Accidental Creative

Setting Rails

Have you been excited about a personal creative project, only to see the excitement wither and die over time until you forget why you were excited in the first place?

If you are paying attention, then it’s likely that you have more ideas than you can execute. These ideas spark enthusiasm and energy, and we set to work on the details, planning in our minds what the finished project will be like. We spend a few weeks stewing on the idea, but in the interim something else happens: life, work, family, relationships, other ideas. We wait for the opportune time to get moving on our idea, but it’s never convenient, and eventually we hack away at it in our spare time, only to see the original enthusiasm disappear and the idea be replaced by the NEW greatest idea we’ve ever had.

Sound familiar?

This was my life for several years. For artists - especially those of us who create-on-demand - it can be difficult to pull together the resources (time, energy, focus, motivation) to move forward with personal, non-organizationally-mandated projects. I kept a whiteboard in my home office with a list of personal creative projects that I wanted to get to “one day”. I found that this list kept growing, and I was making little progress. In fact, over time I found that I was erasing earlier projects in order to make room for newer ideas for which I had more energy.

It was at this point that I realized that the principles that guide my create-on-demand work needed to similarly guide my personal creating. I needed “rails”. Every creative leader worth their salt knows that the better and more precise the “brief”, or the initial creative direction for a project, the more latitude there will be in the later stages of the project because there will be less time wasted on “what are we REALLY trying to do?” In the same way, I realized that in order to get my personal creating moving, I needed to set rails to give it some guidance.

I sat down with my list of potential projects and asked a few questions:

1. What am I really trying to do with this project?

2. What are my expectations (time of completion, quality, personal cost?)

3. What would success look like?

In the same way, I prioritized my projects so that I was only working on one at a time and I allocated my unnecessary creating time, (you DO have built-in unnecessary creating time, right?), to the projects according to priority. Then I ticked them off the list.

Now, setting rails does not (of course) guarantee creative brilliance. At the same time, I realized that simply executing on my ideas in a systematic way cleared up the dissonance that was created by the “gee…I really should do something about that” thoughts that accompany creative stagnancy.

So, since it’s 2009 and we’re off to a “fresh” start, think about how you want to approach all of those great ideas you’ve been sitting on. Set some rails, then get moving.

Ridiculous

Creating involves risk: risk of failure, risk of exposing areas of incompetence or weakness, risk of being misunderstood. But perhaps the greatest risk in our creating is the potential for losing faith in ourselves and our very abilities. There is always the temptation to alter our understanding of the past in order to reconcile it with our present understanding of who we are. There is also the temptation to limit our engagement in the present in order to prevent our view of ourselves from being compromised. It is a perpetual shell game, and though we think we know where the pea is there is still risk and doubt involved in picking up the shell, especially when the perceived stakes are high.

“For us moderns, perhaps, fear of being ridiculous in our own eyes is the greatest shame.” Dorothy Soelle, Death By Bread Alone

I’ve been thinking a lot about this of late as I’ve been wrestling with my own creative boundaries. The need to be profound is a terrible slave master, no? Each time we artificially elevate the stakes and place our very identity on the line while creating, we place another brick in the wall that will eventually become our prison. The fear of being seen as ridiculous, wrong, improper, silly, irrelevant, etc., keeps us from following (and trusting) the very instincts that give us creative prowess.

So my ambition this week is to be creatively ridiculous. (Maybe I’ll even declare this the week of “Creative Ridiculousness.” Is that a word?) I am going to try to ignore the impulse to “protect” myself and my identity while creating. I am going to follow my creative “gut” and move, act, be and create fully and freely. Want to join me?

iPhone Apps for Creatives

Thus far I’ve managed to avoid writing this post, but because I get frequent requests from artists and creative-folk wanting to know how I use my iPhone, (REALLY?!?!), I decided to give this one a whirl.

Participant vs. Contributor

Are you a participant or a contributor?

There is a marked difference between the two, and it mostly has to do with mindset. As creative pros, we’re not hired for our time or our physical presence or even our skills. We’re hired to contribute. To shape thinking. For the value we produce.

It’s easy to default to a mindset of participation, which is based largely on “being present.” But this is unacceptable and ultimately unfulfilling.

“But you don’t understand….no one values my contribution.” Not your problem. Or maybe it is, and you should look elsewhere. But it shouldn’t allow you to throttle your own engagement and self-limit. Your only job is to bring yourself fully to each circumstance, relationship and project. To engage. To contribute.

A participant asks, “what’s in it for me?”
A contributor asks, “how can we get this done?”

A participant asks, “what are the personal risks involved in speaking up?”
A contributor asks, “what does it cost us if I don’t speak up now?”

A participant asks, “what’s the least I have to do in order to satisfy my expectations?”
A contributor asks, “what would really ‘wow’ them?”

A participant asks, “how can I skirt responsibility if this goes down the tubes?”
A contributor asks, “how can we all share the load for successes AND failures?”

Life is too short for simple participation. It’s not worth the opportunity cost.

