The drought
Now this ????
Coming from a Design background, having a creativity crisis is one of those things that you experience sooner rather than later, you learn about in the very first phases of art school, it comes naturally, it comes surely, and either you learn how to deal with it and it makes you or, you know... it breaks you. Lost good people to the drought during my college years, they decided that it was going to be permanent and they ended up switching to other areas and pursuing other less (to their perspective) "creative" (I'll tell you why I quote it in a bit ??) paths or careers.
Now as far as I remember there were two schools on how to deal with a drought, there was the "well it's natural" kind of thinking, "it'll pass, it's part of the process" and then there was the "hiccups" way of thinking: you probably know what I'm referring to, but if you don't it consisted of tricks, advice, hearsay, legends, obscure methods, nothing short of consulting the Necronomicon (or the book of the dead ?? for the uninitiated): "jump over this, 4 and 1/2 times", "Lick the juice of a lemon/orange/cactus... when you wake up", "walk on your hands backwards and then...", "do a headstand and after you try to count in Hebrew".
Very funny, if you ask me, although I confess more than once I couldn't bring myself to rationalize staring at a blank page and coming up empty handed, taking coffee ?? breaks, being distracted by all things, talking a quick walk hoping that somehow that could change the absence of any sort of idea ??, and then maybe trying one of said common remedies. But the truth behind this is that creativity is like falling asleep, the harder you try, the less likely it will happen.
Now I'm sympathetic to all of those that tried a "non standard" or questionable remedy by listening to the "hiccups" school, because at the core of a drought, there is an intense fear, the doubt of "will the muses ever talk to me again...?". And the very nature of the subject makes for a hard to grasp, hard to follow theorization and it's also hard to rationalize. For a long time the notion of a drought or lacking creativity seems to me like something that the media shrouds in mist a lot, like... a lot. You need not to go further than any social media feed to see a bunch of "how to", "10 steps to", "you're missing the list of" for creativity, ad nauseam.
I've yet to listen to Andrew Huberman's episode on creativity and I'm sure he demystifies it and brings some structure to the whole think, hopefully ????. And hey I for sure am not writing the 10 things to boost your creativity list, like this is not that list, or any list, sorry ??. What I'm trying to go for here is to tell you that I know creativity and therefor lack of, and based on what you just read, you might be thinking that eventually I joined my former mates that surrendered their sketching books, DSLR cameras and colorful markers for tools of other non-creative areas, like that's why I ended up programming right? To be free of having to summon the muses, free of squeezing creativity juice out of my brain ??...
There's no smoke without fire ??
I think that there is a good point to be made that creativity is something that sort of belongs to a certain area, at the very least most general concepts hold a bit of truth to them, but for me, and this took years to discover, is quite the opposite.
When I started programming, back in 2015 I knew that it had a bad rep of being dull and you know boring, mechanical, tedious, repetitive, living hell for someone "creative" (or coming from a creative field) like myself, and for a couple of years it felt that way. And of course there were other aggravating circumstances like the fact that I started programming not out of love for technology, but rather because I needed the money, cause... hey look as much as I love being an industrial designer, I didn't see any good openings at the moment, and I know that is the story for a lot of folks in a lot of industries, that's probably the most common origin story for programmers, not gonna make a big deal of it. Aaaaaaanyway I started that path feeling that there was nothing new I could bring to the table, it was just that I was able to understand code and therefore repeat it to a client's contempt.
Now admittedly, at first since I was a one man show I was able to exercise my creativity by designing/mocking websites first, and then programming them.
Hey I even felt very creative with the things I'd tell my clients so that they would hire me in the first place and also creating a bit of advertising for my upcoming agency, I mean jajaja (yeah I laugh in Spanish ??), those were some awful times but laughter was abundant.
