This week we’re finishing up a three-part blog series on the “assassins” of the creative process. (This series is loosely based on a section of the talk Create Or Die: Thriving in the Create-On-Demand World.)
The third potential assassin of creativity in our personal and organizational lives is expectation escalation. When we achieve a level of success, we inherently begin to expect more from ourselves and the result of this is paralysis.
There are a few places these unhealthy expectations can come from:
1. Our own work. Once we create something great, we compare everything we make from then on to the peak of our creative career, right? This results in creative paralysis, because we’re trying to guide the project to make it match our expectations (from past work.)
2. Our peers/managers. In the same way that our own expectations escalate when we achieve a measure of success, others’ expectations of us can rise as well. The expectation becomes that we will perpetually perform at the peak of our ability, but again, this violates the rhythmic nature of creativity.
3. Our heroes. This can be much more stealthy, but often we will compare our work to the work of our heroes or the industry leaders and this can be paralyzing. Rather than simply throwing ourselves into the work, we begin with a clear expectation of what the results will be. This can be aspirational, but it can also be limiting.
In our creative process, we want to be expectant, but without expectations. We want to be asking questions rather than making declarative statements.
Now, it’s likely that all of us, to some extent, are experiencing these creativity assassins in our organizational creating. No organization is immune from them. If you are a leader in the organization, it is your job to stamp our dissonance, fear and expectation escalation wherever you find them.
But if you are an artist within the organization, it can often feel like many of these things are beyond your control. And realistically, they are. BUT…you are responsible for your own creative health and growth, NOT the organization. If you want to thrive, you must learn to embrace the phases of creative growth and begin to take your own growth into your own hands.
I love this quote from Benjamin Franklin:
“To the discontented man, no chair is easy.”
Engage and continue to grow. Act on what you can change, and you might just change a few of the things that seem out of reach as well.
It takes intentionality to engage with creative projects on our own time - they don’t just make themselves. In this episode, we talk about some disciplines that can help us creatively engage and get moving on our “pet” projects.
December 2nd, 2008 at 5:37 am
I’ve recently begun to realise the incredible importance of letting go of expectations in my creative work: The work itself has its own trajectory that may or may not fit in with my expectations and by limiting it to these I am in danger of missing the ‘beautiful solution’ that is calling to me from behind the shadow of the expectations I fail to let go of!
December 2nd, 2008 at 6:29 am
@Wildcherry, I love “the work itself has its own trajectory” and believe that you are exactly correct. Part of the tension of the creative process is releasing enough control that we allow for the connections that are happening in our mind but that we can’t perceive yet. It’s an intuition thing.
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:48 am
Yes! Its hard not to be a control-freak when we have high stakes riding on our work and yet the best creative work is done when we can surrender that control…A whole subject in itself
December 3rd, 2008 at 2:24 am
This is powerful stuff, here. And matches my experience exactly. As soon as my first novel was published (when I was twenty-eight), I thought I had to move right over from student to teacher. My family and some friends seemed to feel the same way, and I was mentoring people twice my age before I turned thirty. The problem was that I expected myself to have arrived–and there is no arrival, really no destination for creativity. In addition, my teaching has always been strongest when I come from the edges of my own need to learn. In other words, I teach best that which I barely know or that which I need to understand. This requires an expectation of process, not perfection, of journey, not arrival. Here, here to everything you’ve written.
December 4th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Thanks for your thoughts, Elizabeth. The amazing thing is that wisdom can come from a child or from a 60 year old, but it’s all in how we receive it. My children tend to go with the flow, and as a result they teach me more about the creative process than the volumes of books I read each year. When we layer upon ourselves the expectation of profundity, we immediately squelch our greatest asset: humble curiosity. My kids don’t try to be profound, but they also aren’t crippled by the need to have their words count for something.
One of the greatest quotes I’ve heard in a while came from a gentlemen I met with a few weeks back, Michael Hoxley. He very non-chalantly summed up much of this issue of expectations when he said, “when you have to be right, you dare not be wrong.”