7 Laws of Creativity for Breaking Through Your Blocks
How to get inspiration and follow it through to your greatest work.
How to get inspiration and follow it through to your greatest work.
Being creative means being open to new thinking — to new connections.
To open your eyes and your mind wide, and tune into that greater frequency that gives you energy and lights you on fire.
But passion and inspiration are not enough to live a successful, creative life, where you create your greatest work.
The most useful thing for creatives who want to evolve from being an amateur, into a professional, is to learn the creative laws.
These creative laws provide the objective, closed constraints that allow your creativity to run wild. They help you balance your nature, turn your creativity into a strength, and something that fuels your life…
Instead of something that just leads to unfinished projects, dishonored ideas, and wasted potential.
So, in the spirit of living your most inspiring, creative life, here are the 7 Creative Laws I live by each day.
Creative Law #1: When you receive inspiration, you must act on it. Now.
Inspiration doesn’t wait, and if you wait to act on your inspiration… more than likely you’ll end up losing it.
You see, inspiration is not just a creative idea that comes crashing into your life willy nilly. It’s an idea that chose you, that knew you were ready to help become realized.
But inspiration is not just the creative idea itself, inspiration comes with the necessary energy to see an idea through from start to finish. However long that process happens to be, that motivation is paired with the inspiration.
And if you wait once you get a good idea that lights your mind on fire, more than anything, you risk losing that idea. Then, it will move on to the next best suitor who is a better steward of new creative ideas.
Many people trick themselves into thinking they will remember later, but in most cases, they do not. And by then, the energy that exists to help you get started and build momentum will be long gone.
So, when inspiration comes, prioritize it and follow that idea through from start to finish. 10,000 words at the moment of inspiration are easier to write than 500 words when you’re just not feeling it.
Creative Law #2: You must remain silent on the journey.
The second law is simple: never talk about what you’re going to do.
This law is second because it is the secret killer of good ideas.
Avoid telling others what you’re going to do as if each time you do it becomes less likely that you will ever finish the project. Because that’s what is happening.
So, never speak a word good or bad about something you are doing — until it is done.
The reason why is because talking about what you’re going to do, or that you’re doing, feeds the same part of your brain that goes off when you successfully finish a project.
So, you’re getting the reward, without getting through the hard stuff. Which is going to increase your sensitivity to resistance, and open the door for it to win over you and grow into procrastination.
Each time you tell someone what you’re doing, you change the incentive. Instead of being the pursuit of chasing inspiration, it becomes about social accountability, which is a very different source of motivation to pull from.
Like going from clean zero-point energy to depression era-gasoline — it’ll work, but you definitely don’t want to rely on it. And if you accidentally traded one for the other you’d be kicking yourself.
Creative Law #3: What you end up creating will not be what you set out to create. You will discover it. And what you find will be better.
Inspiration just tells us where to get started and in what direction to start in, but it is not telling us where we’re going. Or where we’ll end up!
That’s the joy of creative discovery, but for those who crave certainty, or who have to rely on their creativity for their income — it’s hard to not want something more tangible.
The problem is when you try to rush the process, jump to the end, or force the process to go any specific way — you will miss out on the best parts you never planned on.
The key is to stay open during the process and realize your first inspiration was just the first grape on the vine. So, follow the thread and get all the fruit you can. And the good news is, in many cases, when you do this, what you go on to make will be better than what you intended.
If not for the simple fact that it is finished, then because there are many things you will discover along the way, once you are in process that will improve your original inspiration.
That’s because when you sit down to do the creative work, you open that same channel that you connected you to the idea in the first place. And there are more ideas where that came from, which you can weave into one for your audience.
There are no mistakes in art. Everything works its way into the final product if only to help make more conscious additions later.
Creative Law #4: The effort you put in now, creates an effortless experience for them, later.
The creative process is the process of holding multiple perspectives at the same time, for a long time. It’s about accessing higher levels of consciousness and staying there. To remain open and vigilant, until you finish what you’re creating.
In many ways, the creative process is one of triumph over resistance.
Professionals, face resistance every day. They don’t wait for inspiration to come. They get started and overcome resistance ahead of time, so they are there — open and ready when inspiration shows up. Then it just comes right on through, like lightning passing through anything that will conduct it.
Willpower is the gauge of how much of this resistance you can overcome, and all of that effort builds up over time. Accumulating into an experience your audience experiences as a sensory flood — that you accumulated one raindrop at a time.
