What haircuts are teaching me about creativity…
First of all, I need haircuts a lot. My hair grows real fast and so to look the way I like to look I typically gotta get to the barber once a month.
Back in the day, I would wait about every 6-7 weeks before going in for a haircut to stretch it out and save a bit of money. But I always felt better and more confident after a cut and decided that was worth a couple extra haircuts over the course of a year.
If I ever hit it big, though, I might just be there twice a month.
Where am I going with this? Find out on the newest Creative Changemaker
Anyways, having creative work is a bit like having my hair. You gotta be ready to trim it back pretty often in order to be on top of your game. If you don’t, it’ll just get out of control on its own.
What do I mean when I talk about a trim for your creative work? I’m talking about that segment of your audience that limits your creativity as you try and cater to their sensibilities. The excessive commitments that tend to accumulate over time. The chaos of what’s around you.
One of the first things I’d trim is about 20% of your output. Are you committed to writing three articles a week? A video every week? A song a month? Is there a way to pull back from about a fifth of this work?
I’m not trying to stop anyone who’s making this stuff from a state of flow. But I am conscious that being driven by quantity ultimately weighs down quality.
Last year, I was doing two short form videos a week and releasing two articles a week. It worked for me then, but I realized I really didn’t need to be doing all that. Trimming it down to one of each a week has allowed me to take my time, which has in turn improved the quality of my videos and left me with more time.
Two things go up as the overall workload goes down. The first is the quality of the work. You no longer feel like you’re just cranking stuff out in order to play catch up or to keep up with a self-imposed quota. You can pour more of your ideas and consideration into each individual effort.
This ultimately makes the process more fun. When you’re simply concerned about creating something the way you envision it, even if the process is really efficient, it’s a good indicator you’re hovering around flow state.
Don’t be afraid to look at your targets, your release calendar, or whatever rhythm you’re into and realize that the bottom 20% of it represents the least fun projects that have the smallest impact on your bigger goals. While there may be some value in getting in your reps, it’s far more common for these to be things that hold you back from your best work.
Another important thing to look out for that you’ll want to trim right away are time sucks.
Tasks that you find yourself doing very frequently that take a lot of time that ultimately aren’t really worth it.
Cut those out right away.
For me, the most common time sucks are habits that I’ve stuck with over time in the area of record-keeping. I tend to obsessively back up all of my creative work. That part is a good and worthwhile thing to do, as any past victim of a hard drive failure is well aware. The problem was the obsessive cataloging that I committed myself to.
By having such a complicated system of folders and sorting all of my photos and video clips, I felt productive, but really I was committing massive amounts of time for an endeavor that provided a really small benefit.
People more commonly tend to use the word ‘time suck’ to describe things like Instagram or Netflix or apps where it’s too easy to commonly get lost scrolling and staring until a whole work day has disappeared while you were distracted.
Of course, if that’s an issue, definitely look for ways to get rid of that. I’ve never exactly used one, but it seems like those app-blocking extensions have been helpful for a lot of people.
There’s one other thing to trim back constantly and it’s perhaps the scariest one for people. But to do your best creative work, you must be willing to regularly lose about 20% of your audience every so often.
I get why that’s scary. You work hard to gain people’s attention and support. Why would you lose them?
Well, I don’t necessarily mean outright dumping your audience. Usually. I have heard from some online creators that they tried to cleanse their follower list by removing the 15% least engaged audience members. A good portion of these were bots or people who weren’t seeing and interacting with their work anyways. Shortly after doing that, their engagement went way up.
So if that’s of interest to you, go for it!
But I think you also need to be willing to grow and evolve as an artist and a human in ways that might not resonate with your audience. You need to understand that when a person decides to follow you, it represents a decision at one point and time, and over time you will drift from that point. Perhaps you’ll drift in the same direction, but this doesn’t always happen.
Artists often work themselves into a place of confusion when they’re trying to appease longtime audience members, newcomers, all while evolving in a natural and organic way. This can sometimes trap people into creating from a position of fear or defensiveness, instead of boldly looking for ways to assert new ideas.
At a certain point, you have to realize that there are a lot of good practices and ideas, but if you try to adopt all of them, you’ll end up with such a full plate that they’re no longer all that helpful.