Doing Bad Work
What often stops us from doing our Most Creative Work? It’s the close attachment that we have to our work in general. We get into these patterns where we feel like every word we write, every note that we record, every delicate stroke of the paintbrush is not only a reflection of who we are but a life summary all in that one moment.
Younger people are more free with their work because their ego is not well formed. It’s an exciting time to be making things, but the lack of maturity creates other problems such as naivety and willingness to be exploited.
But if we go back further in time to real childhood, we can find the answer to everything. The reckless abandon of a kindergarten-aged child, creating mini-masterpieces while they live in their own worlds.
In short: we are often unwilling to do bad work. We fear that merely putting a bad sentence down or finishing a bad piece of music is the thing that will finally do us in. People will get wise to the fact that we’re a fraud and that we had no business doing this in the first place.
At some point, I recently decided that it’s not possible to write a newsletter without first doing a freewriting session. The one before this was five minutes of some gobbly goop that just got a bit of stuff off my chest. That bad work session allowed me to write something a bit better, but overall I must be ok with the idea that this is a bad newsletter edition.
Something I shared in my Confident (Enough) on Camera workshop is that when recording videos, we often feel like the moment the camera is recording we have to not only keep what was recorded but it has to get published on a feed to all our friends and relatives. This is simply not true. You can hit record and talk to a camera, and then delete it.
Yes, there was an era when all recording was precious when there was film and tape stock involved, but now it’s just hard drive space and you can delete things that you don’t need. Many times when I record music, I feel like every time the red light goes on, what comes out of my hands has to be perfect. Again it’s not true, I can just re-record the part quite easily. But my mind is telling me to get it right or else you’re a failure and a fraud.
And then when the piece of music is finished, we will do this good vs. bad experiment all over again. The output is simply an expression of what we were feeling at that moment. It is like taking a photograph of our thoughts and emotions. It’s not much more than that.
Don’t make the work out to be more than it is. People aren’t sitting around evaluating you the way that you think they are. And while that sounds cold, it’s probably one of the most liberating ideas that we can hold on to.
This week I listened to the Huberman Lab episode on leveraging dopamine to overcome procrastination. Something in there that is relevant to the above text is the study in which kindergarteners are observed drawing, and when rewards are handed out, they increase their motivation. But when the rewards are then taken away, their motivation goes down even further than before. He warns people to be careful about how they reward their work, and the power that they attach to these rewards in general.
I had some great Project Navigator Sessions this week. Just a reminder these are free sessions where I facilitate a mind-mapping exercise that helps identify what is blocking your Most Creative Work.
Feel free to book yourself in here. Limited to about 1-2 people this week.
I’ve been posting every day on Instagram for a few weeks now. Find out how that’s going in this video.
Thanks for reading and see you soon!
Do bad work…
Elliott
Create with the vigor of the abundance of the digital world as if quality depended on the resources of the analog world.