← Daring Creativity
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- [00:01]
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Welcome to five Minute Magic from the Mindful Creative Podcast, a short bonus episode sharing tips and insights from the pages of the book of the same title. Every week, I'll be sharing one or two ideas that can give you an actionable takeaway for your creative process, your work, your business, or just food for thought for the weekend ahead. These episodes share content from the audiobook and you can find the link to the full version in the show Notes below. Today we're going to talk about what it's like to be a creative in the 21st century. Why do I call it that? It's because we have access to more technology, tools and applications than ever before, and the overwhelming amount of choices and constant pressure to keep up with styles, trends and updates. It can make us feel like we're fighting an untamed beast. The key to finding our way through is to recognize that we are architects, our own creative journey. We can choose our pace, set boundaries and build resilience against inevitable setbacks because it often feels that creativity is an eternal lesson in mastering resilience.
- [01:14]
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Creativity in the 21st century what does it take to be and stay creative? Creativity is part of the human condition, as old as our race and a vital part of how we became so dominant to begin with. But this is the 21st century we're talking about. The world is coming at our tribal hunter gatherer brains faster and faster all the time. Stuff is blurring as it whizzes by. The ride is intense. We now absorb more information in one day than a medieval person absorbed in their entire life. This upsurge feels relatively recent. I definitely feel like I'm expected to take in and retain more information per day than I was when I embarked on my creative career in the early 2000s. What does this mean for us as creatives, professionally or otherwise? Do we have to accelerate our creative process or processes to keep up with how much faster humanity is operating? Do we even want to? On one level, progress is not only inevitable, but also incredible, and we adapt to it almost unconsciously. The blank page may be here to stay, but of the creative writers reading this book, I'd bet a decent amount of money that none of you use quills and parchment, or chalk and slate, or even typewriters. Sure, it's great to have an old school notebook and a biro for sketching ideas, but writing a novel? Give me a laptop where I can get my ideas down as fast as I can think of them. Go to a poetry night and you'll see more and more performers reading from the notes section of their phone, powerful home studio software for musicians, pre made templates and files for graphic designers. In that respect, one could argue there's never been a better, more intuitive time to create. Yet it's easy to get swept up in all the other stuff too. Unless we're hyper niche, it's fair to say that most of us broadly keep pace with general fashions and trends. However, subconsciously, because those are the clothes in the shops, the phones that technology has developed, the music that's current, the shows that are on TV, etc. It takes a special effort to become 100% out of step with your times. This unintentional keeping up also extends to those metrics we discussed earlier, speed, size and money. If we feel like everyone around us is being more creative more often and possibly earning more money and accolades because of it, it's natural to want to stay in step. That's what's on offer, what's being presented to us as what everyone else is doing right. Most of the time we hardly notice that we're keeping up. But increasingly, as the world continues to quicken and we're fed more and more information from every conceivable angle, it's like a treadmill gradually speeding up. And more and more of us are realizing that it's getting too fast for us. Even those who seem to be keeping pace are likely a couple of notches away from being flung off backwards. But we can adjust the speed of the treadmill if we want. We are the architects of our own busyness and we always have the power to choose. Think of it as being like one of those Jimmy Spice style all you can eat buffets that serve different kinds of food from all over the world. Want some spaghetti with a bit of tikka masala and some spring rolls? Fine. Want to make your play your work? It's hard work, but it is possible. Want to opt out and keep it to doodling for your own amusement? Perfectly valid. Want to do a bit of both? If you can comfortably balance it without booking, then go for it. And while we're mixing things up, I'm going to mix the metaphors and say this. Don't let society hack the circuits to your theme park and send everything spinning out of control like some villain from a kid's cartoon. You are the architect, key holder and operator. It involves taking responsibility and ownership for your decisions, but it also brings you empowerment. Meeting the Untamed Beast Too many choices, lack of rules. When we hone in on creativity, we find that to a degree progress shifts the ground beneath our feet. Yes, we do own the ability to choose and to define our expectations. But with the explosion in information comes more choice than ever before. We can do many more different kinds of creative work. We can be influenced by so many more different things. And we can share our creativity in many more different ways. There's Jimmy Spice's and then there's a buffet with every conceivable food in the world. I call this mass availability of choices the untamed beast. The multiplication of options we have at our disposal makes final answers so much harder to calculate. What you do, how you do it, where you share it, how you share it. We can find ourselves wrestling with a Frankenstein like monster that overwhelms our ability to harness our creative strengths. Now, let's be clear. Every human being has creative potential to a greater or lesser degree. Ask your kids if they've got any cool inventions. Or ask your grandparents for the best route into town. They won't have any trouble coming up with multiple answers. Creativity isn't the issue. It's not a negative force. It's there to be cherished, nurtured and celebrated. But creativity is intertwined with our humanity. And just like our humanity, it ultimately has to engage with reality to have any chance of success, materially or spiritually. We might have to tussle with our optimism, bias and inner romantic over this idea. But when the untamed beast is left to run wild, it hurts. Our creative outcomes and projects never get finished, succumbing instead to eternal tweaking. Some might be happy to keep editing the novel they've spent 15 years writing. The escape is enough. But if we want to truly embrace our creativity and balance it with our humanity, then I would argue that we should adopt healthy habits and boundaries with our creativity, as we would anything else in life that we want to enjoy. The benefits of creativity is an eternal lesson in growing resilience. Taming beasts and adopting positive habits takes a heap of willpower if you don't already know from experience. Creativity also requires building mental resilience. Not least are the inevitable criticisms and rejections that come with any attempt at self expression. To wholly embrace your creative mindset can mean choosing to dedicate yourself to your practice with the discipline of an Olympic hopeful. The kind who trains almost daily for four years aiming for that one shot at glory in an event that may only last seconds and be decided by an even smaller interval. They train to win, but they also learn how to process the struggle when the result goes the other way. Creativity is your gold medal discipline and ultimately you know or if you're unsure, you can work to discover what it entails. You can practice it at your desired level, and through practice you can build resilience. The knockbacks will always sting and the issues mentioned so far will raise their heads time and again, but you can learn to deal with them and get back up more quickly every time. If we nurture it, then just like our creativity, our resilience will continually evolve. So will our sense of balance as we get better at learning how much we can take and want to take, and as we learn to celebrate and be generous to ourselves and others on the same path without giving too much of our power away. This is perhaps the ultimate creative undertaking because it's one that we can never complete. Not because it's undefined or unrealistic, but because it involves working with the unfinishable project that is our humanity. In today's rush, we all think too much, seek too much, want too much, and forget about the joy of just being. Eckhart Tolle.