You are more creative than you think

I’ve played guitar since I was 9 years old. But I’ve never written a song. I write a couple lines, look down at the page and think, “that’s terrible.” So I quit. It turns out this fear of judgment is what holds most of us back from doing creative, amazing things. Overcoming it isn’t as much about judgment from others, as from ourselves.

We were born creative

We were born creative. We were all that kid that finger-painted and scribbled with wild abandon. We drew blue suns, purple trees and people with ten arms. But we were thrust into a world that teaches us to conform. We’re evaluated, rated and judged. We’re put into buckets.

Suns are yellow, not blue. Trees are green, not purple. Cute, stupid kid.

And that creative kid inside of us? They slowly die.

The science of creativity

Dr. George Land conducted a study on creativity in 1968. He worked with 1,600 children ages 4 and 5, and found that 98% of them scored at the “creative genius” level for imaginative thinking. They studied these same kids at 10, and found the number had dropped to 30%. By 15, it was 12%. And when they studied adults, the number was 2%.

98% of 4 year old’s are more creative than 2% of adults.

All of a sudden I don’t feel so bad about never writing a song. So the question is, how do we get it back?

The messy, creative process

I talked to Robert Carli, an award-winning composer of music for film and television. He is an incredibly creative person and spends his life around creatives. When I asked him about the creative process, he said, “The most creative people I know are the ones that seem not to care.” Rob talks about watching actors work. He said it’s actually quite embarrassing and awkward because most of what they’re doing is weird and doesn’t work. We only see the end product, which we say is brilliant, but we don’t see the thirty messy takes it took to get there.

Most of us are so worried about being embarrassed, we never put the reps in to get good. And since nobody ever creates something great at first, we convince ourselves we suck. “I’m not creative” is part of the story we tell ourselves, that gives us permission to never try. I’ve always seen creative people as aliens, so different from me, with something I’ll never have - like a third eye or a tail where my ass should be.

But what if the first take is really the best?

Rick Rubin in his book, “A Creative Act” talks about the power of experimentation. He says it’s possible that your first version of your work is the best. But there is no way to know until you create another 10 or 20 versions. Only after the trial and error can you look back and realize the first was the best. But if you stop at the first version, you’ll always be left wondering if it could have been better.

Write for no one

The biggest critic we face is ourselves, and the biggest obstacle we need to overcome is the judgment of our work while we’re creating it - just like my unwritten song. The best practice I’ve found to overcome this fear of self-judgment is to write for no one.

Julia Cameron wrote about morning pages in her book, “The Artist’s Way.” My wife tried to get me to read it for years, and like most things she tries to get me to do, it changed my life when I finally did it. It’s the best way I know to rebuild the creative muscle we used to have as kids.

Morning pages are stream-of-conscious journaling. You write about whatever comes to mind, without pausing. It can be about the ant crawling across your kitchen counter. It doesn’t matter. Don’t stop. Every pause is your mind asking, “is this dumb?”, “what’s the point of this?” Keep going for 3 full pages. Single-spaced. Hand-written. Every day.

Now here is the most important part of morning pages - you never read them, and you never show them to anyone. They’re completely transient. If nobody ever reads them, there is no way to know whether they’re good or bad. The point is simply to remind yourself how to create something from nothing without judging it along the way.

Wise words from Jamie Lee Curtis

Being creative is uniquely human. Making something from nothing but our imagination is the only thing that separates us from every other species on earth. And it’s the only way to prove any of us were ever here. I heard something from the actress, Jamie Lee Curtis, that lives rent-free in my brain.

Mic drop.