by Herbert Lui
A few years ago, I was asked for feedback on a marketing campaign. The tagline was, “Being a creator is a curse.” It felt relatable to me. When you try doing creative things, you’ll need to deal with incredibly difficult emotions. A creative idea might not work, so you’ll experience crippling doubt, from others and more painfully from yourself. You often compete, and need to adapt to constantly shifting business models. And then, there’s the constant constraint of resources.
In Make Your Art No Matter What, artist consultant Beth Pickens writes, “The most frequent issue with time for artists is the belief they don’t have enough time for their art practice or as much time as they would like to devote to it.” Artists with all sorts of different schedules, habits, commitments, family expectations, report this to Pickens, leading her to believe, “This specific time issue isn’t correlated solely to reality; it’s also linked to perception.”
Actively shaping this perception, rather than only letting it shape you, is a big part of what makes you creative. You need to actively create an attitude that enables you to do work amidst your circumstances, or even transcending it. Instead of believing creativity is a curse, you may learn to find lessons in the challenges to be grateful for.
“What we must understand about the attitude is not only how it colors our perceptions but also how it actively determines what happens to us in life—our health, our relations with people, and our success. Our attitude has a self-fulfilling dynamic,” Robert Greene writes in The Laws of Human Nature. “See this shaping of your attitude as your most important creation in life, and never leave it to chance.”
It’s much easier to find a creative groove when your attitude sets you up to do it. Here are three ways to shape your attitude to become more creatively expansive.
Turn it around
Being creative often comes with needing to deal with difficult emotions. Sometimes, you might wonder, “It’s too late for me,” or, “If only I’d done that instead.” Statements like these are signs that you’re dealing with a difficult emotion. For me, this mental chatter even comes up in the middle of the night.
Reframing these emotions is critical to find a state of creative expansion. A few years ago, I discovered an incredibly useful method of working through them through Byron Katie’s book Loving What Is. First, you need to answer four questions (which I’ve reworded slightly):
- Is it true?
- Is there a way to know if it’s true?
- How do I feel when I believe this statement?
- How do I feel when I let it go?
It’s important to work through these questions one at a time, in order. By the fourth question, I’m usually able to let a statement go, and I feel lighter and more relaxed. I can trust the process more, and I feel like whatever I’m doing is the right thing.
After responding to the four questions, Byron Katie suggests choosing a part of the statement and flipping it into its opposite. If my original statement sounded something like, “It’s too late for me to win,” I might try a few different ones, and settle with, “It’s too late for me to lose.” I’ll describe what that statement makes me feel or think about. It helps me shift my focus away from the challenges of the future, and remember all the momentum I’d built so far. (I write about this more in-depth in this blog post.)
If you’re wondering how you’ll make time to do this exercise, keep a paper journal and pen near you. The next time you want to open an app on your phone, open your journal instead.
Choose curiosity, not judgment
Developing good judgment is an incredibly useful skill. It can help you make observations and quick assessments. But being constantly judgmental comes with limitations. In imagining the judge as a person, Professor Betty Flowers says, “But for all his sharpness of eye, he can’t create anything.” What you need, instead, is to become curious.
In neuroscience, the predictive coding theory of brain function suggests that our brains are constantly making and updating mental models. We see what we believe, and we make judgments based on them.
If we want to make lasting changes to how we behave, we must also learn to rewrite these narratives for ourselves so we can learn to see differently. When we rewrite our own stories, we also update our mental models.
Getting curious means letting go of thoughts you believe to be certain, and considering their opposites. It involves asking questions or listening more closely. It means, generally, considering other possibilities.
This is good practice for introspection, as well. We are all participants in a social context. When people in our lives inevitably make their own judgments of us, we also learn to internalize these voices and narratives. These narratives can be extremely powerful, and shape how we perceive the world. Curiosity is the first step to considering that you don’t need to fit into your past, or the shapes of how other people perceive you.
Nurture pronoia
As we gain more life experience, we learn to brace ourselves for worst case scenarios. We often conflate criticism with intelligence. One popular book title suggests, “Only the paranoid survive.” However, simply thinking defensively with a focus on preserving yourself won’t help you get into a creative state of mind.
If you constantly behave with a paranoid attitude, your mind naturally closes off many possibilities and alienates people who might have been in positions to support you. Sure, you’ll expose yourself to limited risk, at the expense of practically cutting off all the positive reward.
Rather than immersing yourself only in the worst case scenarios, consider also the positive possible outcomes. Restaurateur Danny Meyer’s mantra goes, “What could possibly go right?” A popular poster phrases the sentiment slightly differently, “But what if it works?”
Both of these questions suggest a dose of pronoia, the idea that everyone is conspiring to help you in some way. It’s the opposite of paranoia. In situations where you’re not sure of the outcome, or how to interpret feedback, it’s useful to bias your thoughts in favor of positive outcomes. When you believe this, your attitude becomes more positive and expansive; you’re open-minded, mindful, and relaxed. (Dr. Richard Wiseman explores this in his book, The Luck Factor.)
One simple way to do this is to listen to your hunches. “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’” goes a quote attributed to Isaac Asimov. If you ever think, “This seems like a good idea,” it might make sense to chase the whim a little longer.
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Herbert Lui is an author and speaker whose work encourages people to embrace the messy, joyful process of creating with purpose and impact. His writing has appeared in Fast Company, The Globe and Mail, and The Fader. As the author of Creative Doing, Herbert draws from his years of practice to help creatives move through blocks, build momentum, and reconnect with the joy of showing up consistently and honestly. He writes every day at his blog and twice a month at his newsletter.
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