As a creative person who has worked on engineering teams for years, I got used to being perceived as “flaky”. You probably know that “creative” is not a synonym for “flaky”. The truth is that creative people are the most determined and organized people that I have encountered.
Creative people - whether or not they make a living from their creativity - have to be both determined and organized in order to exist in the world. While creativity can be highly valued in our society, often creators are not.
I follow several creators on Patreon (especially since I ditched Instagram a few months ago), and I noticed common themes among their practices. I think these themes can teach everyone a good lesson, not just creative people:
#1. They have systems, but those systems are constantly flexing.
Creativity does not come out of the blue. Every creator I follow has some kind of system in place that allows them to express themselves regularly. Most of them involve systems involving free sketchbooking and discipline around their sketching practices. But this doesn’t mean that their systems are brick walls. They all are open to trying new things: new mediums, going to new places, and taking classes among other things. Their systems are consistently being tested and allows room for trying new things.
#2. They recognize struggle and have a process to handle it
Creative people are not creative 100% of the time. A writer once told me “not everything is going to be a home run” years ago, and this lesson has really stuck with me. It has allowed me to be bad once in a while, and work through it. The artists I follow also allow themselves to be stuck when it happens. They also have a process to get unstuck, usually some kind of practice that takes them away from their work. It can be a gallery visit, it can be a roadtrip, it could be brainstorming based on bad ideas, it could be anything.
#3. They are constantly looking for better ways to do the tedious stuff
Most of the creators I follow sell their work through some kind of online store. This means they are doing a lot of repetitive work around packaging and mailing of their inventory. It’s amazing to me how much time creative people spend on these tasks, but I’m also struck by how they figure out ways to do packing and mailing as quickly and accurately as possible. This is where organizing systems really flourish: for example, the fewer drawers they need to open to get inventory into envelopes, the more time they have to create. I have also noticed that these tasks are also very timeboxed, also so that they can focus on creating.
I’d encourage you to take another look at the systems that the creative people in your life use every day and see if you can adapt some of their practices into your own. Maybe adapting one of these systems can help you make a breakthrough.
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