You can’t hurry creativity. The most you can do is guide and encourage.
Just like a seed emerging from the soil it takes its own time. Your job is to provide the perfect conditions for it to flourish… Protect and nurture it… Then let it grow at its own pace.
Trying to rush isn’t merely ineffective — it actively breaks the flow.
It’s an artificial forcing of things that want to be natural. A “needy” and scarce state of mind where creativity thrives on a feeling of safety and being enough.
But when you let time do it’s work then magic happens.
Unhurried ideas will simmer and change in miraculous ways. They’ll whisper in your ear at night and tell you what they want to become. Or they’ll tell you which others they want to connect with.
Before you know it, your subconscious is making and mending from all the discarded “failures” and magical new stuff emerges.
Your best ideas don’t pop into your brain fully formed — even though it can feel like this is exactly what’s happening.
There are no truly new ideas. Things that appear new are either a rehash of existing ideas, or a gradual iteration. So to think you can jump straight to the end is naïve.
Your subconscious connects ideas like it’s doing a cosmic jigsaw. It’s dredging the new things you read, your past memories for material that might make up the set of pieces to work with.
Then it’s sifting through for promising ideas and trying them out. “I wonder if this fits here? No. What about this one, then?”
All this takes time.
Or you’re letting ideas and insights accrete gradually — one small step at a time. Like sediment at the bottom of an ocean settling slowly, layer by layer, into what will eventually become a new mountain range.
Rilke laid out the ideal attitude that we’re aiming for:
“Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist.
These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquility, as if eternity lay before them.”
Letters To A Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke
This is not easy to achieve, however.
You’ve got to fight the framing that the modern world places on time. Willingly step outside the prevailing production mentality and into a new perspective.
It might help if you give it a name — “Artist’s Time”, perhaps. And mark those specific transition moments when you choose to step out of the ‘normal’ world and into it.
When you deliberately enter Artist’s Time you could remind yourself that there’s no rush. That measuring things in terms of how long they take is missing the point entirely.
You could give yourself permission to put all that to one side and merely lose yourself in the process. Letting it take the time it takes.