The Secret to Creating More Work You're Proud Of

Tell me if you know this feeling…

You’ve created something you really like. Maybe even something objectively good (if that exists ;))

The creativity was flowing. You don’t even know where it came from (we rarely do) and by luck or skill or both you somehow ended up with something absolutely incredible.

Then you release it. People love it. You’re getting a ton of compliments.

And then, after a while, the feeling of doubt creeps in. “Can I do it again?”

As artists we are intimately aware of the fact that we don’t know where our ideas come from.

As Rick Rubin puts it in his book, The Creative Act, art is the original Source of creation flowing through you (paraphrased).

We express a small sliver of that original creative act through our chosen medium and unique perspective.

And that’s exactly the reason we start doubting ourselves when we finish something.

What if the well of creation, our connection to the original Source, dries up?

This doubt is specially vicious if your next idea kind of sucks.

The Big Cosmic Joke

In a weird, twisted way having created something amazing can make us doubt ourselves even more. It’s like the Universe is playing a big joke on us.

The doubt can prevent us from facing reality and make it difficult to start our next project.

We’re generating ideas - but they all suck.

This can happen because we’re comparing the finished product of the amazing thing we just released to the new idea in its inception.

We can’t see what it turns into. On your last project, I’ll bet that you took it step by step, and didn’t have all the answers in the beginning.

But for some reason we’re expecting to have all the answers beforehand this time.

As humans we tend to overcomplicate things. We’re letting our last project taint the new one. We’re not letting the idea be its own thing, we’re expecting it to be at least as good as our last one.

In my opinion, this is one aspect of being present to the moment. Let whatever’s happening right now be its own thing with no thought of comparison to the past.

In reality, there’s only a handful of variables that actually determine the success of our projects. Without perspective we can lose sight and make things unnecessarily complex.

Without perspective, we can keep adding things that taint the creative process.

A bee doesn’t care how good the last batch of honey was. It just creates a new one. In the same way, we need to let our creations be their own and come to fruition on their own timeline.

During the process, if we’re not careful, we start judging a project before it’s done as if it is finished. We start doubting ourselves and think unhelpful thoughts.

Are we losing the connection to creation that we so masterfully wielded on our last project?

Look for the gold

Our first reaction is to give up and go do something else and beat ourselves up for not doing our work. Don’t do that.

In stead, try to view it like this.

There’s a certain percentage that I’m going to find something good. It’s my job to keep looking until I find it.

Like a prospector looking for gold, I’m just testing some different things out to see what happens.

Separate your self worth from the action and result.

If someone looking for gold finds a piece of coal, they don’t start doubting themselves. They just look in another place.

In the same way, if you find something that doesn’t really work. Whatever. Look somewhere else.

Sit with it. Explore it a bit more. But don’t feel bad. Don’t let negative thoughts and doubt consume you. Just keep looking.

Sometimes we need to continue and develop the idea. Other times we need to give up on it and move on.

But there’s no reason to tie our self-worth into it. We just ran an experiment and it didn’t work. Let’s try again.

Now, we can increase the amount of gold we find in two ways. We can get better and more efficient at digging itself and we can dig more.

To formalize it, we can express it like this (don’t be scared if you don’t like math - it looks more complicated than it is):

L(S), the likelihood of success, or finding gold, multiplied by n, how many times you look, equals to V(G), the volume of good work you produce.

As stated above, we can increase the amount of good work we do in two ways.

The first is to increase the likelihood of success by getting a better pickaxe. Or in other words, we can increase our skills.

Learn a new music theory concept, deepen your understanding of color theory, attend a lecture about writing a good protagonist. All these are ways we can improve our likelihood of success.

Improving our skills teaches us where to look and how to increase our chances of striking gold.

The second is to have minimum delay between getting an idea and testing it.

Trying more ideas in a day is equivalent to digging for gold more often.

Some of my best ideas came from just noodling around on the piano when I had five minutes before I had to head out.

In stead of browsing social media, brainstorm ideas.

Now, how do we use this in practical terms?

Let’s say we have developed our skills to the point where the likelihood of finding an idea worth pursuing is 20% (in reality, it’s not a static variable - it can change on a daily basis, but the concept still works).

Now, we know we just need to keep looking and after trying 5 times we’ll, on average, have a good idea.

Of course, we don’t know our exact percentage of striking gold. But it doesn’t really matter. The right thing to do is to keep digging.

Eventually you’ll strike a vein of gold.

If you want, you can try to approximate this value over the next week.

Start by taking the amount of ideas you deem worthy to pursue and divide by the number of ideas you have generated total for the week. The result is your L(S), likelihood of success.

Keep digging and sharpening your axe

As we discussed earlier it can be incredibly difficult to not let the success or failure of past projects influence decisions on our current project.

I encourage you to try though. Let your current piece be all it is in its own little bubble and then see what happens after it’s done.

My challenge to you is to think about your art like we talked about above the next time you are idea generating.

You’re just a prospector looking for gold, and there’s a certain percentage that you’re going to find some.

Maybe spend some time getting a better pickaxe or hone your digging technique, but above all just keep digging.

Eventually you’ll hit gold.

Hit reply and let me know how this technique works for you.

We got this.

Dan