Build your inner creativity library
Plus, some criticisms on the advice to “just start”.
Must you act on your ideas right now? The notion to launch your work before you feel ready is wise for anyone with perfectionistic proclivities but, for everyone else, there is more to it. Sometimes, the value in a raw idea is not so immediately apparent. You sort of need to let it marinate over time, like you would your chicken dinner. Clarity, like chicken, tastes best after it’s developed its richness and depth. To take action too soon, therefore, might be the real disservice to your creativity.
Action without clarity is usually a waste of time.
In the interest of leveraging your innovation for its highest yield, there is real value in knowing when ambiguity will serve you and when it might cloud up your process.
Sometimes, it is totally okay to sit on an idea and not act on it. Watch them float around in your imagination like you’re cloud gazing. Eventually, you’ll end up with a stunning sky of shapes and colours. By creating your own sky of possibilities, your inner world acts as a rich library from which you can pluck new ideas from whenever you need.
Got a question on creative process, or how imagination might be applied in business and culture? Ask me something for it to be included in the next Your Ideas, Examined.
In recent months, I’d been attending events whereby a known author speaks on promoting their new book. It’s been more than one of these authors who reveal their creative process demanded they spend years finessing their novel before it is ready for publishing. (Such was the case for 2024 Nobel Prize Winner of Literature, Han Kang, who spent seven years writing We Do Not Part.) There is beauty and, yes, value in the slowness of a creative process. I think of the Milan Cathedral, which took over 400 years to complete, which would have required incredible collective foresight and trust in the ambiguity of imagination.
So then, where is this line between acting too soon or not at all?
When in the thick of the longview approach to creativity, it helps to look at periods of time in seasons.
Is now the season of gaining strategic clarity on what I want?
Or: Is now the season to test the market with little, simpler versions of my idea?
Or: Is now the season to go into winter hibernation and allow my ideas to gestate?
In a sense, this is a process of stress testing ideas until they are durable enough to carry sustainably in the real world.