You Are a Peach Tree. Beareth Thou Peaches.

Your Creative Anxiety As a Gardening Problem

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.

While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.

You can buy my book Permissionless here.

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You will never be more fulfilled in your life than when you understand your own natural inclinations, figure out how to nurture them, and build // work in a way that honors them. You can spend an entire 80-year window of existence bucking against the person you are, alternatively hating and loving yourself, battling and embracing, trying to squash yourself into so many molds, trying to brute-force change, or trying to lay anchor and resist it.

And when you get to the end, you’ll feel nothing but exhaustion.

The only way through it all is to accept who you actually are.

You can change the quality of your work without trying to change your essential nature.

You can take ownership of that nature without throwing up your hands and disclaiming responsibility because it’s just the way you were born.

You can evolve, and you can grow - but you can’t do any of these things unless you know who you are in the first place.

I started rewatching the Kung-Fu Panda movies with kiddo recently, and I’ve been thinking about this scene ever since.

(Note: if you’re of the opinion that you can’t learn much from a kids’ movie, this is where you should probably stop reading. And unfollow/unsubscribe; it’s not getting better from here, folks.)

Oogway: “My friend, the panda will never fulfill his destiny, nor you yours, until you let go of the illusion of control.”

Shifu: “Illusion?”

Oogway: “Yes. Look at this tree, Shifu. I cannot make it blossom when it suits me, nor make it bear fruit before its time.”

Shifu: “But there are things we can control. I can control when the fruit will fall. And I can control where to plant the seed. That is no illusion, Master.”

Oogway: “Ah, yes. But no matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach.” **Shifu: “But a peach cannot defeat Tai Lung!”

Oogway: “Maybe it can, if you are willing to guide it, to nurture it, to believe in it.”

My goal as a creator is not to become a different creator. My goal as a writer is not to become Hank Green or Malcolm Gladwell or Michael Lewis. It’s not to become Ursula LeGuin or Douglas Coupland. No, my goal is to be what I am; but find a way to be the best version of that.

My goal is to be a peach tree.

To be okay with being a peach tree.

To be a bloody good peach tree, that produces bloody good peaches.

I can go right ahead and demand apples, oranges, pears or roses from myself, and I can do that to my last dying breath. But it’ll be peaches all the same. Talent and discipline, ambition and the latest tools, even all the capital in the entire world won’t let me bear any other kind of fruit.

But how much of our creative frustration, our anxiety, our sense of failure, our obsession with comparison, is only the fault of our drive to become something we were never meant to be in the first place?

The Fantasy of Being a Different Creator

Re-invention is a wonderful thing. I’ve been working on a whole piece about it. But re-invention is not the same thing as attempting to change your entire nature, against your own nature.

David Bowie is possibly the most famous re-inventor - becoming a new artist, a new persona, with a new aesthetic every handful of years. But he never lost what made him unmistakably Bowie: his spirit, his energy, his passion for music, rhythm, and storytelling.

It all stayed the same. Goblin King or Thin White Duke.

But I think we can all agree - David Bowie would have never attempted to reinvent himself as a TikTok wellness influencer; it would have gone entirely against who he was. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with TikTok influencers (not in the scheme of 10,000 years of human history and the eventual heat-death of the universe) - but it could never have worked with who Bowie actually was, in his core, under the makeup and glam boots and white suits.

When something isn’t working - when we’re stuck, when we’re plateaued, when we can see other folks in our various niches doing better than we are - the instinct for a lot of folks is to try to emulate them. To find out what’s working and copy it, and copy them, and as close as we can, to become them. It’s why you see novelists attempting to become short-form video influencers and non-fiction writers jettisoning their deepest takes in pursuit of virality.

But it never feels quite right.

Something is always just a little bit...off.

Admiration itself is a useful signal, and imitation a useful tool; but only in so much as they reveal something or amplify something of our own. Only in so much as they uncover what actually moves us, or expand our sense of possibility and experimentation. IE, fucking around as a creator is perfectly acceptable, as long as it serves some form of finding out. But if you take it too far - if you abandon your own nature - you’ll only confuse your peers’ excellence with the evidence of your own internal inadequacy, measuring your beginnings against someone else’s best work, and getting unfamiliarity tangled up in superiority.

You can grow like that beautiful tree over there.

You can stretch your limbs to the sky, etc.

But you can’t become it.

No more than it can become you.

Remember: the tree doesn’t apologize for its fruit. It grows toward the sun, it accepts the seasons as inevitable, and it bears only what it can bear.