The Power of Daily Creation
I am going to write every day for the month of October.
Perfectionism and self-judgement has turned me into a creator that doesn’t create and a writer that doesn’t write.
I know from past experience how powerful daily creation challenges are. They simply work.
It’s not about showing up when we feel like it. It’s showing up despite not feeling like it. It’s about quantity and not quality when we are stuck in a rut and dealing with creator‘s and writer‘s block.
It’s about writing and not researching.
It’s about shipping and not making it perfect. But about publishing something that is good enough so we can make something better next time rather than getting stuck on the one thing to make it perfect.
I‘m tired of being stuck. Tired of having such high standards of myself. Tired of taking two weeks to write and publish a damn blogpost. Tired of feeling creatively constipated. I’d rather have creative diarrhea. I’m taking a laxative - this post is it.
There’s a story about perfectionism in the book Art & Fear, which I have come across many times over the years:
„The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.“
Let’s make some pots.