The 5 simplest ways we kill our creativity
You are creative, and there is nothing else you can tell me that will change my opinion. Every one of us, no matter how rigid or dumb we might think of ourselves, we are a bunch of creatives.?
I know you know that we all know it. You have attempted to see the works of your hands and mind, how you can form a thing or two from nothing—having that natural elixir you can stare at every time to do wonders.
These times, you wowed yourself in the most astonishing ways you never thought about. It happens to everyone, and you must have felt eureka when you saw the results.
But then, along the line, you started doubting yourself, or maybe you stopped, that it wasn't good enough, and people would not like it. Or simply because you forgot how you got to this point in your mystic life.
How could you think about such a magnifying feat that lit you up? Something you shared with your friends, and they wowed just by seeing the results of your imagination.
The above is not unusual, and every day, we get creative pangs that reveal our inner abilities, the superhuman in every one of us.
But you aren't getting this every day. It's like you have the lows and the highs; it's the misbehavior of life, and it's okay. What if you can be creative and come up with your better creative self every day?
I'm not talking about voodoo here; I am talking about ideas that reveal your ability to the world around you. They don't have to be significant.
But something is hindering your bandwidth; you are stretching it that far and making vast streams of it. They are like a broken network; one time, they connect, and other times, they falter because they aren't getting the hit they are supposed to get.
You know this; you acknowledge that you should be doing more stuff that stirs and rattles your frontal lobe.
But you need to know why, what, and how you are getting the optimal hit required to build strong and consistent synapsis.
Your mental map is not crystal clear enough; something is happening.
You don't want this unreliability; you want constants. Here, the constant is Y, which is YOU.
The solution to your problem might seem trivial, but some are backed by extensive scientific research.
Hello Science!
You are way too much of an adult.
You have problems; I do too, but our problems are all the features of the adulting software. Like many others, the problem with this software is that one can't downgrade once you slowly unpack all the files.?
They are meant to stay that way, and as you get older, more update is required; you pay bills, get social, and raise these beautiful monsters called kids. There is no going back, no exit.
This is life, but something is amiss; you totally forgot how charming you were as a kid, free of all the burdens of endless meetings, noise, distractions, and obligations.
The child you were, played and socialized without judgment and at least had a free-thinking ability according to your mental capacity.
Good sleep was nonnegotiable after spending hours toiling with your friends in the carefree world, but now sleep is the cousin of death because, many times, no one knows what's running in your arteries, blood, or caffeine. You tell me, you adult!
Can you turn back the hands of time? Of course not, but one can cultivate the heart of a child.
You can be a child at heart; if that's hard enough, you must have the radiance of a young heart.?
Rigidity conflicts with your creative self so much that you don't know.
Being a child at heart means playfulness, but you ask, why is this even important?
Playing helps you relax and avoid the seriousness that often hamper your creativity. It's been documented time and over that when we are relaxed, playful, and numbers-free, we get the best of our creativity. Don't you believe me?
Daniel Kahneman would like to have with you.
Numbers, logic, data, are good, but logic is for reasoning, creativity barely reasons, and only after you are out of your creative stream can you add logic and reason to your creation; this is what I call "post-production."
Happiness lurks within childhood; this is where you ought to be, so embrace it.?
Overthinking
Creativity doesn't like overthinking because when the network of your thoughts hits, they come in different forms at extensive highspeed; it's a deluge, a tsunami that you can't control, except, of course, you shut them down, which is harmful.
It's harmful because they are often hard to recall; at best, when we do, they could be more crisp and coherent as we first had them, leftovers and stale.
In neuroscience, they say, "the neurons that wire together fire together." Indeed, when neurons fire and wire, I think of them as up to a boiling point, to the maximum degree they can achieve, like when you order a cup of cappuccino on a breezy November morning. If you are like me, such a cup of coffee is best enjoyed when hot.
According to an African proverb, Yam is best eaten when hot.
This is what I think when neurons fire and wire because when they fire, they are still fresh and new. They start eroding when more neurons keep firing; this is when you start losing that peak moment of your creativity.
The human brain contains approximately 80 to 86 billion neurons; imagine all that!
