Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living.

But Socrates also stank.

Everybody knew it.

He also said the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing. He didn’t have a job. And, less known, is the fact he bad-mouthed his wife. All the time.

I mean, come on folks. Alarm bells?

A half-dressed misogynist with a straggly beard approaches you in a Tesco car park today, stinks like he slept in the recycling, and says he knows nothing about it…?

You’re calling the police.

Look, I’m not saying we should completely dismiss one of the greatest thinkers of antiquity, but can you really trust a person with poor personal hygiene?

True, he was riffing in a time before Lynx Africa. And I suppose his job was trying to educate the people. And he did say he liked his wife for the very fact she was argumentative (though I’m still not sure that’s really a good reason to marry).

In one respect, he’s right: it is important to question our own thoughts and actions and to live an examined life. I’m guessing you agree with the sentiment.

Problem is, as a copywriter, when it comes to examining your own work, you probably have a tendency to over-examine at too early a stage.

Often, before you’ve even committed an idea to paper, different voices in your head are screaming for you to reconsider.

What if it’s no good?

What if it is good but people don’t like it anyway?

Why would anybody be interested in your idea in the first place?

Who are you to put this out there?

What if you reveal something about yourself?

What if people think less of you for doing this?

…and why all these bloody questions?

To be honest, it’s likely a problem you’ve had since childhood.

Psychologist Erik Erikson—the man who coined the phrase ‘identity crisis’—argued we form a basic trust or mistrust in the first stage of our psychosocial development. If this trust is undermined, even slightly, it can make you more susceptible to fears and anxieties later in life.

Follow this up with his second stage of development, at which point you become exposed to the potential of lasting self-doubt and you’re in a real pickle before you’ve even celebrated your third birthday.

What chance do we really have?

But the fact is, every copywriter carries around their own questions, their own very personal collection of insecurities they’ve been curating since childhood.

They’re an active part of who we are.

But the fact you worry about your work so much is the reason you’re able to produce the work at all.

“In order to be created,” wrote philosopher and proto-hipster Albert Camus, “a work of art must first make use of the dark fires of the soul.”

Indeed, you shouldn’t worry about over-examining the madness in your mind, you should exploit it.

The aim of the game here is to explore the inner workings of your grey matter and see if there isn’t something interesting you can serve up.

But it’s important to realize that at this early stage in an idea or a headline’s development… you’re still operating within “the dark fires of your soul” and what comes out on the page might be weird as hell or not quite right.

That’s fine.

You edit. You use it as a springboard to a better idea. You react to what other people think.

What you shouldn’t do at this early stage is over-examine things.

(There’ll be time enough for that later.)

If you’ve ever joined one of our live calls on a Friday, you’ll often see Nick or me thinking on our feet and trying to invent headlines or lines of copy off the top of our heads.

We’ll often speak complete gibberish until we hit on something that sticks and we can use as a platform to tease out a better line.

If we worried about what people would say about our bad/weird initial ideas, we wouldn’t get to the good stuff.

So, by all means, follow stinky old Socrates’ advice on a more general basis and live an examined life…

But when it comes to the first stage of dreaming up ideas as a copywriter, over-examine at your peril. Instead, let whatever lies within the dark fires of your soul out and see if it doesn’t inspire you to come up with something truly original.

P.S. Remember, if you want to see me and Nick trying to invent new ideas for projects you’re working on, we do so every Friday on our live sessions on Discord. To get access, join one of our membership groups here and find the DIscord invite in the “Getting Started” video.