A few short years ago I noticed a preoccupation with what I perceived to be my own lack of creativity. I literally felt handcuffed and unable to break free of certain limitations on my creative process. “What is holding me back?,” I wondered. The artist from my early days as a photographer was still there, somewhere.
As a teenager I never saw any limits. But by the time of my creative crisis I constantly saw limitations. Over time, I’d become quite good at finding out how things could fail, before I figured out how they might succeed. And I began to have the attitude that any creative idea I might come up with would probably not be good enough to pursue.
The habit of finding flaws and potential failure with new ideas was reinforced in school as I studied to be a computer programmer. A good programmer writes code with the upfront notion that things will go wrong, break, and be hacked without question. All you can do is try to minimize the potential and manage the severity by writing code that expects things to go wrong. Web developers actually know their code will be attacked. Their code is their work. And it will be attacked.
Cynicism also plays a role in the decline of one’s creative output. Looking at the world with jaded eyes isn’t much use to an artist who needs to see new possibilities. Being cynical has a tendency to make you doubt the authenticity and integrity of everything, including your own ideas. When you start from that place, you’re not going to go very far with a new idea. Cynicism comes with age and experience. The world will let you down.
Expecting failure and being cynical can be quite useful in certain lines of work. But not for artists. Artists should be free of the thoughts that would hold their creativity hostage. It’s easier said than done. But those handcuffs can fall away.