Contribute.

AC #132: Seth Godin on ‘Tribes’

AC Podcast #132 features an interview with Seth Godin on his new book Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us. In the interview Seth explains why everyone is now a leader and challenges us to stop defending the status-quo and to start doing something remarkable.

A few of my favorite quotes from the interview include:
“The system wants you to be mediocre.”
“The enemy is not piracy, the enemy is obscurity.” (quoting Tim O’Reilly)
“You are rooting for yourself.”

Learn more about Tribes at squidoo.com/tribesbook

So…have you read the book? What do you think? How do you plan to apply it?

(Subscribe for free to AC podcasts in iTunes or by RSS.)

 

 Seth Godin: Play Now | Popup

Identity vs. Masks

In the “Battle Lines” series we’ve been examining some of the common battle fronts in our creative lives. One of the places I’ve seen many artists get “taken out” in the battle for long-term creative health is on the front of “Identity vs. Masks.”

Thomas Merton, one of my favorite authors once said this about identity:

“There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular - and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”

Many of us move through life wearing someone else’s clothes. We produce someone else’s art. We make someone else’s music. We write someone else’s words.  We replay someone else’s arguments. We don’t have the courage and the conviction to stand on our own and speak our own thoughts and craft our own work. We don’t have the courage to say “I don’t know” and to make it up as we go. We are wearing a mask.

The pressure to wear a mask is palpable in western society. We value celebrity and success and, as a result, we ascribe worth to people based upon how “received” their work is or how “popular” it is. (Which is typically, by the way, arbitrarily decided by a few people in an office on the coast.) Or, on the other side, we celebrate people who publicly scoff at celebrity and work out their “anti-pop-culture” art in an effort to show how they are not a part of the “machine.” 

The  problem is that in these scenarios both the “pop” artist and the “anti-pop” artist are wearing masks. They are behaving in accordance with, or responding against, someone else’s expectations. They are not creating out of a sense of identity, they are creating in order to please or defy someone else. 

There is nothing wrong with creating to please. Most of us who hang around this site are create-on-demand pros, meaning that we create everyday to please other people. It’s our job. The problem emerges when we begin to identify ourselves by our work to the extent that we’re no longer sure of who we are or what we care about. We are wearing masks because we’re not so certain that who we are will be received. We reactively hide so as not to be found out.

The best antidote for all of this is - wait for it - unnecessary creating time. It’s critical that we have time to create for ourselves (and no one else) in which we can take on projects that fuel us, give us life and the opportunity to explore new means of expression. We discover ourselves and our unique “voice” as we act. We need to build intentional, structured time into our lives to express ourselves in new ways and to take creative risks where there’s a safety net.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

1. Do I seem to be stuck in a rut, doing well at work but not necessarily gratified by the creative work I’m doing?

2. Does how my work is received by others significantly affect my moods and ability to engage creatively?

3. Do I get defensive when others critique my work, or am I able to listen to their feedback and apply possible learnings without feeling the need to “position” myself?

4. Do I feel a need to always be right?

Remember - “cover bands don’t change the world.” It’s important that we take the steps to unlocking our individual creative passion and finding our unique voice. It doesn’t mean that we’re all going to be rock stars (thank God), it simply means that we all have something beautiful to contribute if we’re authentic, engaged and diligent. Work hard, be real.

A Bouncing Baby Series

Today we launched our new series called “Pace” which is about some of the basics of establishing rhythm and “intervals” in our creative life. As I was preparing to launch, I was reminded of something that happened a few months back.

Last Christmas I needed to make a quick trip to the store to pick up a gift certificate for a family member. This is normally a quick and painless thing, right? But at this time of year nothing is painless when it comes to retail. It was raining heavily outside and upon walking into the store I already felt like I’d braved the gauntlet at a water park.

I was not comfortable.

I was pleased, however, to notice that there were only two people in line at the checkout stand. I made quick work of navigating the kiosks and displays in time to claim the title of “third in line.” I thought I would be out of the store, to my car and into some warm clothes in a few minutes flat. I was wrong.

One person in front of me was trying to pull some kind of money-changing scam using clothing instead of currency. (At one point she actually tried to return the clothes she was wearing and use a 30% coupon to re-purchase them.) The other person decided that she couldn’t remember if she had a credit card with this particular store and asked the cashier to call corporate and do a credit check. Lucky for me, it turns out that she didn’t have one and she decided to open one right there on the spot.

As I stood there dripping and cold, I suddenly felt a familiar urge well up inside of me - the urge to assert my rights. It was the sudden compulsion to explain to everyone else in the store how petty my little transaction was and that if they would simply turn around and look at me they would see that they are clearly inflicting terrible amounts of pain on an innocent and clearly justified bystander.

I’ve felt this feeling before. Usually it was within an organizational setting when I’ve been pushing for changes or over-extending myself in unhealthy ways to get things done. In some of my darker days, if there was even the slightest sense of lack of support from the organization I would spin out into a downward spiral of victimhood and self-pity. (Hey…I’ve learned all of this stuff we talk about the hard way, believe me.) In my better days I would simply take a defiant and compliant attitude and simply serve up whatever was expected, even if I knew we could do better.