Remember: what is tattered for you, is seamless for them.
Enduring and triumphing over resistance is your primary responsibility to be a good steward of the creative process.
Creative Law #5: Originality is not as important as authenticity.
The fifth law is living by a lesson that all new artists must learn, often at a price, that originality is a fruitless pursuit.
Let alone, likely not possible.
There are only so many ideas in the world, and only so many of them have been written down. It’s unlikely for any idea to be completely original, especially considering people live roughly the same lifespans and patterns repeat ad infinitum — regardless of what century we happen to find ourselves in.
But still, artists stress over originality. As if their entire personalities themselves, aren’t just collections of the pieces of others they’ve loved their whole lives. As if the most profound ideas aren’t also cliches.
Seeking originality is an impossible task, as it is impossible to verify. Don’t mistake vanity for artistic pedigree. It is easy to accidentally be original, on the pursuit to clearer thinking…
But it is much harder to be authentic.
It’s easy to want to be someone else, something new and seen in a new way. As if, you being known for having had an original idea means you’ve added new value to the world.
When in reality, what people most want from you is not originality, but authenticity. Originality is simply what you most want from yourself.
Authenticity resonates with others because they know the hardest thing for you to do is consciously reveal yourself to others and be seen without hiding. Because it is also the hardest thing for them.
In the end, after overcoming resistance, no matter what you do — your audience will be able to see you at your most naked in anything you make.
Instead of seeking originality outside yourself, embracing yourself, your story, and being willing to embody that fully is the most original thing you can do.
Creative Law #6: Know the difference between something you make for yourself and something you make for others.
There are two reasons to make art: for yourself, for others. I count for the pursuit of the art itself as for you, because what ends up happening is you explore parts of yourself, your psyche, and your spirit through the art, and its impossible to commit yourself to the craft, without committing to being willing to be changed by the process yourself.
The reason this is important is that the difference between your intentions matters.
When you create for yourself, it’s easier to explore new ideas. To make sights you want to see, write words you want to read, create sounds you want to hear. And that process is inherently renewing.
While making something for others is a more selfless act, where unique inspirations can come through you in a very public and serving way.
Professionally, I’ve found it is easier to make my art for others my vocation because by having it inherently be about others, I experience far less self-sabotage. Because I know who what I am making is for, and I remind myself what it will do for them. Giving me the strength for two, to overcome resistance and show up each day.
While what I do for myself, is how I sharpen my skills to show up my best when I need to.
Creative Law #7: Finish what you start.
The final law is the hardest, but the most important.
Simply finish what you start.
If you fail this law, you automatically fail all others. Because your growth will become lop-sided. For instance, if you chance inspiration each time it comes — that’s great you’ll get many beginnings.
But if you don’t consciously finish what you start, you’ll never get good at endings. Which, big surprise, always comes sometime after new beginnings!
So they’re worth mastering, too.
And if you remain committed to just that, finishing whatever you start…
You’ll naturally become more conscious of what you begin because you know what that means, and what you’ll have to do. This will connect you more intimately with your limits as well as what you’re capable of.
And when you follow any idea through to its conclusion, remember law #3, whatever you finish will end up being better than whatever you started to make.
Follow The Calling of Your Creative Heart
I hope you enjoyed this article and these 7 Laws of Creativity that I’ve discovered in my 10 years living as a creative professional.
I’ve also found that when people think of creativity they are either:
A creative individual who wants to be more effective.
An effective individual who wants to be more creative.
The difference, I’ve found, is less about personality and more about consciousness. A threshold one crosses between these two dominant modes. And what is meant to be a rhythm and a daily journey, for many, is getting stuck on one side or the other.
Whichever side you sit on, the solution is that perfect balance of both not being too open, nor too closed. A balance between discipline and daydreaming.
In my experience, rather than being both at the same time — which is difficult, maybe impossible… I think it’s easier to simply know when you need to swing wide open and throw yourself to the wind and remove the limits on your mind. Probably, anytime you’re sitting at your desk.
And then the rest of the time, stand back and be a good steward of your little creative embers until you can see them through to their conclusions.
This is the only reliable way I’ve found for individuals to not only be able to hear the call of their creative hearts, by dedicating time to sitting down and hearing it… then having the tenacity, even boldness to follow them and see where they end up.
Want to learn more?
Living more creatively is only the beginning of living a more fulfilling, higher consciousness life.
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