…The results were surprising: the prefrontal cortex, traditionally associated with thinking, was most active for the drawings the participants ranked as most difficult; the cerebellum was most active for the drawings the participants scored highest on for creativity. Essentially, the less the participants thought about what they were drawing, the more creative their drawings were. Manish Saggar, a psychiatrist at Stanford and the study's lead author summarized the findings: "The more you think about it, the more you mess it up."…
Don't Overthink It; Less Is More When It Comes to Creativity
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Waiting for things to be in order
Order is acceptable if you want neat, coherent, or obsessed. Order is how we organize the world to form meanings that we've carried on for years. Order is suitable for interpretation, presentation, and post-production, as mentioned earlier.
But it becomes a problem when we create because we know the answer already; creativity cares not about how you arrange your stuff, what pen you put in the right place, what color you chose, or what your desk looks like.
This isn't good because it eventually leads you to overthink, and then boom! You are back to crashing out with less to account for; what set in is procrastination.
And if you are obsessed with order, you will never get things done because there will seem to be no end in sight to how much you can clear your desk, arrange, rearrange, and fix. You can fix it for perpetuity and still be bugged down.
If you've lived in a house, you'd know the phrase, "There is always something to do."
Creativity dislikes excessive and rigid order because that is a dark tunnel that leads to endless places that eventually wear you out mentally.
From wanting to record a video or writing, you eventually find yourself updating your computer, which takes minutes; minutes lost are not something you can get back as a creative. It might not affect you much, but if you add one minute to another, they compound as you continue counting.
In the same vein, tidiness is for our post-production. Checking if everything is well written is when you are done and exhausted of your creative capacity.
A friend of mine once told me how she gets exhausted writing her book because she has to edit after writing a page, but then I asked her if she had finished the book, she said no, and then I asked again, Why are you editing when you should focus on creating?
She has a knack for putting everything in the right place; things have to make sense. But you need to remember that the same eyes we use for creating is most likely different from the one we use for tidying stuff.
Quoting Rick Rubin in his book, The Act of Creating," focus on creating when you can create. You can edit later."
I'm not advocating total chaos or a disorderly environment, as it hinders creative thinking and is overwhelming and distracting.
Of course, we can agree on meeting basic needs, for instance, having a working and suitable environment, food in your stomach if you aren't fasting, and water. If you are like me, I only think of food when hungry; I can't think with an empty stomach.
Introducing a bit of disorder or randomness into your creative process can foster divergent thinking.
Wanting excessive order leads to perfection, and a famous quote says, "I'm done better than perfect."
Getting prepared
I'm guilty of this act, too; you want to be prepared, feel the need to, or be at the right place when you express your craft, but I have sad news for you: your art barely cares about what place you are, what you are doing and on what day.
We often hear about preparation meeting opportunities, but far from that, your creativity can be without special preparation or effects, as I would call it.
Getting prepared takes away everything you are currently thinking, and of course, you have to get dressed to get to it; then, allocating brain power to getting dressed reduces your ideas.?
Ideas genuinely embody the phrase "opportunity comes, but once."
Haven't you learned lessons from your sleep? Or, just after waking up, when my mind is still fresh, the streams of ideas are stronger for me, but once there is a minor delay, everything vanishes, and it's hard to put everything coherently.
It's perhaps one of the reasons why journaling is vital. You'd be amazed how much you can put down in a journal if you are consistent with such practice.
I recommend having a journal beside your bed and every other place where you often get ideas.?
It could be in the toilet; none of our business; a draft is better than nothing. What's worse is holding on to a particular idea for too long.
Empty thyself
Let's pretend you've had great and different exotic meals for the past week, but somehow, you cannot go to the bathroom to empty your bowels; what do you think would happen to you?
I don't want to imagine the consequences; neither should you; it's unpleasant for you and your environment.
But for sure, what you will get is constipation. Holding on to your ideas for a long time may lead to mental constipation and mental fart.
Think about that for a second.
There is a limit to how long one can go without bowel movements; if so, then there is a limit to how long one can hold on to their ideas without letting them out.
In the same vein, holding on to your ideas for far too long is bad for your creative process and causes procrastination, hampers your ability to create more, and even more so, future works that might lead to masterpieces.
Indeed, you know that holding on to an idea for a long time distracts you and takes up a vast space in your head while exhausting your mental bandwidth.
Although I get it, you are only doing that for you not to forget. Or you want to think it through as most people would do. But you can also "think things through" If you have them written down.?
Put your ideas down where they are accessible, and you can quickly get back to them.
The more we empty ourselves of ideas, the more we create, and there is no limit to how much we can produce.
Sometimes, we are hyper, and other times, we are slow; this is life and its randomness.?