How to be more creative: A surprising approach

💡 This blog post is adapted from my Playing Favorites newsletter.

My cynicism and skepticism don't consume me. They're not MOST of who I am. I'm MOSTLY warm and fuzzy and gregarious and idealistic. I'm an optimist, which doesn't mean I ignore the bad, but it means I believe the good will win out.

I believe there's light at the end of the tunnel, and the light will push aside (most) of the darkness. Being an optimist is useful in my line of work, but so too is occasionally being cynical and skeptical.

Recently, my cyniskepticism (trademark, you can't have it) has been flaring up again. Everywhere I go, I find the same success story being told: The Legend of the Creative Genius.

You've heard the Legend of the Creative Genius before, haven't you? I'm sure of it. It goes like this...

A person starts their career doing a thing they didn't enjoy but which seemed like the "correct" choice (e.g. lawyer). After being miserable awhile, they decide to rebel. Looking back on their lives, it turns out that (surprise!) their childhood was littered with proof that they would enjoy this newer, more rebellious thing more than the older, stuffier thing, but then they lost sight of that over the years. Now that they're being their true selves again, they find success.

///BUT THEN///

An obstacle!

They go too big, too soon. Or they burn out. Or some unexpected trend or greedy corporation or villainous person tries to ruin them.

(Somber reflection, earnest humility, pithy insight-pithy insight-pithy insight ... soft music lingers ... fade to silence.)

(Hold silence for effect.)

(A little more. Aaaand you're in your feelings.)

(But wait: Perky xylophone music starts.)

Today, things are great! They've overcome that One Big Obstacle, and they're successful.

And not just successful -- they're ridiculously, mind-bogglingly, unattainably successful. They say words like "millions" and "billions" casually. They have 742,567 Twitter followers and follow just 1 person back. (It's their own company. LOLZ.)

They appear on How I Built This and The Tim Ferriss Show. As they tell their story, they refer to a Big-Name Industry Titan as simply Big. The interviewer cuts in. ("That's Big-Name Industry Titan?" ... "Oh. Yes. He's a friend. He's actually why I got into transcarmelized meditation teas. Anyway, Big and I were at Burning Man...")

The Legend! Of the Creative! Genius! (--enius! enius! enius!)

My eyes narrow, I shake my head, and I become old and crotchety until I'm damn near telling others to get off my lawn. ... and off my feed ... and out of my podcast player...

Because get out of here with that story, man.

It's not that they're simply "popular" that causes my cyniskepticism to flare up. It's because they aren't true. Successful creative people don't have careers or bodies of work that look remotely like those stories. The stories are whitewashed and warped to fit a narrative and appeal to the masses, and they're reductionist in their very nature because fitting their lifetime into your runtime forces you to omit details.

I get it. I create stories about creative people for a living. The pull towards a cleaner, neater, more linear career success story is very real and very tempting. But when an interviewer, narrator, or writer -- or the subjects themselves -- refuse to admit to the mess that was made en route to success, it has real ramifications for other mere mortals gazing up at the legends.

Because the legends become the model, and when people try to copy their careers to match, they inevitably get stressed, burn out, or quit. Or maybe they don't even start. All because they think the legend is the truth. But it's not. It's a myth. You wouldn't model your life after Hercules or Achilles, would you?

Sure, maybe -- and I mean MAYBE -- a few people did actually follow a nice, clean, linear path to success, but they are the extreme outlier. And by the way, they're not an outlier because they have some magical gift or secret insight, any more than they're an outlier because they read more Gladwell than you or I. Nope: they got lucky.

Otherworldly lucky. Trying to model ourselves after that kind of luck is like trying to fund our lives by winning the lottery -- except it costs way more than a few bucks to play this game. It costs years.

Actual, successful creators we admire are not the legends they seem. So what are they?

They're bad.

* * *

Being great at this work we do means shipping thing after thing, logging rep after rep, slogging through your practice each day -- which means you ship a lot of bad stuff en route to the occasional good thing. Those good things are then fuel to continue slogging forward.

If you consider this newsletter good (thank you, by the way), it's only because I've written 10x more bad things than good. Also, I haven't done this creator thing nearly as long as the "legends" appearing all over the media ... so imagine how much bad stuff they've made?

This is one of my firmest beliefs, and it is my sincerest hope that you take it to heart, right here, right now: The difference between people we admire and everyone else is they've made more bad stuff than everyone else.

Making meaningful things is a craft. It requires practice. It's repetition plus reinvention over time. As Ira Glass has said, the only way to get through the gap between your taste (what you can imagine creating) and your skills (what you can actually create) is to do a lot of work. You're going to be bad at this pretty often.

But, yanno, sometimes you won't be.

The Legend of the Creative Genius causes us to place certain people up on a pedestal, and I actually think that's fine. We all draw inspiration and energy from others. But if we're going to put our heroes up on a pedestal, we can at least learn what the pedestal is made of. It's not made of marble. It's made of crap.

To get to the point where they're doing work worth admiring, they did a lot of work that wasn't. On balance, most of what the legends made was bad, which means if we wanted to evaluate their entire bodies of work at once, we'd have to declare: they're bad! They weren't all that great at this creative stuff, save for a bunch of times they were.

And that's enough.

Amazing! We can all do that!

If we want breakthroughs like they experience, we need more mass behind us, pushing against the wall, in order to break through. The late nights, the messy drafts, the false starts, the failed attempts, and every single insight and idea and connection we make along the way -- it all matters. It all adds up.

It's practice. It's connected. It's the body of work that matters most. Grow your body of work, you add some good stuff to the pile. But mainly, you add some crap.

Any accurate assessment of a creative "genius" leads to one conclusion: they're not. In fact, it's not their genius so much as their practice, their willingness to make more bad things than most people are willing to tolerate, all while aspiring to be good. I think that is what separates them. And maybe that should be their legacies when we tell their stories.

So what are we waiting for? Let's start making bad! Aspire to make something great, but ensure you're taking one step towards it today.

Making anything good means making anything bad, and all our heroes are actually bad a lot more than we are. You might think of this as a cyniskeptical view of things. I see it as hopeful. Because anyone can do this. Anyone can make -- and eventually, if we persist, make something that makes a difference.

You will never live up to the legends, but then again, neither did the legends. And that, my friend, causes my eyes to widen, my head to nod, and a childlike energy to fill me, as I go cartwheeling around my lawn.

I'm optimistic.