Why should you read this book?
If you have trouble shipping creative work, this book is for you.
Shipping, because it doesn’t count if you don’t share it. Creative, because you’re not a cog in the system. You’re a creator, a problem solver, a generous leader who is making things better by producing a new way forward. Work, because it’s not a hobby. You might not get paid for it, not today, but you approach it as a professional. The muse is not the point, excuses are avoided, and the work is why you are here.
Creativity can feel spontaneous, magical, and – unfortunately, if you’re a creative professional – unpredictable. But creative success is not random. People who’ve achieved creative excellence adhere to a shared set of processes, practices, and attitudes. You can learn them too.
With strategy and discipline, you can harness your creative process and maximize your creative output. Thinking smartly about your intentions, your audience, and your skillset can set you on the path to lasting creative success.
Trust your process.
Don’t lie to yourself. You already are creative. If you have doodled in the corner of a page, hummed a song in the shower, you’ve established that you have raw creative capacity.
Creativity is the result of desire to find a new truth, solve an old problem, or serve someone.
The tricky part, which mostly makes people think they aren’t creative, is not having a map from creative potential to creative professional. But there is no such map. Everyone has their own path.
Bhagadwad Gita – “It is better to follow your own path, however imperfectly, than to follow another’s perfectly.”
Your path lies in your process. If you trust in your process, the path will show. Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.
But trusting isn’t easy. We’re conditioned to chase results, not process. We don’t appreciate the quality of a plumber’s process, only whether the toilet still leaks. And we carry this forward to creative work as well. We judge a book by the copies it sells, a musician by the stadiums they fill.
But fixating on outcomes can lead to shallow work pandering to the easiest available market. Your best work, instead, will come from figuring out your unique creative process. Once you have the process, the path to outcomes will open.
Yes, it’s hard to focus on process day-to-day-to-day. While strumming the same notes over and over, you don’t know if it will ever become a symphony. You don’t know if the daily paragraphs will ever become a book. You can feel overwhelmed by the process. Good news, your feelings don’t matter. Your actions do.
Your feelings are not in your control. Your actions are. The outcome is not in your control. The process is. So, stick to your process, even if you don’t feel like it. Your work is too important to be left to how you feel today.
Sometimes your process will result in a good outcome. Sometimes, it won’t. But every time you recommit to your process, you’re recommitting to unlocking your creative potential.
There’s a practice available to each of us—the practice of embracing the process of creation in service of better. The practice is not the means to the output, the practice is the output.
Your creativity is inexhaustible. Be generous with it.
Plenty of creatives make art for art’s sake: novels in a drawer, dance routines in the basement, canvases in the storage locker. That’s fine. But creative professionals make art for an audience.
If you want to be a pro, you have to be comfortable sharing your work. You have to ignore all the reasons stopping you from doing that: fear of embarrassment, perfectionism, whatever else.
Maybe you have a scarcity mindset. You hoard your ideas and insights thinking you won’t get new ones. And you’re afraid if you share, someone will steal them. That’s another lie.
Any idea withheld is an idea taken away. It’s selfish to hold back when there’s a chance you have something to offer.
Your creativity is inexhaustible, unless you act like it isn’t. The more you share your art, the more your creativity grows. The more you exchange ideas, the more you’re inspired.
Another marvelous hiding place is the strategy of “seeking your calling”. Only after we do the difficult work does it become our calling. Only after we trust the process does it become our passion. “Do what you love” is for amateurs. Love what you do.
Maybe you are hiding behind “I’m not talented enough.” It’s insulting to call a professional talented. She’s skilled, first and foremost. Many people have talent, but only a few care enough to show up fully, to earn their skill. Skill is rarer than talent. Skill is earned. Skill is available to anyone who cares enough.
Or, maybe you’re feeling like a fraud, an impostor, someone only pretending to be a creative? Yes, you’re an imposter. But you’re an imposter acting in service of generosity, seeking to make things better. When we embrace imposter syndrome instead of working to make it disappear, we choose the productive way forward. The imposter is proof that we’re innovating, leading, and creating.
We have unlimited reasons to hide our work and only one reason to share it: to be of service.
Selling your work doesn’t mean selling out.
Don’t confuse art with industry. Industry fills a gap in the market and maximizes profit. Art doesn’t fill gaps, it bursts open new windows altogether. Art creates change. No change, no art.
Selling your art makes it available. That’s not selling out. It’s what enables art-driven change to happen.
More selfishly, if you want to do your best work, you have to share your art. Sharing brings in feedback, which is key to improving. And no one gives more honest feedback than the one who has paid money for your work.
And maybe you’re afraid of the feedback – you don’t want to be vulnerable to negative criticism. Take inspiration from stand-up comics at open mics. They show up before sceptical audiences again and again, telling new jokes. Some land, some bomb. But each time, they improve.
You cannot improve in a vacuum.
Treat your art as a career.
Writers write. Runners run. Establish your identity by doing your work.
It may not be the job or gig that pays your bills, but if you want to be a creative professional, your art is your career. And just like any career, you have to put in time and effort to learn skills and strive to hit key performance targets to go to the next level. If you treat it simply as a hobby, you’ll never grow.
How to treat your art as a career:
Find your hour: Staying fit means an hour of exercise every day. Same with art. Commit to at least one hour of practice every single day. Wake up early or stay up late if you have to. But one hour, everyday, even if you’re not feeling “in the flow”. If you condition yourself to work without flow, it’s more likely to arrive.
