The Hard Things

“You have to do the hard things. The things that no one else is doing. The things that scare you. The things that make you wonder how much longer you can hold on.

Those are the things that define you. Those are the things that make the difference between living a life of mediocrity or outrageous success.”

~ Dan Waldschmidt

This has been a central approach to most of my daily practice.. to challenge myself, often beyond my known skill level… destroying my own comfort zones in the process.. Like I’ve always said, if my first thought is “this will never work”, it often yields some kind of magic if I decide to go all in anyway…killing expectations is a prerequisite. Same concept with traveling to new locations, or considering various international contracts/live performances. If a prospect scares the hell out of me, then it usually demands a higher position on my potential ‘to do’ list. Another good bit of advice along this line of thinking is to start before you’re ready. If all you do is wait until you’re ready, then there’s a good chance that A) you’ll never be READY, and/or B) you will have missed the immediate window of opportunity..

I can attribute a substantial proportion of my past successes to pursuing my curiosity into the unknown. Doing things that scared me shitless. Facing the tasks my logical mind says no to… or “this is impossible”. Each one of these instances has both enriched my skill, overall work, portfolio, heart, mind, and character in some way.

When I first discovered there were other balancers in the world, I absorbed the new knowledge for about a year or so, applying it forward into my own evolution. But I must note that much of my “outrageous success” in recent years has come from doing what no one else was doing at the time.. especially in the realm of extreme balance and challenging the “impossible” as a basic process.. Now it almost seems as thought Gravity Glue has become the general stylistic model or goal for many new school balancers.

This particular balance is among my all time favorites… often signified by taking a self portrait with my creation… but I love the lush Spring foliage as a perfect compliment to the warm skin tones of the Boulder Creek rocks… all the way down to sequence of colors along the spine… These smaller spines are something occurring more frequently in recent work.. i guess it’s an extra improbable challenge to navigate a small combo of rocks lower down in the formation, under relatively massive top weight. Also part of the mood of Spring rain… such a therapeutic sensual experience… the smells, feels, renewal and rain keeps the rocks wet for my pictures. :))