How many different ways can your best creative work fall victim to your own ego?
One of the concepts I’m really fascinated by lately is the relationship between ego and the creative life.
There are a lot of examples of high-profile artists, musicians, and creatives who definitely give off signs of an inflated ego.
But in those cases, fame and success are just as much a function in the equation as creativity. That’s the harder item to isolate.
The creative process can be a personal and introspective one. To do honest and moving creative work, it usually calls for a little bit of soul searching and self-examination. Since these processes are inward, it’s easy to mistake the creative process as self indulgent.
But in reality, ego can derail creativity. like no other.
Your work will always be grown from the soil of your own perspectives, experiences, and cultural influences and there’s no denying that self fits into the creative process. But a lot of people end that thought right there and overlook the fact that creativity is also about connection.
What good are works of art if they aren’t connecting with a viewer? The creative process is also a relational one.
From making work that is so self-obsessed to lacking a collaborative spirit around projects that go beyond an individual, there are countless ways for creativity to get sabotaged by ego, and some of them might even look like mock humility.
I decided to outline some of the ones I encounter the most:
1) Obsessing over responses to your work as though people revolve around you.
Most of us have probably been here at some point, obsessing over view counts and engagement and even… star reviews.
We are probably aware that it’s an unhealthy habit, even as we’re doing it, but we’re human and our social evolution has us hyper vigilant regarding how we’re perceived.
When we’re in this state, it’s hard to maintain any sort of creative momentum. You enter the defensive part of your brain, which is the most conservative and least adept at lateral thinking.
The broader reality is that nobody really scrutinizes you the way you scrutinize yourself. A lot of the time, things that we anticipate will be our visible, embarrassing flaws don’t even get noticed by other people.
This is why most people hate the way their voice sounds in a recording.
Or why people often say they feel too disheveled for a photo even though they look perfectly fine to you.
Others are usually too busy paying attention to themselves and their own agendas to scrutinize us the way we’re worried they will. There’s some tragedy of disconnection there, but also a bunch of relief.
We can be way freer with our own creative instincts than we often give ourselves permission to be.
2) Paralysis due to a fear of critique or criticism
This comes from virtually the same place as the prior issue, worrying too much about the perception of other people.
Paralysis, however, strikes a little bit earlier.
Sometimes, worrying over how our work will be recieved leads to obsessively checking on other people’s reactions.
Other times it’ll stop us from even creating in the first place. This is perhaps the worst case scenario, as something that could be great never even gets a chance to make it out into the world.
This is an odd thing that often comes at the tail end of a successful creative project, feeling like you must have hit a stroke of luck or magic the first time around that you have no idea how to recreate. Again, though, a lot of this anxiety is caught up in ego.
3) Taking it personally
I noted in an earlier article how much I’ve been appreciating Ronny Chieng’s definition of professionalism. Not being emotionally knocked out by a subpar performance.
Of course you put a lot of effort into your work and you want it to succeed, but nobody bats a thousand. Knowing that you have a value and that you’re worthy beyond your work is key.
Feedback spans a wide spectrum, from kind to unkind, from harmful to helpful. I’ve found that one of the most valuable skills to have as a creator is to have a strong filter on your feedback so you know what to take to heart and what to dismiss. This is especially true in an internet culture of cheap feedback.
As humans, the feedback of others has a big impact on us, but being willing to hear that your work could be better and not feeling personally attacked is a sign of creative maturity.
It’s also helpful to take a step back and analyze your own feedback for how helpful it really is. Ask yourself things like, have I heard this before elsewhere? Have I heard conflicting advice? What level of investment does this person have in my improvement? Do they have the skills/background/experience where this is informed feedback?
Not everything is for everybody, so if you release stuff broadly, you should anticipate some by default. Whether or not you should make an effort to incorporate it is a whole separate question.
If you want to see how to really stop ego from derailing your creative life, flip it on its head. Do something that radically confronts your own ego. I’m sure that’ll look different for different people, but create like you didn’t care what people would think of you.
Ego can be a great inhibitor of creativity, but it doesn’t have to be that way.