Next Monday, October 3, Noah Scalin will teach a Hired Guns Academy class on ways to stay creatively productive.
Are you a perfectionist like me? If you aren’t, I can almost guarantee your company or boss would like you to be one. This is a shame, because perfectionism is probably the biggest roadblock to innovation that you will ever encounter. In fact, letting go of perfectionism, or as I like to call it, preciousness, is the key to unlocking your creative potential.
Over the years we’ve been taught that it’s unacceptable to try out new things that could potentially fail because they will:
A. Waste Time
B. Waste Money
C. Get You Fired
D. All of The Above
So we’ve gotten into the habit of working safely within our comfort zones in order to avoid creating anything that’s less than perfect. This is fine for just getting by, but terrible for moving forward.
We also have a tendency to fall in love with the things we make, worrying and fussing over them until all of the spontaneous joy behind their initial creation has been meticulously scrubbed away. By then, we end up with something that we’re so heavily invested in that we’re devastated if it doesn’t succeed — and we’re usually left without any alternative solutions to boot.
So how do you break out of these bad habits?
In my case, committing to making skulls every day for a year solved the problem for me. I was forced to make a difficult choice on a regular basis: do I share work that isn’t exactly right or do I let down my audience by missing a day? Again and again I chose to post my work, even when I was worried that it wasn’t up to my own personal creative standards. And you know what? I rarely heard something negative about it; in fact, more often than not, I got an extremely positive response to things that I never would have shared had I not felt compelled to do so.
In one case I rearranged a map of the United States into a skull. After I was finished I realized I had left out Alaska and Hawaii, because I had been only working with a map of the contiguous states. It was too late to go back and try to fit them in, so I regretfully posted the piece on day 10 of the project. And lo and behold it got the biggest response of anything I had created thus far!
The United Skull of America was so popular, that it inspired people all over the world to make their own versions and I even ended up making a T-shirt of it. Its continued popularity eventually inspired me to finally add in Alaska and Hawaii several years later. The United Skull of America II has since ended up not only on T-shirts, but also as a limited edition poster as well a ten-foot-tall art installation that’s been shown in several galleries as well as Chicago’s International Museum of Surgical Science. Not bad for a piece that might not have ever been seen at all if I’d given up on it when I didn’t get it perfect the first time.
And that’s just one example out of dozens of times when I benefited from committing to producing work in quantity rather than worrying so much about quality. In fact, I now like to think of my entire project as just a year of first drafts inspired by a lack of preciousness that I can return to again and again for inspiration and as source materials for both personal and client work.
So why not take on a version of the 365 challenge for yourself? Maybe just commit to creating something every day for the next month and see what letting go of preciousness can do for you. Just remember, when it comes to creativity there are no mistakes, only unexpected results.
