Sunday 21 January 2018

The hardest part of creativity

I think the hardest part about creating anything is not trusting yourself to come up with something good. It doesn't seem to matter how many things you put out, and how much you improve, you always have this nagging doubt that the thing you are currently working on will turn out trash and you have no idea what you are doing. Having the best ideas often seems to be a magical occurrence, largely outwith your control, and that is extremely frustrating.

The natural reaction to this, for most people, is to try to nail down what makes you most creative and then try to re-create that situation or circumstances. The problem with this is that we forget that our mind is working in the background, churning away on ideas. It's doing its best work when we aren't having anything to do with it. In some sense that is the true genius, the real artist in all our creative work. It's also the part of the equation that doesn't sit well with creative people because they like to see themselves as the artist, they are the creator, not some part of their brain buried deep in the background. Why do we think of our 'self' as only our conscious brain? Why do we disassociate that ancient part of our brain from our sense of self when it is clearly so important in how we view the world and what we put out into the world as our creative message?