The courage to create

In the beginning, the earth was without form and void ...

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“We cured polio …

“We invented the computer …

“We put people on the moon …

No. “WE” didn’t!

We would have little of what we consider as the good and civilized life were it not for the special people who create the miracles we take for granted (*) every day:

• Clean water

• Indoor plumbing

• Central heating and electricity

• Plentiful food

• Trains, planes and automobiles

• Houses and schools and stores

• New knowledge (science)

• Tech-nologies

• “Treatments”

• Music

• Stories

• Images (still and moving)

• Add your favorite creation here

* (Of course, there are millions of people who are not so fortunate to have these gifts)

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, criticize.

The critic, who has usually created nothing of value or beauty or utility, looks down their nose (to build themselves up) and sneers at the extraordinary effort and talent displayed by those who create. Here is a famous takedown of the cynical critic and praise for the person who does the hard creative work (I have taken the liberty of changing the masculine pronouns and adjectives to gender-neutral ones):

It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong person stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends themself in a worthy cause; who, if they win, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if they fail, at least fail while daring greatly, so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.  — Theodore Roosevelt

While TR loved his macho persona (he was a frail near-sighted asthmatic as a child), his image of the muscular gladiator in the arena should not be taken literally. The heroic figure is a broad archetype of any person who labors mightily on their journey toward their intended destination. It certainly includes those who attempt the great alchemy of creating something from nothing.

You might notice we are experiencing a tsunami of sequels and prequels and retro redoes in our literature, visual arts and product development. This going back to the well to double dip as a weak echo of real creation is much easier and less risky than an attempt at something new. Investors love this safer approach and incentivize it. This is another burden the real creator must bear in our profit-driven system: the not-knowing whether their original work will ever see the light of day, let alone earn them recognition or a living wage.

Some say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Perhaps it is, as a backhanded recognition of quality worthy of replication. But imitation, especially if unattributed (can you say Midjourney and ChatGPT?) is intellectual property theft. It dilutes and cheapens the original act of creation.

The terror of the blank page

Everyone who creates something begins with NOTHINGNESS. They stare into the abyss of the white page, the blank canvas, the unstarted blueprint, the silent sheet music staves, the empty lab notebook, the unwritten business plan. And the abyss stares back with a chilling challenge:

Go ahead. Show me what you’ve GOT!

So in the act of creation, everything is on the line: your ego, your pride, your sense of competence and intelligence and value. No wonder creators often tremble at the start of a new project. No wonder so many suffer occasionally from a “block” of creativity, which is nothing more than a stress/freeze response to the terror of that existential challenge.

The greatest terrorist threat to creative production is the harsh critic that resides within, ever watchful, ever waiting to pounce and attack and shame and tear to shreds the opus in process. We must work to silence that disruptive inner voice and find a path to reconnect again and again with the source and wellspring and flow of our creative energies.

Eye on the prize

You can write the sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is writing in your mind now. But that takes a lot of waiting for the right word to come.  — Joseph Campbell

I had a client who was a brilliant musician and composer who had landed her all-time biggest gig composing a full score for an independent film. Problem was, she was completely BLOCKED in her efforts to write the score. She would sit down, write a few bars of music and then … dry as a bone, shut down, NADA! As the deadline for the project approached, she tightened up more and more, shutting down her creative flow to a trickle.

After several weeks of exploration, what we discovered was that while she wrote, she had the (largely unconscious) thought

This music isn’t going to be good enough. The director won’t accept this as the score for their film.

We realized that every time she had this pessimistic thought about the end results of her work, she interrupted her attention to the immediate present and the flow state in which she composed her best music. In other words

She focused on the PRODUCT and lost focus on the PROCESS

This is something that sports psychologists and performance coaches see frequently. An athlete starts thinking about the win/trophy and loses focus on the game they are playing. They take their eye off the ball as they imagine the prize (or worry about failing), and will lose the match if they can’t find a way to refocus on the NOW of hitting each shot.

Other words that capture this difference in focus are leading vs. lagging indicators of success. A lagging (i.e. later) indicator of business success is profit. People who focus too much on downstream profits are rarely successful because they are not focusing enough on the leading (nearer) indicators which are the things they should be doing each day to carry out the business’s strategy.

The same is true for managing a career:

My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film, it is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.  — Mads Mikkelsen

This is all relevant to every person working in any kind of creative endeavor. Successful creators don’t focus initially on the results of their efforts. Those are lagging indicators of success: the product, the prize. They focus mostly on the leading indicators: the process, the ball, which is composing their best words and music and scientific hypotheses and business plans. Staying in the flow of creating may not always lead to “success” (which has multiple moving parts, some of which we can’t control), but nothing else will!

For me, I suppose, it’s the process rather than the outcome that’s important. It’s all about the quality of conversation that I’ve been part of. I realised very quickly that the opportunities to spread one’s wings in this industry close down very quickly, and so I took little parts where I could keep experimenting, parts other people didn’t want to do. People would say, ‘You have got to stop playing small roles.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, why?’ I was just interested in the experimentation of it and not building a career. I didn’t know what that was. I still don’t.  — Cate Blanchett

All Hail the Creators!

Only birth can conquer death — the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.  — Joseph Campbell

Physicists (another band of creators) tell us that the universe trends toward entropy, a diminution of energy and fertility. So every act of creation, the birth of something new, is a defiance of that deadly downwards trend.

So to all you critics and cynics out there: stop your whining and complaining for a moment and imagine how poor your life would be without the fruits of creative work. Then express your appreciation with your words and money (no more “freebies”).

And to you creators (yes, YOU!): give yourself a pat on the head, a (gentle) slap on the back, a bouquet of attaboys/girls/non-binaries, and warm appreciation for all you bring to this aging universe and its inhabitants!

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