Motivational Monday: Can't Use It Up

[Link] Don’t Let Perfectionism Strangle Your Creativity

by Rob Bignell

Ever hit a moment of frustration when you just can’t seem to get a sentence or a passage to sound right? The result is a brain freeze. You keep working at the line, though, only to suffer through the penning of seemingly even worse lines or passages.

The problem likely is that you are overly judgmental of your own work. To a degree, that is a good thing, as it means you hold your writing to a high standard, and the result is you then produce above average pieces.

If you produce at all, of course…

Taken to an extreme, perfectionism can lead you to never finish a task through constant rewriting, procrastination, or not even writing at all.

Fortunately, there are a lot of ways you can overcome perfectionistic tendencies when writing:

Read the full article: https://inventingrealityediting.com/2023/05/04/dont-let-perfectionism-strangle-your-creativity/

Nugget #64 - Tug o' War

 

The creative needs the practical to endure. The practical needs 

the creative to add the excitement and energy to the lives they 

protect and support. Neither can make it without the other.

[Link] The Perils of Plans: Why Creativity Requires Leaping into the Unknown

by Maria Popova

“The job—as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy—of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.”

“Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind,” I offered in one of my 7 lessons from 7 years of Brain Pickings. Indeed, nothing stunts growth more powerfully than our attachment to the familiar, our blind adherence to predetermined plans, and our inability to, as Rilke famously put it, “live the questions.” Keats termed the willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity “negative capability” and argued that it’s essential to the creative process; Anaïs Nin believed that inviting the unknown helps us live more richly, and even psychologists confirm that embracing uncertainty is essential to creativity. And yet we cling so vigorously to our comfort zones, our plans, our knowns — why?

Read the full article: http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/11/11/dani-shapiro-still-writing-2/

[Link] Molly Crabapple's 15 rules for creative success in the Internet age

by Molly Crabapple

I'm a visual artist and writer. What this means is that I have done most things one can do that involve making pictures (as to making words, I'm far newer). I've drawn dicks for Playgirl. I've painted a six foot tall replica of my own face and carefully calligraphed things people have said to me on the Internet, then displayed it in a Tribeca gallery, as a sort of totem. I've live-sketched snipers in Tripoli. I've illustrated self-published kids books for ten dollars a page. I've balanced on jury-rigged scaffolding on a freezing British dawn, painting pigs on the walls of one of the world's poshest nightclubs.

I've made my living as an artist for eight years, almost entirely without galleries, and until relatively recently without agents. It was a death-slog that threw me into periodic breakdowns . I'm pretty successful now. I make a good living, even in New York, have a full time assistant who gets a middle-class salary, and have a book coming out with a major publisher. I feel so lucky, and so grateful, for every bit of this.

My success would not have been possible without the internet. I've used every platform, from Craigslist and Suicide Girls to Livejournal, Myspace, Kickstarter, Tumblr and Twitter. I'm both sick of social media and addicted to it. What nourishes you destroys you, and all that. The internet is getting increasingly corporate and centralized, and I don't know that the future isn't just going back to big money platforms. I hope its not.

Here's what I've learned.

Read the full article: http://boingboing.net/2014/11/04/molly-crabapples-rules-for-c.html

[Link] Inside the Box (People don’t actually like creativity.)

By Jessica Olien

In the United States we are raised to appreciate the accomplishments of inventors and thinkers—creative people whose ideas have transformed our world. We celebrate the famously imaginative, the greatest artists and innovators from Van Gogh to Steve Jobs. Viewing the world creatively is supposed to be an asset, even a virtue. Online job boards burst with ads recruiting “idea people” and “out of the box” thinkers. We are taught that our own creativity will be celebrated as well, and that if we have good ideas, we will succeed.

It’s all a lie. This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,” says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. “As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,” he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.

Even people who say they are looking for creativity react negatively to creative ideas, as demonstrated in a 2011 study from the University of Pennsylvania. Uncertainty is an inherent part of new ideas, and it’s also something that most people would do almost anything to avoid. People’s partiality toward certainty biases them against creative ideas and can interfere with their ability to even recognize creative ideas.

Read the full article: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/12/creativity_is_rejected_teachers_and_bosses_don_t_value_out_of_the_box_thinking.html?wpsrc=sh_all_mob_tw_bot

[Link] How to Break Through Your Creative Block: Strategies from 90 of Today’s Most Exciting Creators

by Maria Popova

What extraordinary energy we expend, as a culture and a civilization, on trying to understand where good ideas come from, how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, its mechanisms, and the five-step action plan for coaxing it into manifestation. And little compares to the anguish that comes with the blockage of creative flow.

In 2010, designer and musician Alex Cornell found himself stumped by a creative block while trying to write an article about creative block. Deterred neither by the block nor by the irony, he reached out to some of his favorite artists and asked them for their coping strategies in such an event. The response was overwhelming in both volume and depth, inspiring Cornell to put together a collection on the subject. The result is Breakthrough!: 90 Proven Strategies to Overcome Creative Block and Spark Your Imagination (public library) — a small but potent compendium of field-tested, life-approved insight on optimizing the creative process from some of today’s most exciting artists, designers, illustrators, writers, and thinkers. From the many specific strategies — walks in nature, porn, destruction of technology, weeping — a few powerful universals emerge, including the role of procrastination, the importance of a gestation period for ideas, and, above all, the reminder that the “creative block” befalls everyone indiscriminately.

Continue reading: www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/10/01/breakthrough-alex-cornell/