The Singularity Moment: Commit or Delay?
What filming a vampire video taught me about embracing chaos
In This Week’s Newsletter:
There's a pivotal moment in any project: the singularity moment. You find yourself suspended between the past and the future, not ready to move forward yet too committed to turn back.
We face two feelings:
The fear of moving forward and being exposed.
The regret of backtracking and feeling like we’ve failed.
This can be paralysing; we often don’t know what to do. Many projects fail not at the start but at this critical juncture.
I faced this myself last week.
Today, I explore how I overcame it and some frameworks to help you do the same.
Life Lessons from Filming a Vampire Movie
The video was for one of my new songs, “Vampires”.
When organising things, I tend to paint in very broad strokes and then fill in the blanks later.
The idea is to apply friction and trust things will fall into place.
And yet, this does not divorce you from the terror of collapse!
So I woke up on Tuesday and realised I had set in motion events that I could not control.
I’d booked the venue, cameraman, lights and lighting engineer.
Fundamentals in place.
The problem:
You need vampires for a vampire movie, right?
And on top of that no cast, band, makeup artist, costume designer, catering or producer.
Oh, wait, a script too?!
So, on Tuesday, I woke ready to confront the horror of unresolved tasks before me.
Before me stood two days to fix everything.
Except I was in no way ready.
I felt fragmented.
Here’s how I got through it:
1/ Fear is a gateway
Chaos instils fear.
Fear is uncomfortable.
New project?
Fear.
New job?
Fear.
Moving city?
Fear.
There is no transformation without fear.
If fear is a certainty, it is worth working on our relationship with fear.
Its role is not to torment us.
It is to stimulate us.
To ready us.
There is no distinction between what you can do tomorrow and the fear you must pass through to get to it.
Therefore:
Your fear is valuable.
Consider it a guide.
One of our hardest challenges is to stop fighting against the fear.
To accept that it is not alien but of us.
So, if you’re afraid of something, consider how you can reframe your relationship to it.
It is there to help us, not hinder us.
2/ Chaos in the Creative Process
Yes, we want order.
But does life allow it?
The reality is that most of us are juggling our creative and working lives.
The top 1% of artists make enough to support a family.
The rest of us live in The Long Tale.
We hustle for our dreams.
We juggle with the job.
We compress planning into tight schedules, extract ideas from exhaustion, and coax kaleidoscopes for a shard of inspiration.
The result?
We are never as ready as we would like to be.
It is our task to exist in unreadiness.
Rather than pining for less chaos, you may have to embrace more.
3/ Fragmentation Precedes Unity
When I woke up two days before the shoot, I felt fragmented.
You cannot do it, so why try?
In these moments, we experience fear like a rabbit in headlines.
It freezes us.
The problem I had was that while I was frozen, everything else remained in motion.
The shoot was still bearing down.
48 hours.
Tick, tick, tick.
It takes a lot for me to want to give up.
But I saw no path except certain failure.
Surely the prudent path would be to postpone?
Do it better later, man.
But then the flip side -
Weeks of planning had already gone into it.
All delaying meant was eating up future potential in place of something I could do now.
Decision time.
Stick or twist.
So, I turned to one of the people I trust most.
She has a tattoo on her wrist.
It says:
Why Not?
Her advice:
“Why not just get something made?”
It gave me the strength I needed.
From fragmentation, the seed of unity.
But what revived me was the love of another.
Looking back, it boggles me.
The first thing we forget is that loved ones who know us better than ourselves.
It is not a weakness to reach out.
It is your strength.
Self-reliance, yes.
But not at the expense of opening ourselves to an even greater force: grace.
4/ The Power of Simplifying
My spark had returned, but the situation remained the same.
My first question to myself?
Could I get something made with the tools I had?
I remembered something from many years ago, after I had lost my EMI deal— when all that was there was my camera and my guitar.
Sometimes, all you can do is press record and see what happens.
The answer was yes.
In the fundamentals, we have the opportunity of the world.
My second question?
What if I put my full being into fixing every problem in the time available?
Even in the limited circumstances, there was magnificent potential.
I was still damn well in the game.
Yes, the clock was clicking, but you only start learning about yourself once you get into the championship rounds.
You don’t learn from them until you go through them.
5/ Acquiesce to the Process
That Tuesday morning, my choice became clear:
Pull the plug or take the plunge?
If we decide to leap, we open ourselves to the potential in the unknown.
I asked myself:
What will happen if I just try?
Feeling so doom-bound and sure of certain failure, this took some courage.
However, a disorganised start doesn't necessarily doom a project to failure.
The legislators of the world have convinced us everything needs to be planned.
This is how the fearful try to box in the human spirit.
Yet chaos has its own agency.