That was until I learned a very important lesson about success in any field or by any definition - it requires patience. Quickened, miracle-grow teams or careers do not have the same root systems to support them that patient, organically grown understanding does. Having patience in the creative process means understanding that no one thing is ultimately important, but that every single thing is ultimately important. In other words, when we begin focusing impatiently on results and become myopic in our focus we miss opportunity because our field of vision is too narrow. We need to run to opportunity without sacrificing experience. We also tend to judge ideas too soon because we’re more focused on outcomes than process.

There is a kind of patient surrender of our rights that must happen in the creative process if we wish to achieve brilliance. We are not surrendering our individuality, we are simply laying down our need to assert ourselves and allowing the process to take over. We might think we know who we are and what we’re good at, but when we learn to lay down all of these notions we find that we’re discovering ourselves in the process of creating our art.

As we discuss “Pace” over the next four weeks, recognize that any kind of growth, process, or progression requires patient observation. There is no such thing as overnight maturation. We must come to patiently enjoy the process. The gold is not on the other side of the world, it’s two inches beneath our feet. Start digging.

Re-framing What You Do

I was reading in this month’s Fast Company magazine about NBC’s 2008 Summer Olympic coverage. There is an interesting article about the strategy behind the use of sound and music during the “highlight” and story narratives that bring the games to life on the small screen. (NBC will be broadcasting over 3,600 hours of Olympic programming via its various channels during the 17 day Olympics…that’s over 8 days worth of programming for every day of the games.) What I found most interesting is that they describe what they’re doing as creating “cinematic moments.” They’re not just scoring video reels, they’re not just creating background music, they’re creating Cannes-worthy mini-films about life and struggle, ambition and glory and the oh-so-familiar agony of defeat.

While reading this I was reflecting on how important this kind of “re-framing” has been for my work and the work of many people I know. We’ve always thought of Accidental Creative as “freedom fighters for the creative class.” We are engaged in a battle to free-up creative people and organizations to be unleashed in their work. This little phrase has given us clarity in what we’re doing and helped the handful of us who make AC happen to stay focused on what’s really important.

The same principle can be applied to any work. Writers, coders (“code is poetry?” I LOVE Wordpress.org’s ethic…), designers, etc., can all apply this ethic to what they do.

Q: So…if you were to re-frame what you do, how would you do it?

The Shiny Black Box

One of the most (potentially) frustrating things for anyone attempting to create is dissonance. Productivity guru David Allen has described it as all of the “stuff” that’s floating out in the nebulous regions of our mind that we know we need to do, but haven’t yet addressed. In our creating, I tend to define dissonance as when the “why” and the “what” don’t add up.

In organizations this often occurs when there’s a break between client strategy and creative strategy. (In other words, when what we’re doing doesn’t line up with what we say we’re trying to do.) It can also play out systemically in our organizations when the “why” (what we say we’re about, our stated organizational values, the “main thing”) doesn’t line up with the “what” (our systems, our day-to-day work, the product we produce.) When this break begins to creep into our teams, we often experience the emergence of the “black box” phenomenon.

The “black box” is the (unknown, unseen) place where the “why” formula resides. Because we aren’t able to see the connection between cause and effect (the over-arching “why” and the practical “what” of our work) we assume that there must be some mystical, unknowable force (let’s call them our manager) who holds the key to understanding the universe. The problem in this situation is that it can be incredibly demotivating to live within a system where there’s a cause/effect disconnect. Ultimately it leads to disconnectedness and apathy about results, a lack of ability to generate ideas and see connections, and a culture of self-protection. (There’s often an unwillingness to take risks when cause/effect connections are tenuous.)

There are tons of ways that this can creep into our lives and orgs, but for now here are a few things to keep our eyes this week on as we go about our work:

Leaders: We must eliminate any dissonance that exists within the org. We must focus on making the “why” (the existence questions of the org) and the “what” (our systems, processes, work) line up. Drive clarity. Have effective feedback loops (both ways - I’ve often really stunk at this in my leading.) Make it safe to ask the “why” questions. Eliminate the myth of the black box. Stand in the gap for your team.

Creatives: Seek clarity. Stop playing the victim. (If we give a self-pitying mindset any ground, it will grow like kudzu.) Ground yourself in the 5 W’s (who, what, when, where, why) before moving to the “how.” If you can’t answer the 5 W’s, then stop work until you can. Have the equivalent of a “client strategy” in your personal creating. Be your own creative director.

Seriously, people. If we don’t get a grip on dissonance it will take us down. As my friend Brian always says, “small weed now, big problem later.” Over time, weeds in a sidewalk will allow room for water to get in. Over the seasons, water freezes and thaws, expands and contracts, and destroys the sidewalk. Do the little bit of work now to uproot the weeds now. It’s a lot easier in the long run.