We only grow by learning

Since I took to pursuing my creative aspirations more seriously, I have learned things along the way which have been very valuable for my creative and personal journey. Some of them I’m still learning, but all of them are things I wish I knew sooner. Time to share them!

1. Be like a Sponge 🧽

I first heard of this technique in Madeline Dore’s “I Didn’t Do the Thing Today” a few years back and found it helpful just as much in my creative aspects as well as my personal life.

In essence, she explains that you should treat your energy levels like a sponge - as you absorb, so too should you squeeze it and vice versa.

• Absorb new information, techniques and inspiration 🧠

• Squeeze them out into project ideas and areas in your creative works. 🖌️

What’s important is to practice absorbing and squeezing equally. Absorbing for too long leads to complacency and procrastination, but an excess of squeezing bleeds your energy levels dry, which could lead to burnout.

By treating your energy levels like a sponge, you would find it you have a greater ability to manage your creative drive - as you exert it, new energy replenishes it. You can apply this techniuqe just as much to other facets of your life as well - if you’re training harder to build muscle mass, you’d need to eat more food to fulfil your body’s demands.

2. I’d Like the Energy Menu Please 🧑‍🍳

The Energy Menu was one technique I found from Kelsey Rodriguez to remain consistent in your creative projects. On a day by day basis, you’d assess your current energy levels and figure out what degree of effort can you invest towards your creative pursuits and for how long.

Are your levels beaming a 5/5? If so, spend a few quality hours on building great progress in your project.

But what if you’re drive is a low 1/5? We’ll encounter days where we’re sick, exhausted or lack the time or capacity to get into what we want to create. In days like this, you can instead keep things smaller. Maybe, it’s gathering inspiration, brainstorming ideas for a project or taking a day to rest and recharge.

Following an energy menu ensures you’re making a consistent effort across your creative interests, regardless of how much. You’re able to clearly assess what you are capable of on a a given day and determine the best action to take, instead of trying to slog through an hour when your levels are a 2/5. Exercising your creative side in smaller amounts has just as much of an impact as the greater leaps in progress.

3. Write that Down, Write that Down!! ✏️

There are days where my mind is bursting with ideas - too many to give enough attention to each of them equally! Thankfully, my trusty notebook that’s with me ensures I can store them in a place where I can look them over thoroughly. Wherever I go, that notebook is bound to be with me - to the shops, on a walk, or on a day trip. Those inbetween or active moments often produce those ideas at a moments notice. Capturing them while they’re fresh ensures the idea is as close to the original.

As I’ve wandered further into new creative avenues, I find it so important and useful to offload my thoughts and ideas down onto something tangible. They become real, and allow my brain to divert its concentration elsewhere. I’ve done this for a few years now and it works wonders. From story ideas, to new skills to pursue or noting down books and resources to return to later.

You don’t even have to be a creative individual to follow this tip either. I’ve found it helpful for a great many other areas as well, be it writing dates for booked events, groceries to get at the shops or even putting my own personal thoughts down. Not only does it remove the feeling of forgetting something from the night before, but it lifts an unconscious stress of having to remember all these different things at once. A win win if you ask me!

You can do this on a notepad or in a note-taking app on your phone but personally I find doing it the manual way allows you to intentionally put them down, plus its one way to remove yourself from the screen too! So long as you have something that’s quickly accessible and easy to put your ideas down.

Of course, there’s times where you don’t need to write anything down. That’s fine, let the thoughts come naturally and overtime, you’d be able to freely take notes of them.

Even if you don’t use them, it’s still worth taking the time to write it out and see if it develops. Better to discard a bad idea than to forget a great one!

4. Be Alert of The Creeper 🥷

If there’s one area that catches me off-guard without fail, it would be scope creep - and not the gaming scope creep either.

What I refer to is when a project becomes far bigger than you envisioned - ideas gradually introduce themselves in the midst of creating something and whilst they may be great in theory (and in practice!), it’s both the timing and scale of these that thursts an unncessary hurdle to your interest. Scope creep has for me:

• Detracted the original vision of the project.

• Added unforseen or new complications to resolve

• Increased the project roadmap and thus the time to complete it

• Induced unnecessary stress

• Caused a loss of interest on your original idea

What might have started as a simple landscape painting to test your abilities in composition, spirals into a fully comprehensive gallery piece, dressed up with exquisite painting techniques, characters/objects, a sophisitcated inner story that’s told within the art piece, topped with a fully hand-made art frame to display it in. No wonder you stopped pursuing painting!

