How to think creatively starts with getting ideas out of your head and into the world.
In this vid we look at the importance of taking creative risks through action.
Also the vid shows an animatic / storyboard for a music video coming in 2019.
Transcript
Obeying our primitive instincts for safety has allowed us to survive in a chaotic world. The problem is that living like a turtle is not particularly creative.
Creativity is inherently risky. Significant growth can’t happen unless we take risks.
The act if doing anything carries some risk. To say a word risks offending a listener. To draw a picture risks failing at drawing what you envisioned.
The trick is to make creating a habit. Something you do so often that you don’t even think about it anymore.
If you only make one painting a year, then that’s a lot of pressure to make sure that one painting a success. This pressure to succeed can be debilitating.
Instead of trying to make one masterpiece a year, if you created one painting every month, then you now have 12 paintings a year. That’s 12 chances to succeed. A lot better than one, and in fact it often takes many failed attempts to make one success. Let’s take it a step further: if you committed to creating one painting every week, that’s 52 paintings in a year.
Now you have 52 chances to succeed versus just one if you stuck with one painting a year.
As a side note, the concept of success is somewhat illusory. What makes something successful? I’m not entirely sure. The definition of success changes depending on the context and what’s being measured.
People debate over the quality of a piece of art. Some people might love it, some people might hate it.
If one person loves a movie, but someone else hates it, the quality of that film changes based on the person assessing the film’s subjective quality.
But you know what isn’t subjective?
Quantity.
Doing things over and over and over, putting in the miles and having a pile of work to point to and say “ I made this exactly many of this thing”.
Quantity paves the way to quality.
Many people think they don’t have time in the day to make anything. But if you examine your daily activities with a critical eye, you’ll find where your priorities lie. The reason it’s easier to watch netflix or youtube videos 4 hours a day than it is to spend those same 4 hours creating is that it feels like there’s no personal risk to consuming entertainment.
Being entertained feels good.
But when we create, we open ourselves up to criticism. We face ourselves and our insecurities. We naked become vulnerable.
When you put your soul into a project, you’ve made a personal investment, not only of your time but of yourself.
It doesn’t feel safe to put our thoughts, emotions, and dreams into the world.
It feels safe to only consume the thoughts, emotions, and dreams of others.
It feels safe to be entertained. Except in reality it isn’t. Our lizard brains reward us with the feeling of safety, even if that safety is an illusion. Familiarity feels safe. But we may turn out to be frogs in a pot unaware that the temperature is rising ever so slightly, until we’ve been cooked alive by our inaction.
Action solves the problem of complacency.
The reason excessive entertainment isn’t safe comes down to opportunity cost. The time spent reading about celebrity gossip on social media is lost opportunity to develop skills or learn how to create an online business.
The tool is the same – we’re all spending time on this tool called the internet – but how that time is spent determines the value of the tool. Youtube is a free college education for those who choose to focus.
The most important step to any project is getting started. Ideas are a dime-a-dozen. Most people have thousands of ideas every single day, yet most of those ideas never get made into anything.
Of the few ideas that do get made into something, even fewer will be what people label successful.
We can reduce the cost of failure by failing constantly and learning from those failures in a non-judgmental way.
Don’t blame yourself. Don’t blame society. Don’t blame anyone. Get out of blame mode and simply observe.
Take a deep breath. Observe what it is you need to do, and then do it.
Make as many creative executions as you can. There’s always a million excuses not to try something. If we put as much time into executing as we do in making excuses, we’d have a different body of work to show for it and a lot less anxiety about not creating. 52 pieces of art in a year instead of 1.
What is creativity anyway?
Creativity is a little tricky to define, but what we call creative tends be something that feels new or useful. Creativity is often achieved by combing old pieces of information in new or surprising ways.
Make something.
We can’t merely think our way to creativity. We have to do something with those creative thoughts
The only way to draw a picture is to move your tool across the drawing surface. The only way to turn a stranger into a friend is to make that first connection.. The only way to walk a mile is to take that first step, followed by many more steps.
Maybe what we draw will suck, maybe the person we try to talk to will think we’re stupid, and maybe that mile we try to walk will give us a cramp.
Creativity is risky, but not as risky as idleness.
