It’s Not Creative Until It’s Finished

It’s easy to get started. To have lots of crazy ideas that you might do something with.

Or maybe you half start them. Then leave them around gathering dust. Waiting for you to return later with fresh inspiration. 

But that’s the easy part. Anyone can have some ideas and talk about how great they’ll be once they’re finished.

It’s actually finishing them that’s hard. Especially once the initial energy has burnt off.

But that’s the point when you finally get to call yourself creative. Because everything before that is just table stakes.

No thing is creative until it IS a thing. Until it’s done.

That means you’ve got to decide which ideas are worth pursuing and which ones you drop. And then polish your selections until they gleam.

Each of these steps involves tough and irrevocable decisions. That’s why it’s so tempting to stop before you reach this point.

But when you avoid these tough decisions you’re doing nothing more than piling up idea after incomplete idea in a tangled heap.

(For me, this is typically because I don’t want to risk losing any aspects that might be good.)

You might find that you try and convince yourself that this is retaining more potential creativity. Because you’re not restricting the infinite number of possible directions that each idea could take.

But in fact you’re doing the opposite. You’re deliberately blocking anything real from coming into the world.

You’re refusing to let the idea to be born. Sure, it may contain an infinite number of possibilities — but you’re denying all of them the chance to become an actual thing.

It’s not REAL. It’s not alive. Not until you decide to finish it.

Yes, getting it finished is often slow, painful, and hard.

It means that you’ve lost a lot — much more than you’ve gained. Because you’ve gone from infinite possibility down to a single, inevitably flawed choice.

But you have nothing until you do this. Nothing real at least.