Great work comes from a feeling of freedom and safety. We feel free and safe when we know we’re not required to produce great work.
The key to creativity sits within this paradox.
Almost all our blockages come down to fear. Fear of messing things up (an unacceptable action). Fear of not being good enough (an unacceptable identity).
This is totally irrelevant and misleading. There’s no need to fear.
The fear comes because we feel like we’re not allowed to produce something bad. Because it feels like we’ve only got one shot at each piece of work.
This is your brain lying to you! But it’s such a common and damaging perception that I want to debunk it directly:
When you’re engaged in creative work you get to churn out as much crap as you like. Over and over again. Huge volumes of the stuff.
It doesn’t matter in the slightest how good any of it is!
Start by producing piles of ideas that you’ll sift through later for the gold nuggets. None of the ideas have to be any good in themselves (though some will be). It’s enough that a few might contain the scrap of a spark that might form the core of a good idea later.
(Once you get going with this attitude you’ll create more ideas than you can possibly handle anyway. So it’s good that most of them will go straight on the rubbish dump)
Then move onto the next stage of the process and do the same again. Take those few most promising ideas and start to shape them a bit. Do piles and piles of this if you like.
Loads of what you come up with will be twisted and misshapened. Maybe it wasn’t as good an idea as you initially thought. Maybe it was fine and you messed it up.
None of that matters. There’s plenty more where that came from. Throw it away and start again. No attachment.
Take what’s worthy of further work and place it aside for the future. Toss the rest of the “failures” back on the scrapheap. You never need to come back to them again. Or, like before, you can melt them down to see if any new seeds of different ideas might have appeared as you worked.
Then have another pass at those works in progress that you kept. Polish them up to their final state. Some will come up beautifully. Lots will be… disappointing.
Again. No matter. Keep the good ones and put the failures aside.
This is how you create brilliance. You’re not afraid to fail and discard. In fact, Brahms went as far as to claim that what marks someone out as an artist is how much they throw away.
By definition half of your work will be below your average. And only 5% will be in your top 5%. How can you hope to make great things unless you create enough volume to allow the really good stuff to come through?
Not only does this give you more shots. But you learn with each attempt. And you get to try out things that ‘might not work’ without fear of failure.
There are at least two angles you can approach this from:
First is the huge pile of different ideas that we’ve talked about already. Filter at every stage so you’re not spending extra time on something that’s already obviously not working. And end up with only good stuff at the end. (Even these will vary. You don’t have to share all of them with the world)
The second option is for when you know you’ve got a good idea and you want to make sure you bring it into existence successfully. In that case you don’t need to spend ages getting your one attempt right. Or to restrict yourself to safe and conventional attempts. You can try again and again and again.
Think about the great artists who painted version after version of the same scene before they did the final masterpiece that now hangs in the gallery in pride of place.
They weren’t thinking they only had one shot. They knew they could take as many goes as they liked. That gave them freedom and joy.