Why Your Creative Genius Escapes You Until You Make a Bunch of Junk

How to infuse pleasure and freedom into your creative process

Is your will divided when it comes to making things?

When you’re not creating, you idealize the process. You’ve had the intuition from an early age: there are countless books, songs, and more waiting to be born inside you. It’s never been easier to build your own empire.

Yet when you try to write an article, work on a song, or record a podcast, you feel resistance. A desire to be somewhere else. Boredom-flavored anxiety.

This creates a sneaky loop. In some ways, you almost wish you could give up your fascination with creating, imagining you could be like everyone else: satisfied to live a non-expressive yet basically enjoyable life of consumption, simple pleasure, and drinks at a bar with backless chairs.

But at a deeper level, you want more. You’d like to stay optimistic and excited about creating a body of work that fulfills you, even when the process feels tedious.

Yet when your work feels especially toilsome, you want to give up. But you can’t. Because then you imagine yourself at 50, bitter and stifled because you haven’t created what you thought you could.

Maybe you even see yourself on your deathbed, haunted by the 196-pound question of what adventures were on the other side of your creative impulses, if only you followed them without reservation.

You don’t want to wonder about the empires you could have built with your words, your songs (etc.), if only you had found a way out of the inspiration-resistance loop.

I’ve gotten into contact with a slower-burning, deeper-rooted motivation for creating with a simple shift in how I think about the process.

This shift invites you to experience motivation, not as something possessed only by a lucky, well-positioned few — but as something that naturally unfolds when you open to a wider range of sensations.

If you want to find ease, pleasure, and fulfillment in your work, become this kind of creator

You can uncover more about what might be driving your resistance by thinking about your conversational style.

There are two types of conversationalists: those who feel most at peace witnessing others, and those who prefer being witnessed.

In conversation, the witnesses love to ask open-ended questions that move the attention away from themselves and toward others. I usually fall into this category.

Conversely, people who enjoy being witnessed feel uncomfortable when they’re not directing the conversation, narrating their inner experiences out loud, etc.

Becoming creatively prolific is, in many ways, an invitation to get comfortable being witnessed without numbing yourself to the results that come from it.

When you’re prolific, you become willing to feel the impacts of being told your ideas are bland, clumsy, and just plain wrong, and to ruthlessly create anyway.

A lot of creators (myself included) struggle to be prolific because they recognize that witnessing feels much safer than being witnessed.

Instead of plunging forward and creating, we over-prepare, drown in research, and fail to move forward with our work until we have a very sturdy model of what we’d like to say. This can be effective, but it’s a slow process that usually limits our impact and our growth.

Many writers I love suggest taking a different approach. Instead of seeking perfection in every creation, they recommend focusing on quantity: making a ton of work, and letting quality become a natural side effect of creating in high volumes.

I’m intrigued by this idea. But when I approach it purely as a mental mindset shift, I still feel creative blockages, stuck points, fear of judgment, and the like.

If you face similar blockages, you might find, as I have, that becoming a more prolific creator is a choice you make not solely with your intellect but with your body.

To build a creative empire, make peace with this inevitability

“Any uncomfortable high sensation is an invitation that lets you know you are at an edge. Approaching this with awareness and consciousness — instead of reactivity — is where magic is created. Feel into the high sensation before reacting.” Carolyn Elliott

As humans, we’re attached to some sensations, and adverse to others. Our attachment to good-feeling sensations certainly has physiological roots. Yet it’s also a product of social conditioning.

Our parents, siblings, and others urged us to pursue certain socio-culturally approved sensations while turning our backs on others.

To become prolific, we must expand our ability to hold the sensations of being brilliant and loved by our audience.

And we also need to wholeheartedly welcome the sensations of being judged and ridiculed by them.

This is a somatic, experiential decision, not just a conceptual shift.

The process of expanding your willingness to hold difficult sensations is a central theme in the reality-shifting book, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power by Carolyn Elliott.

You can do this by expanding what Carolyn calls your “havingness levels,” which she describes like this:

“A havingness level is a kind of internal imprint based on past family and cultural conditioning that determines the amount of and kinds of sensation that you’re willing to feel before some part of you unconsciously decides it’s ‘too much’ or ‘too good to be true’ then goes into fight, flight, or freeze, usually for some highly fictional (but seemingly factual reason)…

In other words, the conscious mind ‘makes up’ a fictional reason to freak out, thus keeping the imprint intact.”

This idea can dramatically change the way you think about your inner life. For instance, in the past, when you’ve created something and later found yourself picking apart its flaws, you might have told yourself a story about being a perfectionist, constantly wanting to do better. Maybe you thought the work genuinely needed improvement.

While all this may indeed be true, you also could have become self-critical because your havingness levels for feeling creatively brilliant are extremely low.

The ambush of self-critique could have just been an excuse your unconscious generated to hold that imprint into place.

The under-worshipped art of being a junk maker

“If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you launched too late.” Reid Hoffman

Again, to receive joy or make an impact with our work, we must hold the sensations of being brilliant and the sensations of being gross, fraudulent creators of steaming piles of junk.

Why do we need both? Because if you focus on just one side of the equation, you can’t stay completely alive, awake, and present for either one: you’ll lack a strong foundation. You’ll leave claw marks on the good sensations, and throw your fists at the troubling ones.

Try this: as you create (or after you put your creation into the world), sit down, set a timer, and practice feeling the sensations of being judged, critiqued, laughably unclever, or fraudulent (whichever feels most potent to you).

Do this without reservation, and release any judgment or shame that arises as you do it.

This is the essence of the practice described in Existential Kink (which I urge you to read) but oriented toward creative hangups.

This positions you within the heat of paradox. The more you relate to these sensations — of being on the receiving end of ridicule, embarrassment, disgust, etc. — as simply part of the territory that comes with putting work into the world, the more you turn on the faucet of ease and contentment. And the easier it becomes to tap into flow states.

When you make peace with being a junk maker, you’re no longer waiting for other people to affirm your value. You’re discharging the emotional energy you’d otherwise waste on attempting to manage your reader or listener’s perceptions.

This works because you might normally feel averse to creating because you want to avoid devoting your full effort, only to be told you did it wrong, your work is a joke, etc.

But when you play with seeing yourself as a fraud, trickster, or junk-maker at the outset, you become less precious. You’re less sheepish with your actions. You just do things. And in that willingness to act, you find what you’re looking for, even if it takes several iterations.

When you’ve spent time connecting with the sensations of being a junk maker, a con artist, or whatever, try experimenting with the sensations of being brilliant, wise, and articulate, no matter what your audience reflects back to you.

Practice consciously holding different kinds of sensations as you walk through the park, shower, wash dishes, or during idle moments.

The more you think of personal transformation as the act of building an appetite for different kinds of sensations, the less attached you become to your ego as it now exists, and the more automatically you broaden your range of competence.

I look forward to consuming the junk you throw together.