Forget inspiration. Forget technical skill. Throw all those things to one side for the moment.
Sure, they’re important — but they’re also totally subservient to what really matters.
The most powerful ingredient of your creativity is not something you’re born with. It’s a habit you develop… An identity you choose to adopt…
You need to become a Finisher in order to produce great creative work.
That’s right! All the other pieces of the puzzle mean nothing unless you’re constantly finishing pieces and throwing them out into the world.
Finishing things quickly and in great quantity is the powerhouse that drives the creative flywheel. It’s what allows all the other parts to do their thing.
Feeling short of inspiration? Keep finishing work — no matter how derivative — and you won’t be able to stop a torrent of new ideas welling up inside you as a result.
Feeling your skills aren’t up to the task? Keep finishing work — you can’t help but get the reps you need to enhance your abilities that way.
Because that’s the first benefit of being a finisher. You automatically learn faster as a direct consequence of putting out lots of reps. It’s the practice you need to hone your key skills. Plus, the end results constantly give you vital feedback on where you need to improve.
Anyway, once that’s done, we need to look at a couple of deeper benefits…
The first is those ‘final decisions’ that you make right at the point of shipping a piece of creative work. These are the last things that need to be tied up before something can go out into the world as a finished product.
Most creatives avoid this like the plague. Their studio is full of almost finished pieces. And, although that represents a whole chunk of practice in some areas — practice in those ‘final decisions’ is completely missing. So when they actually DO have to finish something they’re woefully short on experience in an area that really matters.
Whereas you, as a finisher, have been lapping up this part of the job from day one — learning things that you can’t learn in any other way. It holds no fear or mystery to you. You make great finishing decisions and you make them quickly.
The second deeper benefit is that you get used to the emotional discomfort of putting your finished creations out into the world for anyone to see. This requires no technical skill whatsoever — but it still holds most people back. When you make a habit of finishing work, you’re building up the emotional callouses that allow you to create freely rather than being constricted by fear of whether it’s good enough or others’ opinions
This essay is itself a case in point. I’m a long way from feeling totally happy with it. I see areas I’d like to improve… Whole new angles that I’d like to add in… But all those are less important (for now) than finishing it and moving on.
Maybe one day, I’ll find a reason why I need to come back and create a perfected version of this idea. But, until then, all those desires to change, tinker, improve, are simply distractions from my identity as a finisher. So it ends like this.