Does the Muse Recycle?

Hello. My name is Steve Burks, and I'm a recovering wannabe media mogul. Being broke and unconnected didn't dissuade me. Inspirational quotes were my life rafts. Martin Luther King, Jr. shared this quote. "If a man makes a better mouse trap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door." The writer of the movie, "Field of Dreams," co-signed. "If you build it, they will come." 

Madison Avenue calls bulls**t. They don't work on spec.

If you had the cure for cancer, for A.I.D.S., or for reality television, would the world turn your street into a parking lot? Maybe, if you could overcome the scam perception. But if your product or service failed to delay flat-lining, or was irrelevant to the bottom half of Maslowe's hierarchy of needs? You'd live out of a shopping cart full of trash bags.

Some good can come from playing the entreprenurial "Little Engine That Could." It can help you stay out of your own way, when it comes to negotiable obstacles.

As it turns out, requiring the equivalent of a small country's GNP for start-up capital, isn't on the negotiable-obstacle list. That's on the psycho-neurotic list. People who believe that literally anything can be done, suffer from a strain of popular insanity. It's all the rage. Ask the publishers of The Secret. Ask some preachers. I've never been that far gone.

I had, however, contracted the virus of perceived self-uniqueness. Being a creative loner preserved the illusion, which shattered when I entered a convention center, filled to the brim with thousands of writers, "born" to do the same thing I was "born" to do, hawking screenplays just as "inspired" as mine. Does the Muse recycle?

These were the droves of me's that Gatekeepers deal with every day, the herd of self-help consumers, fancying the supposed global relevance of our output. The avalanche of career how-to books share the blame for public naivete. Gurus tell me that I can be a Spielberg or a Quincy Jones, and I believe them. So do the millions of other suckers who buy the books, see the interviews, attend the conferences. (I'm exaggerating, but only a little.)

"Bitter much?" Go ahead. Say it.

I can't blame how-to publishers for my need to feel affirmed. If I became Quincy Spielberg tomorrow, my satisfaction would last long enough for one snarky review, or TMZ paternity claim, and voila! Mr. Needy would return. Fact is, he would have never left. No matter where you go, there you are. All these years, I thought I craved uniqueness. Actually, I craved being seen as unique.

"Faux-Mogul Craves Uniqueness," a want ad in the Reality Check Times.