Each additional hour spent thinking about a creative idea before bringing it to life improves the idea less and makes it less likely to materialize. There is always that moment between the creative idea appearing in your mind and you taking action to solidify it into reality. For those of us that claim to be perfectionists, that moment sometimes can turn into hours, days, weeks and eternity and what we intended to create is killed, off never coming to light. How many great novels have gone with their creator to the grave? How many movies will never be watched because the person who could have made them had the vision but did not act on it? Why didn’t they act? Because they wanted to make it better in their heads. The word “perfectionist” has taken on a different meaning over the last 20 years. Its true definition, “one who ensures the highest quality in their work and design,” has been replaced with meaning “high expectations and fear.” Fear is what paralyzes the creative and prevents them from immediately going out and making what they desire to. It causes them to sit down and imagine the paintings they could paint, for novelists to daydream of what it feels like to sit down after a long arduous writing journey, while never actually taking a single step to do so. Unfortunately, we humans, the greatest self-deceivers ever actually convince ourselves that we are what we desire and not what we do. Writing one article every two months does not make you a writer. Wanting to write a novel does not make you a novelist. Having good taste in art does not make you an artist. Only by doing does one become that which they do. For the muse is like a beautiful creature, you may stare, flutter eyebrows and experience butterflies but if you do nothing then the muse will leave in sheer boredom at your inaction. To be creative is to act first and evaluate as you go along.
In October 2019, I undertook an experiment. You see, I had always fancied myself a writer. Over the past 2 years, I had written perhaps once every two to three weeks. Not worth calling myself a professional writer. The premise of the experiment was pretty simple. To write one article every single day for 45 days. The article could be on any topic and of any length. The one contingency was that it had to form a complete idea. A fellow writer from Ibua, Natasha Sebunya, would then review my article. Spoilers, I hit 41 out of 45 days successfully. And I learned a couple of things from this that have informed how I look at being creative now.
Show up and do the work.
I want to start by talking about the bad days. Some days I had lots of work to finish and sitting down to write felt frustrating. Some days were too cold others were too hot. Some days I was not in the mood and others I was super excited. But above all, I had to write matter how I felt. The words of the great fitness coach Dan John came to mind as he talked about a concept, “the rule of 5, “In any 5 training days, there is one day where you feel amazing and you can do more than you usually do. You feel great, you perform great and all is well with the world. In any 5 days, there is one day where you feel like shit. You woke up on the wrong side of the bed. you are probably going to stub your toe on the corner of a table. This day sucks and your performance is going to go down. Then there are three days. These three days are all about punching the clock. You go in, you work out, and you get out. These three days are where champions are made. You have to not get too proud of your good days, salvage and turn around your bad ones and give your best on the ordinary ones.
That is something I felt a lot during my time. I just had to get the work done. Show up every single time. The discipline from constantly doing the work built up in me and kept me going. Sometimes I had to just write articles that weren’t that great by my standards. But doing so would let me write the big pieces that I believed demonstrated the best of what I could create. If I did nothing or followed my feelings and skipped writing on my low days, I would not have had the discipline for my high days.
The Law of Diminishing Marginal Creativity.
As embarrassing as it is to admit sometimes, I spent several hours on an article that came out bad. Sometimes I spent thirty minutes on an article that came out great. Now, time spent on something is not the only thing determining how good it is. But there is this feeling I had that if I just spent more time on something then I could make it better, turns out this is not true. Sometimes spending more time means procrastinating and not doing what I know I should be doing. And sometimes spending that extra time to improve an article leads to writingadditional content that dilutes the original point I was trying to make. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of SOUTH PARK, once responded to why they take 1 week to create their episodes with this, “You know, we could spend another week on this but then we will just end up second-guessing ourselves. And maybe we make the episode 5% better. But if it is 90% of the way good, we can just be happy with that. Because the more you look at something, the more you want to change it. And maybe what you change doesn’t even make it better.” I learned to just dive in. Let the article almost write itself and then back off. Accept it for what it is, the good and the stuff I think I could improve.
You can only improve what exists.
Getting that feedback from Natasha was not always easy. Sometimes I felt that I had done a good job, but she would point out things I hadn’t fully fleshed out or when I spent too long on an idea that was fully explored while also highlighting the things, I was doing well. I improved more as a writer in the span of those 45 days than all the writing I have done that no one has read. It is impossible to improve what does not exist because ideas in our minds are just that. The second you bring it to reality is when your skill can be scrutinized and improved. That was perhaps one of my favorite things about the exercise. In a sense, when I started, I did not want to share my writing because I was afraid of being misunderstood. But getting out there has taught me that all I can do is accept that people are different and will sometimes misunderstand my writing. That is no reason to hold back from those that will get it. Sometimes to be better understood, I have to accept responsibility as a communicator. The only way to get better and improve.
So, go out and create. Make what you can and make it consistently.