Becoming (or staying) creative in today’s distraction filled world is challenging at best. Trying to find a pause in between the constant torrents of never ending infinitely scrolling content is hardly impossible. There are always things grabbing your attention and spewing noise that prevents you to find the silence (and the boredom) to let your OWN inspiration speak out and be heard. Creativity is not something you can plan, schedule or timeboxed. A flash of insight or the urge to scream your thoughts and feelings into the void is not something that you can add to your todo list. If you want to start a fire to express yourself, you need to nurture that first spark of insight and give it room to grow.
So do you want to become ‘intentionally’ creative?
1: Inspiration does not make an appointment: Be ready to capture your ideas.
Everyday thousands of thoughts flow through our brain. Though sometimes a ‘Eureka’-level epiphany might occur, most of our thoughts are bland and need some help in becoming brilliant. Unfortunately our minds work like a cheap memory card from ali-express: Slightly unreliable when it comes to storing long term information. The difference between a random thought and a brilliant one is being able to capture them. So make sure you always have something at hand to commit that fleeting expression of neurons into a more permanent form. From an old school analogue notebook to a shortcut to the digital assistant on your phone. A Whatsapp message to your future self, a digital scribble or a voice memo. Whatever you want to use, make sure to ‘Commit the shit’ and sort things out later.
2: Give it a little bit of time.
Creativity also needs "time". Now you have written down those scribbles, some idea’s might have extinguished their glimmer of brilliance by the time you read them back, others have the progeny of brilliance but need more time to grow. So now its time for ‘time’ to do its work. Strike the trivial and nurture the promising.
3: Write it out.
It’s amazing how many half-arsed ideas could develop the full set of buttocks if only they were written out. Tapping concepts out on a keyboard (or by encoding them in your freehand handwriting) you force your thoughts to become structured and going from "just a thought" to a well worked out concept. Let your inner mind speak to a blank canvas to erase all the blind spots and make things more concrete. Unintelligable or unstructured thoughts? Just write them down as they are and shove them into your favorite LLM to make sense of it.
4: Concentraaaaaaaaate!
In the wise screams of Master Yoda (just before Luke almost dumped his sorry green arse in a Dagobah swamp) ‘concentration’ is key. In a world of distractions , ‘creativity’ has become almost an act of defiance. You choose to "create" instead of mindlessly "consume". Pick a time and a place where you aren’t interrupted, but also aren’t tempted by the allure of the endless scroll of low-value online slop that is present on every screen around you. Choose a physical (or digital) environment that doesn’t bug or bother you and let’s you concentrate.
5: The best gear is the gear you have with you
Ubiquitous and easily accessible technology that lets you channel your creative idea’s to the world is a blessing AND a curse. You easily get overwhelmed with all the different choices and configurations. After 15 Youtube video’s on the best podcastin app or how to determine what microphone to use, your brilliant ‘creative concept’ has shriveled up and died. Being unable to express yourself because you don’t have the tools is a shame. Being unwilling to express yoursellf because you can’t pick between the 100 tools you have .. that is a disgrace. Like the old saying oes: The best camera is the one you have with you.
6 Just press GO.
Especially with video and audio it’s so easy to get lost in the technical side of things. Light, sound, graphics, tools. You procrastinate actually "DOING" something untiell you get the right piece of tech. "THIS will help me record" "THAT will help me stream better". You know what? If you think that way, you never will. Every piece of gear you “think you might need” is the materialisation of your own doubt, fears, insecurity and procrastination, payed for with hard earned cash. Collect only the gear for your MVP (Minimal viable product) and press GO, hit Record, start pounding away on the keyboard. Collecting and upgrading gear should be a consequence of your creative output, not a prerequisite.
7. Complexity and functionalities are not your friend.
Many creative ideas and concept have died in the cold steel clutches of complexity. Spending hours fiddling with color settings, audio levels, visual filters or text formatting will kill your content (and your creative drive) as sure as a Tomahawk missile would obliterate a freshly built Hoggwarts Lego set. Make sure that the “first draft” of whatever you want to make can be made using the simplest of tools. Do the rough cut of that video on your smartphone, record the audio with a simple recorder, use a dumb text Editor for your writing. Just like with hardware: Punch the creative pedal to the medal and scream at complexity to “get out of the way” or suffer the consequences.
8. Content trumps presentation
Which leads me to my final point in this rant: Presentation. Many creative outbursts never get published because of ‘what other people might think’. Not putting it out there because it might not meet some high end standards or because it “might not LOOK/SOUND good enough”. Let me tell you: If I can watch it, listen to it and read it and the content is sufficiently enticing, I’ll take your sub-standard creativity with GOOD content over the overproduced influencer dribble any day. I don’t need a fancy theme, immaculate production quality or late-night-fm-dj-voiced production that brings no value. Give my your slightly-off grammared blogpost, the sound of wind in your podcast or your lightly over-saturated video anyday. If it stirrs something inside of me? I’ll bloody take it!
So there
So there, that is my rand, my raging and raving to all of you to listen to the voice of your inner gnome that wants to shake the cage of the status quo. To stop scrolling, stop mindlessly slurping up the Soylent Green of content that soulless algorithms are force-feeding you.
Do not go quietly into the night, but scream into the void and let the echoes of your creativity resonate into eternity.