Creativity doesn’t need to be complicated. There’s no need to pressure ourselves to find the next innovative concept to consider ourselves creative. We don’t need to keep one upping ourselves. We just need to keep exercising the muscle.
The act of creating is valuable on its own.
Now, am I telling you to not push yourself further? No.
It is good to push yourself further and look for your next innovative concept. But, satisfaction and value you associate with your creativity should not be dependent on your ability to create something new or amazing.
I feel like that pressure is where we can begin to drift away from our creativity. We begin to stop ourselves from creating further because the projects just aren’t living up to our expectations.
I have been blessed with two amazing little girls that I get to see grow and develop.
The beautiful thing about kids is that they don’t have any sense of creative expectations. They grab crayons, scribble on the paper, and show you what they created with more pride than any of us have felt in years. They want to show you their creation because they had so much fun creating it and because it came from them.
They picked those colors.
They put that crayon to paper.
They made something new by themselves.
They did that.
I feel like we need more of that within ourselves.
Pride in our work because we did that. You did that. That’s something to be proud about.
The act of creating is a beautiful thing.
Creativity is a muscle that needs to be consistently developed.
Enjoy the process of creating. Your satisfaction with creativity can’t come from the results. This is the same when it comes to physically working out at the gym. When you are results focused and not process motivated, you can easily give up on your progress because your expectations of results are not being satisfied.
When working out, you do not pr (personal record) every single time. A pr is a big moment. You have achieved something you have not been able to do to that point. A pr is a special moment. You don’t achieve a pr just because you want to. It is the result of all of the work that you have been putting in.
You can’t look at your creativity and get frustrated that you aren’t pr’ing every single time you are creating something. That just isn’t being realistic and detrimental to your relationship with creativity.
Your projects don’t need to live up to your expectations.
Get satisfaction from the process of creating. You will take way more reps that way. Then when you begin to create just to create, you will be surprised with how often you will end up pr’ing. And that will just be the cherry on top, not the ice cream.
Creative exercise recommendation:
Physical Magazine Collaging.
I can’t think of another form of creativity that forces you to take away any sense of expectations. The only control you have is in choosing the magazines you have access to. Besides that, you have no control over the images you can choose from. You have no control over the colors. You have no control over the size of the images.
You can only let your creativity run and see where it takes you. Grab a few magazines, a pair of scissors, a glue stick, and a piece of paper then go.