Let me tell you about a guy I used to know. Great guitarist. Beautiful touch. Could make you cry with two notes. And he never, never, played in front of anyone. Why? He was “waiting for the right moment.” Waiting to be “discovered.” Waiting for someone with a clipboard and a badge to walk up and say, “Sir, you have officially been granted permission to rock.”
Spoiler: that person never came. And now he sells insurance. Good guy. Miserable.
Here’s what I’ve learned after decades of standing in my office, tapping into a WordPress account, convinced the SWAT team was about to break down the door and arrest me for grand larceny of attention: creatives are addicted to permission. We’re junkies for it. And the dealer never shows up.
We wait for society to say we’re old enough, young enough, thin enough, credentialed enough, enough enough. We wait for our parents to understand. For our partners to stop looking at us with that gentle, “that’s cute but when are you getting a real job” expression. We wait for the muse. We wait for the grant. We wait for the algorithm to smile upon us. We wait for someone with more followers to retweet us so we can finally feel legitimate.
And while we’re waiting? The page stays blank. The guitar gathers dust. The idea that woke you up at 3 a.m.? It dies. Because you didn’t have a note from the principal.
I’ve been there. The first time I seriously started writing, I metaphorically hid behind the keyboard, and I thought, Who said I could do this? Who gave me the right to take up space? I was waiting for permission from… what? The ghost of some dead writier who I admired? The Writing Gods?
Here’s the ugly, liberating, terrifying truth: there is no permission. There never was. That door you’re knocking on? It’s not locked. There’s no door. You’ve been standing in an open field, asking an imaginary bouncer if you can please, pretty please, come inside.
So how do you get around this? Because “just stop waiting” is about as helpful as telling a depressed person to cheer up. I know. I live here. But I’ve found a few things that actually work. Real things. Messy things.
One: Give yourself a shitty, homemade permission slip. Seriously. Write it on a napkin. “I, [your name], hereby give myself permission to make something terrible today.” Frame it. Put it on your wall. Because the thing nobody tells you? The permission you’re waiting for isn’t “permission to be great.” It’s permission to be bad. To be amateur. To be embarrassing. Society will never sign off on that. So you have to. Right now.
Two: Find a low-stakes, zero-audience sandbox. Start a private blog. Buy a notebook nobody will ever see. Make art for your cat. I used to record fake radio shows into a cassette deck when I was a kid. Nobody heard them. That was the point. The freedom of no one watching is the most underrated drug on the planet. You don’t need permission in a vacuum. So create the vacuum.
Three: Reverse the question. Instead of asking “Who says I can?”, ask “Who says I can’t?” And then really look. Is there a person? A law? A gun to your head? Or is it just a ghost in your brain, some old voice from third grade, some rejection from a decade ago, some “you’re not the type” that you’ve been carrying like a stone? Name the ghost. Then tell it to shut up. Out loud, if you have to. I do this in my office. The neighbors think I’m crazy. I’m fine with that.
Four: Borrow someone else’s permission until yours grows in. Find a dead artist you love. A rebel. A weirdo. And say, “What would they say?” I ask myself what Bill Drummond would think of my whiny, self-indulgent writing. And I know, I know, he’d say, “Shut up and get on with it.” That’s borrowed permission. It works. Use it.
Five. The big one: Stop confusing permission with safety. This is the trap. We think permission means guarantee. No risk. No judgment. A warm bath of approval. That’s not permission. That’s anesthesia. Real permission, the kind you have to give yourself, comes with a receipt that says “non-refundable, may cause embarrassment, side effects include growth.” You don’t wait for permission to be safe. You give yourself permission to be unsafe. And then you do it anyway.
Look. I’m 50-something. I’ve been doing this for decades. And I still wake up some mornings waiting for permission. Waiting for the phone call. Waiting for the sign. But then I remember: the sign is me getting out of bed and opening the laptop. That’s the sign. That’s the only sign there’s ever been.
So here’s your permission. Right now. From me. From a guy in an office who’s still terrified half the time.
You can make the thing. You can be bad at it. You can be good at it. You can show nobody. You can show everybody. You can finish it or throw it away or burn it in a coffee can. But you don’t have to wait. That’s the secret. You never had to wait.
Now go make a mess. And if anyone asks who said you could? Tell ’em Andy said fuck it.
Talk soon. Or don’t. Just make something. Please. I’m begging you. The world needs more people making things and fewer people waiting for permission to live.
So look. You want more of this, the permission, the pragmatism, the permission to be a little pissed off while still getting shit done? I wrote it all down. Well, I wrote some of it down. The book’s called Digital Marketing for Creatives, and no, it’s not some SEO bro manifesto. It’s for people who’d rather make things than chase algorithms, but who also need to sell a painting, fill a workshop, or convince the internet that their weird little project deserves a second look. No suits. No jargon. Just the messy, honest, slightly exhausted voice of someone who’s been screaming into the void and finally figured out how to make the void scream back, politely. Go take a look. Or don’t. But if you keep waiting for permission to market yourself like a real human being, that book’s gonna get lonely. And so will your bank account. Your call.
You can subscribe to this blog using the box below. Zero spam.
Officially andy russell 