Get paid: Predatory individuals and institutions may give you the idea that sharing your work for free means generosity. But remember, in our society, money signifies value and enrollment. Insisting on payment demonstrates your value as a professional. It tells your audience you believe in your work. And it brings you the financial freedom to grow your practice.
Get better clients: If you find yourself complaining about boring client work, don’t blame the client. You accepted them. The best artists work with the best clients. The best clients demand the best work. They want you to push the envelope, win awards. They pay on time. They talk to you about your work. Finding better clients isn’t easy, partly because we don’t trust ourselves enough to imagine that we deserve them.
Have a clear artistic intent.
Amateurs are afraid of setting a clear intention for their art. They’re afraid it sets them up for failure – if their final product doesn’t live up to its intent, it’s a flop. But art that has no specific intent can never succeed. Professional work has to be underpinned with intent.
How to define your intent:
Who is your work for: It’s tempting to say you’re making art for everyone. But that’s as good as saying you’re making it for no one. Push yourself to be extremely specific. If you find ten people who are your ideal audience, chances are they will spread the word about you and get fifty more, who will get hundreds more, and so on. It pays to know who your first ten people are – your minimum viable audience. And you can only find them if you know what characteristics you are looking for.
What is your work for: Art brings change. What change does your art bring in the specific someone you chose above? It could be to entertain, educate or provoke an emotional response from them. Whatever it is, be specific. Having this clarity preserves you from the tyranny of authenticity. A toddler throwing a tantrum is authentic, being herself, but if you ask her why, she doesn’t know. Your art needs to be inauthentic: effective, reasoned, intentional. That means it’s not personal. It’s for your audience. It’s generous.
There’s no such thing as creative block.
Can’t seem to get ideas or inspiration? Don’t know if you’ll ever get one either? Welcome to the the creative block. Every artist faces this, fears this. The good news: it doesn’t exist. It’s a cultural construct developed for amateurs to hide behind.
No one has talker’s block. Most artists can talk endlessly about their interests, influences, and intent. They have ideas galore. Yet, when it comes to actually delivering the work, they’re suddenly blocked.
The reason: perfectionism. It’s hard to start work if you want the final result to be perfect. It’s daunting. And it’s hard to finish your work because you won’t settle for anything less than the perfect image you have in mind.
You’re not serving your audience by withholding the good enough in expectation of delivering the perfect. Standards are good. Setting high standards allows you to feel pride in your work. But you can’t be proud of something that is never shipped.
The block vaporizes the moment you let go of your perfectionism and allow yourself to be messy and raw. Befriending your bad ideas is a useful way forward. They’re not your enemy. They are essential steps on the path to better.
If you can’t seem to write well, write poorly. But write. Write more. Write about your audience, your craft, your challenges. Write about the trade-offs, the industry, and your genre. Write about your dreams and your fears. Write about what’s funny and what’s not. Write to clarify. Write to challenge yourself. Write on a regular schedule.
Promise to ship, but don’t promise the result.
Embrace criticism within limits.
The best case scenario after you ship is: everyone loves your art. But let’s face it: that ain’t happening. Shakespeare, Kahlo, Mozart all had detractors. And so will you.
If the feedback is from a generous critic, someone who takes the time to engage with and understand your work and then point out which parts don’t work for them for what reason, you should embrace it fully and thank them for it. You aren’t obligated to make the changes they suggest, but you should give them serious consideration. The generous critic is actually a fan.
But most criticism shared in the internet age is useless, or worse, harmful. It’s useless because it often personalizes the criticism to be about the creator, not the work. And it’s useless because most critics are unskilled and ungenerous.
If the feedback is from someone who doesn’t care much about your work, you should feel free not to engage with them at all. Especially if they fall way outside your audience.
But just because feedback isn’t considered, doesn’t mean it can’t be useful. If they are booing something, they may be on to something that your faithful fans may be too generous to point out. You don’t have to engage the trolls, but you can silently learn from them.
Optimize for greatness.
Some creatives are happy shipping to a modest audience. Others aim for the very top. They aren’t happy with good, they want great. Greatness is never guaranteed, but with commitment and a bit of strategy, you can improve your chances:
Find your cohort: Most of the greatest artists didn’t work in isolation. Creatives congregate, and spur each other to do produce greater, groundbreaking work. When you’re surrounded by respected peers, it’s more likely you’ll do the work you set out to do.
Commit to your superpower skill: That’s the thing you do best, which makes you stand out in the crowd. Find delight in the exercising the parts your competitors find tedious. Focusing on this skill might mean neglecting other parts of your work. That is fine. In fact, it shows you are on the right track. Outsource many of the things you’re not very good at, so that you can simulate a level of sanity and professionalism to the outside world. Don’t try to corner the whole market. Find your niche. Excel in it.
Do the reading: Whatever creative field you’re in, read all the key textbooks, follow the key blogs, listen to the key podcasts, put in the hours to learn the best and latest.
Embrace constraints: As creatives, we are often tempted to think, “I’d do my best work if only…” If only the canvas was bigger, the budget was healthier, or the deadline wasn’t looming. In reality, only a privileged few enjoy complete creative freedom, unhampered by worries of pleasing clients or blowing through money. And the truth is, those constraints that we chafe at often spur us to do our best work. Smart creatives embrace external limitations.
Liked it? Buy the book.
Minakhi Misra 