The Hired Guns Blog

Noah Scalin is the creator of the Skull-a-Day project. He’s also the author of 365: A Daily Creativity Journal and part of Another Limited Rebellion, a socially conscious design firm. In this new series for The Hired Guns, Noah talks about what he learned from making his projects and how its lessons can be broadened to help everyone get their creative side back on track.

On June 4th, 2007, I started a blog, posted a small orange paper skull on it, and wrote, “I’m making a skull a day for a year.” The entire process took less than twenty minutes; the hardest part was probably coming up with the name: Skull-A-Day. By the time the year was over, I had developed an international following, with tens of thousands of fans visiting the site every week, gotten a book deal, and begun to do workshops on creativity for corporations and universities. Not bad, considering that none of those things were goals of the project… initially.

Most days, my biggest goal was to just get through the day having completed a unique piece of art, however I could manage it. There were days that I finished mere seconds before the midnight deadline (this was imposed by the fans of the site); there were days that I spent nine hours working on the project (a bit of a jump from the initial twenty minutes); and there were days that I found myself doing things that I would have been previously embarrassed to try (yes, that was me with my hand in the trashcan on the corner of Broadway and 10th). But there was never a day when I didn’t make something.

“Did you ever cheat?” I get that question a lot. It’s a funny way to put it, really, since I made up the rules of my game and I could have changed them at any time. But the point wasn’t to make 365 skulls in a year, it was to make a skull a day, for a year. And the experiences I got out of the process of trying to pull off that feat were infinitely more important than the images I produced (admittedly, I like those very much).

What I was doing, without necessarily realizing it, was enacting something we’ve all heard at some point in our lives: “Practice makes perfect.” Only I wasn’t practicing the piano or yoga, I was practicing creative inspiration. And, go figure, it works for that too. I’m not saying I’m now “perfectly inspired,” just that the little bit of time I took every day to hone my personal craft built my creative muscles in a way that nothing in my previous 15 years working as a professional graphic artist ever did.

And it turns out that I’m not alone. After embarking on my own yearlong creative journey, I met tons of other folks who were in the middle of, or had completed, their own projects. Over and over I heard the same thing: the effort they made added up to incredible results. They achieved their initial goals easily and almost always sailed past them to goals they had never even imagined attaining when they started. Recently I interviewed musician Jonathan Coulton, who quit his job as a computer programmer to spend a year writing a song a week.

His goal? Become a professional musician. By the end of the project he was indeed that—AND his music had been licensed for video games and commercials! In the past year I’ve interviewed over 100 other people who have all had their own transformative experiences from committing to daily practice (you can check them all out here.

So what does this all have to do with you? What if you could reach some unimaginable goals by taking a series of tiny, manageable steps rather than being overwhelmed by a giant to-do list and a looming, but distant, deadline? Consider the gauntlet thrown down. I want you to take the challenge of making something every day and see how it changes your life. Don’t worry—you won’t be alone, and you won’t have to do this without help. Over the course of the next few months I’m going to give you more insight into my own experience with creative practice, share the tools that I have learned for generating instant creative energy, and introduce you to others who have taken the challenge.

In the meantime try to take just 20 minutes out of your day today for a bit of Unnecessary Creating, as fellow Gun Todd Henry of the Accidental Creative has dubbed it. Don’t think too hard about what you’re going to do, just do something that’s completely unconnected with what you are currently working on, and do it just for fun (and even better, do it away from your computer). Then leave a comment below describing what you made and how you felt while doing it. Was it exhilarating, frightening, confusing, inspiring? No matter what, I guarantee it’ll be better than boring.