when being creative is like herding cats
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Many creative people apparently believe or subscribe to the idea that “inspiration” must strike so that we can be creative, regardless of how motivated we may feel about our creative work. Do you believe it?
More important: How have you tested your belief?
What conditions make that spark of ”inspiration” more likely to happen? Is inspiration the same as flow?
What is inspiring [...]
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The more I read and experience and observe creative people, the more I notice how we get in our own way and limit our creativity by imposing rules about the conditions we require in order to create. We might be convinced we can only create using specific tools or in a certain setting or under [...]
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A behind the scenes look at a Real Artist or Real Writer or Real Creative-Person-Doing-Fill-in-the-Blank in action frequently reveals a less than neat and tidy process going on.
Let’s face it, the creative product is the result of many forces at work over a period of time. Some of these forces are predictable, like learning the [...]
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The devil’s propensity for details pokes specifically at perfectionists. The details of any project are the perfectionist’s easy target. Let’s dot each i and cross each t and for heaven’s sake let’s make sure the apostrophes line up just so. Can you relate to this vision of hell?
I’ve written about perfection before, and recently my [...]
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If you haven’t read the old 80’s era creativity book, A Whack on the Side of the Head: How to Unlock your Mind For Innovation by Silicon Valley creativity guru Roger von Oech, you should. As von Oech describes it, the book explains how you can engage in mental sex – meaning “sex of our [...]
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I just read the saddest thing, a post at Men with Pens about “how to bribe yourself to do nasty things,” meaning all the things you don’t want to do as a freelancer. Things like finish an ebook, finish a press release, make cold calls, write a blog post.
Apparently, we should reward ourselves with [...]
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You know how you come back from vacation or the weekend at the same time relaxed but also all jazzed up and ready to roll? And then you re-enter the routine of daily life and the energy seeps out of your being until you are right back where you started with the same sapped-out feeling [...]
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Creative people who wish to create consistently face a double challenge: the challenge of following their dream while also facing a potentially harsh reality and bringing their work to life. Eric Maisel, creativity expert and author of Coaching the Artist Within, highlights the importance of maintaining a focused equilibrium between these two aspects of living [...]
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Deep in Chapter 8 of Eric Maisel’s Coaching the Artist Within, we come across a nugget on identifying and dealing with perfectionism. Maisel argues that we are culturally conditioned to value a high gloss perception of perfection over reality. Reality, of course, includes both glossy and matte, highs and lows, successes and failures, perfection and [...]
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Are you committed to the process of making art, or are you one of those creative types who, as Eric Maisel describes in Coaching the Artist Within, would much rather imagine that other (lucky!) people’s creative projects finish themselves joyfully and magically by effortless genius while you, meanwhile, refuse to get out of bed?
Dilemma: [...]
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