Accidental Creative

Possibilities vs. Pragmatics

We’re in the midst of a blog series called Battle Lines in which we’re looking at some of the places in which artists draw arbitrary and sometimes destructive battle lines in our creative lives. In the last part of the series we discussed the battle line Proactive vs. Reactive and how we can often slip into a victim mindset, especially within an organizational setting. In this part we’re going to look at how easy it is to slip into pragmatics thinking as our primary reaction to creating solutions.

“Our aspirations are our possibilities.” - Samuel Johnson

I have an extreme aversion to “psychobabble.” This is the kind of talk that involves self-important sounding words that temporarily instill a sense of comfort, but don’t really inspire change over the long-term. Perhaps one of the reasons I’m averse to this kind of language is because I’ve so often heard it tossed around in “creative” circles. We somehow think that if we could only get our thoughts in the right place, everything else will follow. While I don’t doubt that a proper mindset is critical to healthy, sustained creating, it is also important for us to follow that with engaged activity and discipline. We must work.

But for some of us, this is where the going gets…what’s the word….yeah…tough. We have been met with disappointment, rejection or unfairness in our organizational life and as a result we have begun to limit our thinking to only that which is “practical” or likely to get “through.” For others of us, we’re not really certain of who we are and what we have to offer the world, so we tend to stick close to the rails and never venture out into the open. (Sometimes this is due to a fear of failure, but just as often it is because of a fear of success - can we sustain the success once we’ve achieved it?)

So the battle line with which we must struggle is this: how can we push pragmatics farther into the creative process so that we can dwell more on possibilities? How can we avoid making a decision too early so that we have more time to generate the right idea?

How can shun our fears and choose possibilities over pragmatics?

So often we’re unaware that this is even an issue. We move through our days solving problems, creating art that’s acceptable, earning our “keep.” But the fire in our gut has extinguished. There’s no longer a sustained curiosity for our work. We’re cranking it out, but we’re no longer enjoying the process. For people who tend to lean toward the “conceptual” end of the spectrum, this can often be attributed to a lack of an answer to the “why” questions.

“Why are we doing this? Why is this significant? Why am I involved in this project?”

Instead, we’ve grown accustomed to running with only answers to the “what” questions. (Which mostly involve concrete answers about the product itself.) We must recognize and make peace with the reality that this is the way that organizations are wired. Organizations are about the “bottom line” and always should be - that’s why they exist and there’s nothing wrong with it. The real tension emerges when the organization continues to demand something that we can no longer give.

In order to embrace possibilities over pragmatics, we need to change the stakes of the game. We have to decide what we’re really playing for. We cannot stand on the fence between, “the recognition is my reward” and “engagement in the process is my reward.” We must choose a side or we will live fragmented lives. We must live within the realities that organizations create, but with the deeper understanding that our identity is not determined by what is accepted or rejected by them. The org does not define us, rather we define our work by how we choose to engage.

If we immediately think pragmatics when given a task, we are forfeiting the creative mandate. If we default to what’s easiest or most obvious, then there is a good chance that fear has taken root in our lives. And this is the beginning of creative death.

Here are a few questions to help us wrestle through this:
1. Do you often default to your first idea when working on a project? Why? (It’s OK if your answer is “because it’s always brilliant.” We’ll address that later…)
2. Do you find yourself using, “yeah…but…” language in meetings or ideation sessions? How about in your personal creating?
3. Are there lists of projects you’d love to tackle but haven’t started for seemingly practical reasons? What are those reasons?

4. Are you able to enjoy the creative process even if your favorite idea is not ultimately “acted upon?”

We’re going to continue wrestling through some of these creative “battle lines” over the next few weeks. Again, the goal here is simply to unearth some of the hidden stuff that we’re often too busy to notice. The hard work…your part…is figuring out how to act on it.

In the next part of the series we’ll be tackling the arbitrary line we draw between play and work.

Play vs. Work

“What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it. Who was it who said, “Blessed is the man who has found his work”? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work–not somebody else’s work. The work that is really a man’s own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man’s work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.” Mark Twain 

Why is it that we feel the need to draw arbitrary lines between “work” and “play?” So many people, in fact, dream of working themselves around the clock for several years in order to claim the prize of “early retirement.” It’s thought that if we can only get all of this “work” stuff out of the way, then we could really enjoy ourselves and do whatever we want - take up a hobby, write our novel, etc. We have so cast the dichotomy between work and play that we are incapable of seeing them as two sides of the same coin - an expression of our engaged curiosity.

In fact, we’ve so taken this to categorical extremism that it affects our mindset about what we’re up to in the world. I often hear, “I’d really like someday to be engaged in helping orphans” or “after this I’d love to spend time mentoring young designers” or other types of “wishful” thinking. But, for now at least, we’re a prisoner of this thing called “work” until the “great someday.” We divide ourselves into two modes and assign a purpose to each. One is for our “passions and interests” and one is for our “work.”

We have confused “occupation” with “vocation.”

We each (hopefully) have an occupation. It is the way we make money, pay the bills and contribute to the economy. It’s our job. It leverages our skills to generate value for the organization of which we’re a part. It is largely extrinsically motivated (pay, rewards, recognition, etc.)

