When it comes to habits, the missing piece of the puzzle is often the very first one.
Even more often, it’s not even opening the box to see what’s inside.
Because looking at the picture on the box is safer, easier, and sometimes just the best option.
But it’s not fulfilling.
And if it’s not fulfilling, what’s it all about?
You don’t need proof that you can do it to start doing it.
You have to start doing it to create the proof.
You don’t need to believe you can do it to start doing it.
You have to start doing it to create the belief.
Learning a foreign language is both a frustrating and liberating experience.
We can focus on the frustration of not understanding the words the way we understand our mother tongue. Or we can realize that without the words, we are free to fall back on other ways of capturing and understanding meaning.
A crying baby can be soothed by words it does not yet understand, because she senses what’s behind the sounds, lets the meaningless melody cradle her to sleep…
Similarly, we don’t always have to know what’s behind the words, as long as we make an effort to understand the meaning behind the sounds.
Hearing a foreign language brings us back to that wordless world the way we experienced it as a newborn, before we tried so hard to put everything within and around us into language.
It makes us remember, there’s more to life than our words will ever allow us to express. And somehow, that’s a soothing thought.
Plants are productive when they’re fertile: capable of producing fruit or offspring.
Plants are only prolific when they actually produce fruit in abundance.
https://wikidiff.com/prolific/productive
When it comes to creativity, we humans are all productive in the sense that we are capable of creating.
Productivity tools and “hacks” can help to create more space in your day for that creative potential.
But you’re only prolific when you use that creative potential and actually create something in abundance. Like Picasso.
Without prolificacy, productivity is just an empty container – unfulfilling, unfulfilled potential.
What can you be prolific in? What do you want to create in large quantities? What’s important enough to you to start sculpting away, day by day?
No matter if you write or not, run or not, spend time with family or not…
No matter what you say, what you care most about will show up in what you do.
Living a balanced life doesn’t mean living average experiences.
It’s more like a barbell, or a seesaw, where you go all in on complementary actions.
Work hard, rest hard.
Write with total focus, then fully let go when you’ve hit your word target.
Work out with full intensity, then let your body fully recover.
So when you’re out of balance, the solution is not to come closer to the middle.
Instead, you start doing less of what you’re already doing or add more of the polar opposite of what you’re already doing.
Figure out your polar opposite pairs, and give them both the attention they deserve. That’s how you dance the barbell balance of life.
Admiring (flawed) early work is easy when we already know the late work is going to be great.
Everyone forgives Picasso or Da Vinci for a lousy early sketch. In fact, people pay good money to hang one in their living room.
Maybe the early work, showing that even the greats are mere mortals on a journey towards excellence, is the most valuable?
And yet, it’s much harder to be gentle on a beginning artist for shipping mediocre creative work – not in the least for the beginning artist themselves – when their path to excellence hasn’t unfolded yet.
After all, something that one day will be “my early work” is still “my current best work” today.
The road to excellence is invisible from the trenches.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Which makes me wonder…
When I know that through persistence and daily practice, one day, I’ll look back on today’s creation, smiling, thinking: “Oh how far I’ve come… How much I’ve learned… And some of this was actually pretty good…”
Can I admire my creative work less for what it looks, feels, or sounds like, and more for who I’m becoming through making it?
Can I do the same for the creative projects of others?
With that mindset… How much easier and forgiving would the daily creative journey be?