The mockups were a good place to "go out and play" later came the choring tasks of smashing snippets together (who misses Adobe Muse? not me), now as things went by, I started being less and less involved with the design aspect of things, my agency was growing there was room to bring a designer and then later when I needed to enter the market as a professional (again, no money, pandemic was starting)... well, I could've branded myself as an industrial designer, but I had no professional experience so I was again starting where I was when I decided to switch industries, definitely not stepping over that stone twice, now I could've branded myself as an UX/UI designer but the offers for developers were just so much better, and I already had a recommendation so I went with that, cause if I needed to define myself as the industry isn't very fond of generalists, I was going for the most profitable profile, now up until that point I still had a little bit of say on the design of the websites/platforms my agency was creating for clients, but becoming part of a bigger machinery well, even if it was a startup like culture, pretty much limited me as a gear in a conveyor belt and so all I did all day was programming and coding, coding and programming.
I stopped doing other things I considered artistic or creative, like drawing, painting or other things I enjoyed, not because I didn't want to, but because I decided up to go all the way into the developer path, and so I devoted all my time to play the part: I was reading, consuming, living and breathing courses, articles, anything I could get my hands on.
Mainly because I felt like a fraud, I had a title in my email signature that in my mind didn't belong to me, but I didn't say "oh well it's not for me", I told myself: "Myself, you're already here". I'll go ahead and try and fill these shoes I just got.
领英推荐
Eureka! ??
And little by little, my mind started shifting, my creative outlet started to present itself more and more, I think we all have these eureka moments where you're showering ?? and then you'd think of a way of solving or going around a blocker, for me, before coding it would happen all the time, by the time I was a code monk it would start to happen again in little bursts, and then bigger ideas, like not only solving a bug, but organizing projects, architectures and ways of semantically using developer artifacts, being presented with the same input over and over, having to resolve a very discrete set of issues that would arise again and again, the limits of my thinking became crystal clear, the rules were set and so I could, after a long long time, start to devise a strategy. Somehow things started to feel in place, I was able to think of creative solutions for small issues and problems, that part of me that was rewarded in that way started to feel fulfilled, I started thinking more in terms of technicalities and limited to the small (or virtual, I think of them as small because if I envision a field and players, the field is mainly my editors theme in my laptop screen and the players are the functions and constants that all get colored differently ??) boundaries of the projects I was working on. My mind started for the first time in a long while to have fun.
??
That was the good news, the bad news is that this happened to me I'd say about 3 or 4 years in, after I decided to become a programmer, nowadays on the good days I see my work as solving mathematical or logic puzzles all day, like playing sudoku professionally and get paid, on the bad days, like almost anybody, work feels like going into the mine without a rain of sunshine, but you know, the usual, nothing too dramatic aside the usual professional crisis.
But the good days oh man! And interestingly enough, once I started looking at my programming work as something creative and that needed imagination and it started giving that thrill you get when you fill a word in a crossword or a piece fits in a big puzzle, I also started to have droughts, creative droughts, where I wasn't able to see the whole picture, where the diagrams of a system and its inner working that would before just pop into my head are nowhere to be found. And so I believe that if creativity can happen for programming, it can definitely happen for accounting, insurance, economy, librarians, and other perceived as boring jobs or professions.
And to be honest I don't know how to replicate this, I guess people with a lot of time in their fields probably feel this way, that after a while, your mind understands that this are the rules, like in a board game, where you struggle to understand and see what the fuzz is about about the game and as you try to learn the rules but then after a while you start to have fun, you start to enjoy yourself, now admittedly this doesn't happen to all people that is exposed to a new game immediately, but with time and maybe patience and knowing you'll get there (I didn't know that I'd feel creative eventually could actually happen!) so that you start to strategize and to think long term to well, beat the others, or beat yourself. This has made my work so much bearable and then up to a point, enjoyable, I used to think for a while: "Well, this is work, it's not supposed to be fun, otherwise you wouldn't get payed for doing it", and also to be honest, is not always fun, but when it is, it's quite fun!.
I plead guilty you honor ????
Now, you probably caught me, I'm writing about a drought and creativity for a reason, 3 issues in and I'm already pulling this... yeah well, it was this or asking chatGPT, so far:
Luis - 2 ( or 3 if you count the first issue)
chatGPT3 - 0
Now before you leave, let me tell you about some other projects I have in store just for you ??
Let me tell you, this issue took more effort and I haven't even written the Spanish versions of 1 and 2!, I'll get there sometime, in the meantime, be safe, be awesome and we'll catch each other next time!