Overcoming Your Own Worst Enemy…YOU: Kent Grosswiler (Transcript)

Full text of artist and writer Kent Grosswiler’s talk: Overcoming Your Own Worst Enemy…YOU at TEDxYearlingRoad conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Kent Grosswiler – Artist

Hello. I’m curious how many people here have had a project or a potential hobby? Something you want to try on the back burner?

Or, something you maybe started into a little bit and decided you were no good and quit? If I could see a show of hands, please… okay! So we can relate to one another on this.

That’s been the story of my life and I’m not really sure where those messages came from.

I don’t remember anybody telling me stuff like this when I was a little kid. I know I have some friends – maybe it was their parents or older siblings or a teacher or a coach gave them some negative self messages.

But you know a lot of my life, if somebody would tell me I can’t do something, I would get kind of aggressive and say ‘Watch me!’ And I’ve always been really puzzled with this.

When certain things were offered like ‘You should try this’, or even if I would think myself like, ‘I want to try this’, this voice up here would be like, ‘Oh man, you’re not going to be, any good at that; like so why even bother!’

And a lot of things, when I was a child I would start. My parents enrolled me in all kinds of different activities – gymnastics lessons, different kinds of sports, piano lessons, swimming lessons.

And you know there would be this disconnect. I would see older kids who had been doing it so much longer. And I particularly remembered it at gymnastics lessons. I was doing my little forward rolls and I was watching older kids do handsprings and back flips, and there was just this disconnect in-between like where I was at in this timeline with work involved and where they were at’. And so I quit.

And I would quit everything I did up to a period of time.

Like one thing, as I got a little older… one thing like that I did stick with for a while was playing drums. I’m a musician. But I need to tell you like by the time I got into high school I was starting to drink a lot and I would start to do a lot of drugs.

And you know a little bit further into high school, I had begun my own criminal enterprise. And of course that was one of those things people like, ‘Dude, you can’t do stuff like that’, I was like, ‘Yeah, watch me.’

But you know when it came to anything productive, I mean just the negative self-talk up here like I would always quit or not even bother. Like the amount of space in the top of my skull would like probably fit in a soccer ball, like it’s not very much space but to me like it’s the wild wild west, or it’s the set of a Mad Max movie.

And that serves me really well in my creative endeavors. But like the voices up there can be awful like the jury that I put myself up against or the committee, and all the talking.

I mean even right now like maybe you’ll think, ‘I’m doing a good job’, but there’s voices up here like, ‘Dude, you can’t give a TED talk.’ And you know I’ve moved through it long enough to it’s like, ‘Oh that’s funny, because I’m doing one right now.’

The one thing that I was doing and was starting to do okay at (is) playing the drums. Other things I was doing just snow balled and I eventually like eradicated all the good opportunities I could have had as a musician.

And so you know I’m getting into like going to fast forward a lot of this, and I do want to say like I may or may not be a member of a certain organization that follows this 12-step agenda and meets with some regularity in church basements and serve some of the worst coffee on the planet.