Scope creep is a difficult lesson I’ve encountered - one that I’m still trying to learn. From my experience and the advice of others, removing scope creep’s influence comes down to defining clear boundaries on what your creative project is, your vision for making it and what you aim to achieve by the end of it.

When brainstorming, go wild - throw anything and everything onto the table! That’s the part where you want all your ideas on display, to see if they actually work and are feasible to achieve. Once when things become refined and a roadmap has been established should everything be locked in.

Like knowing when to say no is an important skill in our everyday life, recognising when to reject additional ideas is equally as important as generating them. Finishing that creative project becomes far more achieveable when you map out its scope.

There are times however where it is perhaps acceptable, if not necessary to take on new ideas along the way. Maybe there was a major re-write to your story, an update that renders your feature obsolete or a change in perspective after returning to it for so long. Use it sparingly, but don’t succumb to the temptation to go beyond what you need to.

5. Begone Doubts, You Have No Power Here! ☁️

I think most of us have been in the situation of trying to start something, but can’t.

For me, one of the hardest hurdles in a creative project is actually starting it. The concept and fantasy of what it would be like is one joyous feeling, but finding that initial momentum to push you towards realising it is another case entirely. If these ideas are a dopamine to our brains, why then do we hesitate to actually bring them to life? Common reasons for this include:

• We feel we’re not ready

• We’re afraid of failing

• We’re afraid of what others would think of it

• We feel we don’t have the time to focus on it

Sure, these are valid arguments: You may not actually be ready to make a feature length film, you may fail at composing your first original score, you very well face judgement by others for making youtube videos about bird watching and you probably don’t have the time if you’re working a 60 hour week with a partner and two kids.

But you know what’s the one common thing about them all? They’re all inner doubts, created by your inner voice. The part of you that says no because it fears it’s too dangerous, too uncomfortable or requires too much effort. Ask yourself, how certain are you of these claims being valid? Have you made things before and encountered these first-hand or is your inner voice projecting these to substantiate your reasons for not wanting to start?

They maybe the thing your inner voice is telling you, but it’s not what YOU and others are saying. If you decide putting off starting for a month, a year, or until the time you say “you’re ready”…would you start it?

Without starting, you never know what the outcome of that creative idea you have will be! Suzy Kassem says this best.

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will - Suzy Kassem

Time and attention are our most precious resources, so why not use it while we can to start the things we care about and cast those inner doubts aside. Prove them wrong.

So to take away from this entry.

1. Be a sponge: Expend your energy, absorb and recharge it

2. Assess your energy levels to decide what creative task to focus on

3. Write your ideas and thoughts

4. Set clear limits on your projects

5. Ignore your doubts and start making

If any of you were seeking some tips, I hope these were helpful! Doing these won’t be feasible overnight. If you struggle with any of these, pick one that’s difficult or easier to recognise for you. Make a conscious effort on that task and go from there.

Now I will confess, I haven’t been consistent with following all of these strategies at once. Some days I do, other times I don’t. What matters is that I do my best to apply these across my days however I can - persistence is key. The more you do it, the more natural it becomes. I hope these become helpful to you for whatever interests you’re striving towards!

Do any of these lessons resonate with you in particular? 🤔

📺 Recent Movie/TV Watch: The Present - An inspiring short documentary about Dimati cycling from Mexico to Ushaia to raise awareness about Huntington’s disease and of living life to its fullest

📗 Recent Book Read: Re-read The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape. A financial guide to help you be financially secure and achieve financial freedom (refers mostly to Aussies but the methodologies are applicable elsewhere)

🌱 Lesson of the Week: Freedom starts today, you don’t have to wait

📖 Learning Experience of the Week: The Caesar Cipher was one of the earliest means of cryptography where a cipher key offsets letters by an x amount

🏆 Highlight of the Week: Planting NZ Native Plants for the Annual Maitariki Planting Day - an opportunity to give back to the land in the lead-up to the Maitariki 🌳

Bonus Highlight! Exploring the Howick Village buildings used in VLDL’s EpicNPC Man skits!🧄

🎵 Music of the Week: Shelter from the Rain - Vindsvept’s newest track

Thankyou for reading! I hope to see you in the next Tale. Until next time! 🧙🏻

Critters

🖌️ Creations of the Week (Or Fornight in this case XD):

17 More Anticipated Minecraft Mods in Development