The boring way to be creative
Easy Read
“You’re often most creative when you’re least productive.”
This is a quote from artist and writer, Austin Kleon. It’s one of my favourite.
Lemme tell you why…
I can be a lazy son-ova-bitch. And that’s okay.
People often feel dejected, regretful, and unproductive when they don’t get stuff done.
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It happens to me almost daily. I’ll write a to-do list, arrange tasks by priority and tick one or two things off between reading articles, scrolling or housework.
Stuff that isn't really work.
I’ll feel like shit when I don't complete my list. Like I should have spent that time being more ‘productive’.
Well…
Productivity is for machines, not for people.
You can't force it.
A lot of us confuse “working” as doing something physical. We find ourselves with a fresh supply of free time and don’t know what to do with it.
Because we’re thinking about living every waking moment dedicated to the ‘game’. This is wrong.
It’s good to embrace the occasional moment of quiet. This doesn’t mean flipping the off switch in your brain and losing yourself to the online swamp of social media.
Instead relish your downtime because that’s where your energy replenishes. That’s where we make connections and where creativity flourishes.
You can’t force creativity. You can only lure it out by doing something mindless, unrelated. Something else.
What usually happens when I'm in cleaning mode or lost in an article is, I’ll make a connection with something I’m working on. An idea forms, I’ll jot it down, and begin to flesh it out.
This process wrote the words you’re reading now.
So really, I’m not wasting time being ‘unproductive’.
While my conscious is elsewhere, my subconscious is hammering away. Connecting things, processing knowledge, and when it finds something interesting, it’ll shoot me a signal.
Then I’ll babble “Oh, what if I…”
A good way to flip it is to think about how effective you’re being, not how productive you’re being.
Copywriting Master, John Carlton says, “One hour of writing after a 20-minute walk and an hour-long nap will be HUGELY more productive than six (or ten, or 100) hours of sleep-deprived “forcing it” work.”
Don’t think twice about reading some articles, taking that nap, or playing some games. Greedily guard your free time, and devour it without guilt.
Be boring to be creative. And never look down on downtime again.
okay?