But there is no calm like the hurricane centre.
I decided to do two things.
First, to roll with the chaos.
Second, to see how I could shape it, despite it having its own will.
And so, I acquiesced to the process for the next two days.
6/ Time is a Catalyst, not an Enemy
We spend our days multitasking.
What is before us appears to be the most important thing.
Yet what is the one thing you want?
What is the one thing you need to do?
In the singularity moment, I realised:
Time is an equation.
I have 48 hours.
What really happens if I apply my full potential to each hour available to me?
I listed:
what needed to be done.
how it could be done.
where I could ask for help.
The advantage of time pressure is that it compresses the mind.
Hemingway discussed this, recalling the war's curious simplicity: “All that was to be done was the one thing, the only thing.”
When a goal binds to a timeframe, transformation takes place:
It dials you in.
And refashions fear into the spirit of action.
7/ Prioritise the Priority
When fragmenting we see only the chaos.
Once parts are moving though we have to unify.
Freedom emerges once we resolve to go forward.
What overwhelmed, clarifies.
To make a vampire, you have two choices.
Find someone to bite you or find a costume.
I chose the latter.
The Wolfman is one of the heroes of Berlin’s underground.
Wolf, I need a masterclass.
I entered his lair.
We rummaged through velvet cloaks, brocade vests, lace Jabots, Onyx cufflinks and leather corsets for several hours.
The path will ask you to become what you are not.
If it says today, you will be a costume designer, a costume designer you must become.
What is clear is this:
In every moment is a problem you must solve.
You have to expand to fill it with the solution it craves.
To do that:
Prioritise the priority.
If you fully commit to resolving the challenge at hand, life will assist you.
8/ The Impossible Resolves Itself
Along the way, I guarantee you this:
There will be a task you cannot fulfil.
This moment is your making or breaking.
I experienced it.
Things were moving.
Each missing piece of the jigsaw was falling into place.
I arrived on set.
Two trucks with lighting docked.
Fabian, my new makeup hero, flew in from Hamburg.
The cast appeared.
Humans started shapeshifting into vampires.
As night fell, the vast 10,000 sq meters of Mahalla shrank, shaped by spotlights, pierced by Asteras, and moulded by high-cast key lights.
The trouble was, there were no dam vampire fangs.
Everything had fallen into place except the package that never arrived.
And then it did.
A call from my neighbour.
Jim, um, I think vampire fangs are here for you!
I looked around me.
A director can’t leave the set, right?
I needed to get them, the hour-long round trip be damned.
I understood.
This was my final task to solve.
I had initiated enough chaos.
It was now shaping itself into instruments of potential.
My task was now
to trust
to do the one thing, the only thing
So, sweating, I took the final hour before shooting began to dash across the city in search of vampire fangs.
It was then that the chaos started to give me its reward.
I started seeing the script that hadn’t been written.
And it was good.
And it made sense.
By leaving, I returned not just with fangs but with an insight I’d never have gained had I sent someone else.
The idea that could only be born out of desperation.
Leaving the set at the critical moment brought me back with a stillness in my heart, reclaiming the peace stolen by chaos.
I left an imposter and arrived as a director.
The shoot ended up being one of the best of my life.
You don’t know it as the time, but even chaos wants to be something.
9/ Conclusions and Takeaways
The Singularity Moment presents a choice:
Commit or delay.
There is no failure in delaying.
There is no guarantee of victory in committing.
The point I am making in this newsletter is whatever we decide, reconciling with chaos is part of our creative journey.
Don’t reject it willy-nilly.
Or make the assumption that it over organisation leads to the best results.
There is nothing more sanitised than safety.
A Miniature Guide to Thriving in Chaos
Chaos as a Catalyst: Embracing chaos in projects can lead to significant personal and professional growth.
Fear is a Gateway: Instead of shunning fear, use it to propel forward motion.
Accept Fragmentation: Feeling fragmented is often a precursor to achieving unity and clarity in your projects.
Trust in the Process: Even amidst disorganisation, maintain faith in the process.
Time as a Tool: Utilise the pressure of limited time to focus and intensify your efforts on what's essential.
Prioritise Effectively: In chaos, identify and tackle the most critical tasks first to bring order and progress.
Embrace Unreadiness: Acknowledge that feeling unprepared is normal; it’s more about how you handle the situation than being fully ready.
Leverage Support: Don’t hesitate to rely on trusted individuals for support and guidance when overwhelmed.
The Power of Simplification: When overburdened, simplify the situation to manage tasks more effectively and clear your mind for creative solutions.
Chaos as a Creative Force: Understand that chaos isn't just a challenge; it's an opportunity to innovate and redefine boundaries.
Below are 2 expanded points and a personal revelation which prepared me for life’s madness.
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