Falling Off The Creative Edge

In many career paths you or someone you know may have been faced with a challenging situation, a situation that pushed the very limits of their ability to comprehend what people are asking or requesting from them.

How do you handle this type of situation?

Simplistically, this is about new projects or new requests, not normal activities that are run of the mill, everyday work flow.

For me, simply because I’m the one writing this, it’s most certainly different for some others I am sure of it but the thought application could be linear to some effect.

The largest factor in this is “overcompensation” with a close runner up of “aesthetically pleasing”

The meaning of overcompensate: excessive compensation; specifically: excessive reaction to a feeling of inferiority, guilt, or inadequacy leading to an exaggerated attempt to overcome the feeling

The meaning of aesthetic, there is a couple of these but easiest is: pleasing in appearance

There are rare times that a technical or financial solution may not be currently available and you have to drop back to the next best thing, common sense or in the case of some, not common enough that it is regulated by your peers.

Combine “Overcompensation with Anesthetic” and you will get a very pretty solution that no one can accomplish or ascertain, that’s not saying that it’s impossible but the perception of it initially may seem to be shocking to a point where someone may immediately lose interest it.

This is falling off of the creative edge…

I am a true believer of the K.I.S.S. method, “Keep It Simple Stupid”, but have often gone over that edge myself and never noticed it until I was in the middle of trying to recreate something that should have never been created in the first place.

Processes and systems are deadly for this, understanding where things go wrong and putting a fix in place can easily turn into “reinvention”, possible change of logic or the simple back away and take a deep breath before approaching. I’ve often wondered where I went wrong or how could my brain continue to think this was a good idea and then suddenly it was clear, this is not going to work. Getting to the point of not admitting that it wouldn’t work is the often harder part of the entire situation. It takes a large amount of confidence in yourself to start over with a clean slate and continue to put hammer to the nail until you get it where it’s understandable and digestible.

Don’t feel bad, that’s makes you human… 

Image Copyright: Brian D. Colwell 2015