You’re killing your creativity, and I want you to stop

The top 3 bad habits of blocked artists and realistic, tried-and-true ways to work around them

Let me preface this by saying, this is not your average habit-changing article. This is the only thing that got me out of a 2-year creative block and back to painting and writing daily. With that said, let’s begin!

Picture this: you woke up earlier than usual, like all these self-help blogs told you to, and went out for a walk. All the nature, the nice people at the cafe, and the general ‘god-what-a-lovely-day’ of it all really got you pumped, so you went home and sat at your laptop, ready to write.

But then Medium tells you there’s new articles curated just for you, so of course, you do that deranged thing of trying to see what othert poeple are up to.

What is the pulse of the morning?

That’s when your face drops: Eve Arnold tells you how she got 130,000+ eyeballs on her work by just birthing 2 articles daily (she adds, nonchalantly, with little effort). And now you’re focused on metrics, SEOs, and how to make it in the media. That, knowing full well you were only sitting down to work on a passion project, you decide nothing will ever be perfect enough to compete.

Ergo, you should probably give up while you’re ahead.

Michelangelo was a perfectionist, too, so I won’t fault you for being one.

But you know what he did with that perfectionism?

The work.

He didn’t look at Raphael and think, “God, he’s so much better than me.” (If anything, he had big beef with Raphael and said the guy’s a crook.) He just put his head down, chiselling away at David’s much-revered derriere, and when he raised his head, it was to paint the fresco of the Sistine Chapel.

Everybody says the best way to be a great writer is by being an even better reader, but is that always true? Here’s how you’re killing your creativity.

You’re comparing and imitating

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. — Eric Hoffer

Something really beautiful happens when we see works at a museum or sit arrested under a tree with a real page-turner — we get really inspired. Great art and literature makes you want to stand up and do something, and at that stage it is a good idea to start planning out your projects.

Start making a list of your ideas once you’ve just finished a book you love or seen a tiktok artist painting with new media, but never start working on those ideas while actively watching what your contemporaries are doing.

What you’re seeing online is a lvl 20 absolutely crushing it when you’re still at lvl 7, and when you inevitably don’t crush it like they do, you’re going to be too hard on yourself to continue offering the gift that is you to the world.

While neither Picasso nor Ingres were wrong about imitation, you have to understand that you can only imitate so long as you use it to learn.

When you imitate art in the hopes of emulating the same success as well, you are killing your inner artist, and I simply won’t let you do it.

Do this instead

Take yourself on the artist’s date like The Artist’s Way suggests, then just toss out everything that isn’t yours and focus on how you, in your uniqueness and eccentricity, would tackle your projects. Picasso took Ingres’ painting of Ines Moitessier and made it his very own, just to show us that even if we are inspired, even if we steal the reference, we still do it with our own flair.

You’re trying your best to do your best

Too often we convince ourselves that massive results require massive action. — James Clear, Atomic Habits

This killed me when I realized it, but you trying your best is what’s stopping you from doing your best.

There’s a Hindi film that I’d watched from the ’90s when I was quite young, about three friends of whom one was a pretty incredible painter. When asked which of his pieces was his favorite, the artist was taken aback, and said, “I guess I haven’t made it yet!”

And that was when he started pushing himself to make more art.

Here’s the thing: you aren’t lazy, or untalented. You’re a victim of your own illusions of grandeur.

You find it hard to let yourself be a human being because, let’s face it, that means you will make mistakes. And, oh, how we loathe mistakes as creatives.

But if your perfectionism isn’t pushing you to do the thing lest someone else botch it before you, it’s actively holding you back and I need you to stop!

Do this instead

Sit down at your workstation and say, “Okay me, it’s time to do your worst.” Then, do your damned worst. Write nonsense on the page, or play with your paint, or even just set up everything and twiddle your thumbs. I promise you, after the initial discomfort, at some stage, you’ll feel called to begin, and that’s when you’ll lean into actually doing your best.

You made it too hard

Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you are riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind. — Bob Marley

Maybe it’s too much, maybe it’s ADHD — but one undeniable fact of life is often the tasks we avoid the most we avoid purely because they seem too big to bite.

Everything from Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley & David Kelley to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey say exactly this and I’m going to give it for free: that task is only too big because you made it too big.

So, try making it smaller.

This means if your task is to write an article on Medium, start by

1. Sitting at your desk

2. Opening Medium on your laptop

3. Letting yourself have a stream of consciousness moment

4. Having an a-ha moment for your new article

5. Chalking out the structure of said article… You get the gist.

Each of those tasks is at best 10 minutes of your time.

If your goal is a novel, start at a short story. If it’s a painting on canvas, start with a painting on the smallest shell you can find. Surely you’re not afraid of 10 minutes at your desk in front of a computer. Surely holding a paintbrush for 1 minute won’t have you running for the hills. But I promise it will surely have you painting the painting and writing the writing.

Do this instead

Now I’m a strong proponent of being the ‘cheater-cheater-pencil-eater’ you want to see in the world, so I have two AI tools I love using to break down tasks for me instead of doing the mental labor myself: FlexOs asks you what your big goal of the day is and, when you type it in, it generated a generic action plan, bulleted and anotated for your productivity pleasure. It even adds your plan to Notion if you use it for all-round productive goodness. And if you find that one too rudimentary and not spicy enough, try Goblin Tools. This one takes breaking up tasks to another level, if you change the level of ‘spiciness’ or intangibility of the task, the number of sub-tasks increases, and all of them are timed!

At the end of the day I could make a whole list of 59 things creatives do to make themselves less creative, but at this moment we’re starting small because this is my first article back to Medium since 2020 and a testament to these things actually working.

As usual, this is unsponsored, and I’m linking some music that I adore at this time for all 4 of my followers to read:

Tyla — Water

Mave & Dave — You are Delicious

Lana Del Rey — Candy Necklaces

Rob Grant — Lost at Sea