and push your magic into the world, whether through writing a screenplay or just doing your work at the highest level and going to places you’ve never gone in your work and in your life. It is extremely inspiring and it’s deeply exhausting. Because the energy required to push yourself beyond your limits, causes you to be very tired. And I want you to think about that. I mean, how do you grow a muscle? Really important piece I’m offering to you here. How do you build a bicep? You lift a weight that is beyond your normal. If you’re to look at the bicep muscle under a microscope, you would see micro-tearing, so you push the bicep past its limit, it tears, and then you recover through rest. Here’s the key, the growth of the muscle happens in the rest and recovery. Well, life is like that. When you push your craft past the limit and then recover and rest, you’ve stretched your limit and you’ve grown. And a lot of artists do that. They put out a piece of work and then they take a year off. Putout a piece of work, they go out in the wilderness for a few years, and then they come back. What I’m simply suggesting to you is going to the edge of your limits expands your limits. And so creative exhaustion is a part of personal mastery. There’s nothing wrong, it’s a part of the cycles, you push, getexhausted and then you recover.