Though we often don’t realize it, we each also have a vocation, which is the unique contribution that we have to offer the world. It’s the central thing that puts a “fire in our gut” when we encounter it or engage in it. It is intrinsically motivated. It’s the thing that fuels our passion, keeps us moving forward and in some cases even obsesses us.

Vocation is typically much more aligned with our “gifts” than with our “skills.” Skills can be developed, but gifts are unique ways of engaging the world that cannot necessarily be taught. They seem to be innate. (For example, many visual artists simply see the world differently than other people. Others can be taught to replicate a shape or a line on a page, but the truly gifted visual artist simply has a unique way of seeing perspective, shape, texture, light, etc. The same holds true with the gifted musician. Playing a piece by rote is different than experiencing the world as music.)

The tension that causes us to draw lines between work and play is the tension between our occupation’s responsibilities and our vocation’s pull. We know what fires us up, but our day-to-day tasks do not fuel that fire. We feel robbed. Though some people are able to bring the vocation/occupation dissonance into alignment, most of us will spend our day-to-day activity performing tasks and engaging in activity that leverages our skills rather than our gifts. But when we begin to understand our vocation, we can cast our day-to-day activity in light of what we value as opposed to what we feel obligated to do.

The beginning of relieving this tension and reclaiming “work as play” is to identify our vocation. What is it that fires us up? What do we obsess on when there is no extrinsic reward? It is important to be a specific as possible. For example, a few years ago I began this journey of excavation and realized that underneath much of my passion is a desire to see people freed up to be brilliant. I noticed a pattern in my life of being deeply moved by stories of underdogs, people who had accomplished things in spite of the critics, and people who had taken extreme (though calculated) risks to deny fear and embrace possibility. This “freedom fighter” ethic had always been present in me, but I’d not identified it so specifically. Now much of my day is seen through that lens. My occupation does not always line up with my vocation as “freedom fighter,” but because I’m aware of this vocation I’m able to bring “who I am” to “what I do.”

Though the process can take a long time, I’d encourage you to make an attempt identify your vocation. Here are a few questions to help you get started:

1. When are you most “moved” emotionally? Cite a few specific instances. Are there any connections between them? What are the commonalities? 2. How can you better bring your occupation in-line with your vocation? Are there ways in which you could leverage your gifts in your work as well as your skills?
3. Are there any ideas you’ve had that you’ve always wanted to execute, but have been putting off? Do they line-up with your vocation? What would be the next step to get started?

In the next part of our series “Battle Lines”, we’ll be tackling masks vs. identity.

Proactive vs. Reactive

I’m starting a new blog series today called “Battle Lines.” I’ve been seeing more and more creatives struggling and wrestling with their creative lives not because of a lack of resources, skill or knowledge but because they are drawing the “battle lines” in the wrong places. As a result, they spend their time fighting ghosts and mustering up all of their strength to combat the wrong enemy. In this series, I’m going to name a few of the places where I see this happening and (hopefully) challenge myself and all of us to begin engaging on the real front lines.

The first “false front” I’d like to mention is that of being Reactive vs. being Proactive. This typically manifests itself most obviously in the form of victim language. For example:

“I wanted to [insert creative idea here], but they made me [insert organizational replacement here.]”
“I would love to [insert dream here], but [insert person] would never go for it.”
“It’s not worth the effort to [insert creative activity here], because in the end it simply won’t matter.”

These are all statements made from a victim posture. They are reactive statements. (Notice that I didn’t say that they aren’t true - they very well might be, but we still must recognize them as inherently reactive.)

LISTEN TO AN AC PODCAST ABOUT PROACTIVE VS. REACTIVE

The problem with this kind of posturing is that it’s essentially the same as allowing someone else to control your life. You are willingly living in a prison that you helped build. You are allowing someone else to limit your creative engagement and the fulfillment you find in your work. You are eating your own heart.

The journey toward engaging with a creative ethic begins by asserting that no person has the ability to steal your creative engagement. They may not like your ideas and they may consistently disagree with your vision, but they cannot steal your ability to engage fully in whatever you’re doing. You can still choose to be proactive rather than reactively acquiescing or folding like a cheap lawn chair.

As a word of precaution, please know that you cannot control the results of your decision to “reactively” withhold yourself from the creative process. You cannot “silo off” one area of your life and think that it will not affect every area of your life. If you choose to harbor anger, bitterness, resentment or grudges in one area of your life it will most certainly spill over into all other areas. If you think you can slack off creatively at work and that it won’t affect your creative engagement in other ways, you are wrong. It will catch up with you.

You must engage. You must make the choice to bring yourself fully to the creative process regardless of your circumstances or how unfair things might be within your organization. It feels good to turn everything inward and stew on negative stuff, but ultimately the only person you’re harming is you. You must assert ownership of your own creative engagement.

Here are a few practical questions to help you get started:
1. Are there areas in your life in which you’re actively withholding yourself? Why? What would full-on creative engagement in those areas look like?
2. Are you proactively creating anything other than what’s required by your work/career? If not, why? How can you begin to work that into your life?
3. Do you have other people in your life who share your passion for creating that you can share work-related issues with? Sometimes it helps to get the perspective of someone outside of the situation.

The next part of our series will be on “Possibility vs. Pragmatics” thinking.

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.